Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  In this vein, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that science and religion constitute “the great partnership.” Science, Sacks asserts, is “one of the two greatest achievements of the human mind.”48 But science has no competence to adjudicate between an account that denies any cosmic meaning and one that discerns meaning in life and the universe; both accounts are equally consistent with the facts and truths cognizable by science.49 “The first story says there is no why. The second says there is,” Sacks observes. “The science is the same in both stories. The difference lies in how far we are willing to push the question, ‘Why?’ ”50

  Scientist-theologian Alister McGrath elaborates on the point:

  My Oxford colleague John Lennox, who is a mathematician and philosopher of science, uses a neat illustration to make this point. Imagine a cake being subjected to scientific analysis, leading to an exhaustive discussion of its chemical composition and of the physical forces which hold it together. Does this tell us that the cake was baked to celebrate a birthday? And is this inconsistent with the scientific analysis? Of course not. Science and theology ask different questions: in the case of science, the question concerns how things happen: by what process? In the case of theology, the question is why things happen: to what purpose?51

  So traditional, transcendent religion can be either suspicious of or friendly to science. Either way, it seems unlikely that traditional religion will wither away in the foreseeable future, as theorists like Berger once predicted.

  To be sure, traditional religion and Christianity in particular appear to flourish more in some parts of the world—Africa, Latin America, the United States, perhaps China (against strenuous governmental opposition)52—than in regions such as Europe.53 Moreover, in the United States, recent surveys report a rise in the percentage of “nones”—people who on surveys of religiosity mark the box “None.”54 And yet, even the increase in self-declared unbelievers may not reflect any actual decline in religiosity. That is because, as we will see, even those who declare themselves free of any religion often openly acknowledge beliefs and commitments reflective of spirituality and a commitment to the sacred. This development is manifest in the career of the most influential (and thoroughly secular) English-speaking legal scholar and philosopher of recent decades, Ronald Dworkin.

  Ronald Dworkin’s Search for the Sacred

  Though a consummately secular thinker, from his earliest writings Dworkin resisted the pervasively instrumentalist and interest-calculating character of modern legal thought. He championed “rights”—rights understood as “trumps” or categorical constraints on laws or governmental actions based on instrumentalist policies.55 He criticized law-and-economics.56 He advocated a form of legal interpretation in which laws would be construed not to further either the subjective intentions of their enactors or the utilitarian aims of present-day policy makers; rather, laws would be interpreted in accordance with the best available moral philosophy.57

  But in a secular, naturalistic world, where were these rights and categorical constraints and moral imperatives supposed to come from? Dworkin’s distinguished career can be seen as a long struggle with the question.

  Thus, in one early essay, he appeared to embrace a kind of refined moral conventionalism.58 Although our moral commitments are conventional in character, Dworkin argued, we should be ruled not by shallow or unscrutinized conventions, but rather by conventions that we have carefully reflected on.59 But this seemed a vulnerable position. If our morality is grounded merely in conventions, why does it matter whether we carefully examine those conventions? What would we examine them for, exactly?

  For consistency, Dworkin said, among other desiderata.60 But why? If we supposed there is some underlying moral truth against which conventions might be adjudged true or false, then it might matter whether our moral conventions are consistent, because under the so-called law of noncontradiction, internal inconsistency would be an indication of error (just as it is for scientific or mathematical propositions). But if morality is merely conventional, and if there is no objective or external standard against which conventions can be judged, then what difference does it make if we have one set of moral conventions for tall people and a different set for short people, or one set of conventions for Mondays and Wednesdays and a different set for Tuesdays and Thursdays? If my habit is to eat tacos on Tuesdays, pizza on Wednesdays, and kabobs on Thursdays, no one criticizes me for inconsistency. “It’s what I (like to) do” is sufficient warrant—indeed, the only kind of warrant that might be pertinent. The same should be true for morality—if morality is merely conventional, that is.

  Something more than conventions seemed to be needed. In a later essay, Dworkin tried to use utilitarianism against itself, or against the unchecked implementation of policies calculated to further utilitarian preferences, by arguing that some kinds of legal restrictions that he disfavored (such as laws regulating pornography) violated the utilitarian premise that everyone’s utility should be counted equally.61 This argument was clever but, as critics persuasively objected, demonstrably flawed.62 While not conceding the point, in a later essay Dworkin moved on to what he at least called moral realism.63 There are objectively right answers to moral questions, he asserted; slavery is and always was wrong, whether or not it was conventional, and whether or not people believed it was wrong.

  In the same essay, however, while declaring that morality was “objective,” Dworkin also insisted that it was not actually any sort of object: morality is not part of “the fabric of the universe.”64 This stance left some readers (or at least one) feeling puzzled, and disgruntled. If morality is not part of “the fabric of the universe,” in what sense is morality real, or “objective,” at all?

  At about the same time, in an exploration of life-and-death issues such as abortion and euthanasia, Dworkin invoked the idea of “the sacred.”65 Insisting that the “sacred” need not be a religious concept, Dworkin emphasized a distinction between “sacred” or “inviolable” values and merely “instrumental” values.66 In fastening onto the idea of the “sacred,” it seemed that Dworkin had perhaps at last found the sort of idea he had needed all along in his effort to resist instrumentalism and to defend categorical constraints on merely utilitarian laws and policies.

  And yet Dworkin’s explication of “the sacred” seemed both half-baked and (confessedly) halfhearted. Once detached from its religious moorings, what does “sacred” even mean? Dworkin proposed that we regard some things as “sacred” or “inviolable” because they are the results of a long process we respect, such as artistic creation or natural evolution. We consider a great painting “sacred” because the artist put a lot of time and effort and genius into painting it. And we regret the loss of a species of plant or animal because it was the product of aeons of evolution, so the disappearance of the species would amount to “a waste of nature’s investment.”67 But this seemed a curiously uncompelling explanation. Does our evaluation of a painting by Rembrandt really turn on how long he took to do it? If it turned out that da Vinci dashed off the Mona Lisa in a week (as Bernini is supposed to have done with his remarkable sculpture of Pope Innocent X), would we demote it from the category of masterpiece?68

  Faced with this and other objections, Dworkin didn’t attempt actually to defend his “process” and “loss of investment” account of the “sacred.” Instead, he claimed merely to be describing intuitions many people in fact have (while at the same time purporting to be giving a revised and better account of beliefs that, as he acknowledged, people typically do not articulate in these terms). And having attributed these reworked intuitions to people, Dworkin expressed his own doubts about whether the ostensible intuitions are ultimately rational or justifiable at all. “It is not my present purpose,” he explained, “to recommend or defend any of these widespread convictions about art and nature, in either their religious or secular form. Perhaps they are all, as some skeptics insist, inconsistent superstitions.”69

  Dworkin’s convolute
d discussion thus amounted to a halting effort to support his anti-instrumentalist commitments by tapping into an essentially religious notion—the “sacred”—even though he was at that point both unwilling to own the premises that gave the notion its significance and by his own admission unable to provide any persuasive defense of the concept.

  And so in his last, posthumously published book, Dworkin explicitly embraced “religion”—albeit “religious atheism,” as he called it.70

  Religion, Dworkin now argued, need not include belief in God or gods. Rather, what he called the “religious attitude” rests on two beliefs or judgments. The first is that “human life has objective meaning or purpose.” The second is that “what we call ‘nature’—the universe as a whole and in all its parts—is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder” (10). These are judgments of “value,” Dworkin explained, and they have an essential emotional component (10, 19–20).

  But the judgments are not merely subjective or emotive reactions: they are a response to and a recognition of actual realities in the universe (6, 20–21). With that clarification, Dworkin maintained that we should “take these two [values]—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life” (11). And the religious attitude serves to restore to us something that Weber and theorists of science and naturalism had pronounced forever lost—namely, “enchantment” (11).

  As it happens, the two commitments identified by Dworkin correspond almost exactly to the two-themed account of religion we considered in chapter 2. One theme, associated with thinkers like Victor Frankl and Jonathan Sacks, sees religion as an affirmative response to the pervasive human desire or need for “meaning”: this is the first of Dworkin’s elements of religion. The other theme, articulated by Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, and Abraham Heschel, understands religion as the product of the human encounter with the “holy,” or the “sacred.” Much like Otto, Dworkin described religious experience as “numinous”; much like Heschel, Dworkin used terms like “sublime,” “awe,” and “wonder” to convey the religious attitude (2–3, 10).71 Also like Otto, Heschel, and Sacks, moreover, Dworkin insisted that these judgments and emotions are not merely subjective; they reflect the discernment of something in the universe that is objectively real, even though it eludes the more naturalistic devices of the scientists.

  Unlike for those thinkers, however, for Dworkin that “something” real was not anything lying beyond or behind the perceived sublimity—not any God or gods. Rather, the sublimity is a property or aspect of nature itself, including the part of nature that is human life. In this sense, Dworkin’s religion would seem to be of the immanent variety. The sublime, or the sacred, is within and part of life and of nature, not something beyond or outside of them.72

  The immanent quality of Dworkin’s religion is perhaps most clearly apparent in his admiring discussions of Spinoza and Einstein, whose philosophies he offered as representative of the kind of “religious atheism” he himself advocated. Spinoza, he conceded, talked incessantly about God. But “Spinoza’s God is not an intelligence who stands outside everything and who, through the force of its will, has created the universe and the physical laws that govern it. His God is just the complete set of physical laws considered under a different aspect” (38–39 [emphasis added]). Under what aspect? Here Dworkin invoked Einstein, who also endorsed Spinoza’s deity. And what was Einstein’s understanding of that deity? Einstein “did not believe in a personal god,” Dworkin explained, “but he did ‘worship’ nature. He regarded it with awe and thought that he and other scientists should be humble before its beauty and mystery” (40).

  That is the sort of immanent “religious atheism” that Dworkin ultimately preached. It is the last answer he managed to give to his long search for something with a categorical quality that could stand against the pervasive instrumentalism of the modern world—for something “inviolable” or “sacred”—that could bring “enchantment” back into the world (6, 11–12).

  From Disenchantment to Reenchantment

  Whether Dworkin had in fact found what he needed is questionable, to be sure. Though he asserted that the sublimity of the world is “beyond nature,” he offered no ontological account of just what that something “beyond nature” could be, or of how it would relate to or emerge out of other, more purely naturalistic realities. It is as if someone were to describe the universe and its contents as having the naturalistic properties of, say, mass, temporal duration, motion, physical attraction and repulsion . . . oh, yes, and also of “sublimity.” Plus “objective value.” There is something incongruous in these add-ons. Dworkin’s “religion without god” seems a sort of ipse dixit, “(non)deus ex machina” solution to the challenges of meaninglessness and morality in a naturalistic world.

  We will return to the point. For now, the important observation is that Dworkin’s odyssey—from moral conventionalism to a doctored utilitarianism to moral realism all the way across to the “enchantment” of “religion without god”—reflects a pattern discernible in other thinkers as well, and perhaps in elite secular culture generally. At stage one, thinkers look back, wistfully perhaps, on the “enchanted” world of antiquity and pronounce that world, alas, irretrievably lost: science has rendered it unavailable to moderns with any critical capacity. The first reaction to this loss is to announce the disenchantment and meaninglessness of the world. The announcement may be offered with resigned despair (as with Stace), or perhaps (as with Russell) with the darkly heroic satisfaction of Homeric warriors who are all the more noble because they fight courageously on without ultimate hope, knowing that they must soon and inexorably die and that will be the end of everything. And then, upon reflection, secular thinkers declare that we can have ethics or morality after all; indeed, we can place ethics upon an even more solid secular foundation.73 And upon further thought, they announce the glad tidings that the secular, naturalistic world is not as empty of enchantment or objective value as had been supposed. It turns out that amidst the “nothing but matter in motion,” as Stace put it, there is also, somehow . . . beauty, value, goodness. Enchantment. The sacred.

  Nor are these merely subjective emotions; they are objectively real. Why had we somehow supposed that they had been lost? What was the reason for all our existential angst? Why were we, or in any case our parents, so taken with Sartre and Camus and Samuel Beckett? What could we, or they, have been thinking?

  Dworkin is hardly a lone traveler along this spiritual path to meaning and reenchantment. We might consider two more recent and notable representatives of this rediscovery of enchantment, or of the sacred. Both are secular, atheistic, scientific. But both discern something—something real—that overflows the normal terms and categories of mundane science.

  Sam Harris, the truculently atheistic author of The End of Faith and other similar works, in a more recent book reports on a personal, drug-induced experience of a “state of being” in which “love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit.”74 This and similar mystical or meditative experiences, both his own and others’, lead Harris to observe that “there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”75 While adamantly eschewing the label of “religion,” and while purporting to “remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism,” Harris uses terms such as “spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendent” to describe this additional dimension (10, 7). “Millions of people,” he observes, “have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available” (11). In such experiences it “is quite possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos” (43). And, as noted, this oneness carries with it “love, compassion, and joy” (5).

  Harris does not postulate anything supernatural or metaphysically exotic as the source of such
experiences; rather, he assumes that they are manifestations of an expanded human consciousness. The mystical experience “says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large” (43–44). Harris acknowledges that consciousness is a “mystery” and that “we know nothing about how consciousness comes into being” (51, 205); even so, treating mystical experience as merely an aspect of consciousness saves Harris from passing into the (for him) dreaded category of “religion.” With an unwaveringly confident bellicosity, he thus continues to insist that “the world’s religions [are] mere intellectual ruins” (5). (Except maybe, it seems, for Buddhism [21–31].)

  Whether Harris should be admitted as an acolyte of Dworkin’s atheistic religion is debatable. He shuns the term “religion.” And his claim that transcendence is within consciousness, not part of “the universe at large,” might disqualify him. But then again, maybe not. After all, while insisting that objective beauty and value are real, not merely subjective, Dworkin himself is less than clear about where in the universe these blessed qualities reside. Why couldn’t they reside in the human consciousness? And then there is Harris’s admiration for Buddhism. In its substance, Harris’s view seems to be kin to the same general family as Dworkin’s.

  In this respect, the recent spiritual autobiography of another admired atheist and writer, Barbara Ehrenreich, presents an even sharper instance. While describing herself as “a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training,” Ehrenreich recounts how, as a teenager, she set as a “goal for life . . . to find out why. What is the point of our brief existence?”76 Later, as she pursued a career in science, the naturalistic worldview she learned and accepted did not negate but rather underscored the why question. “Why was there anything at all? Why interrupt the perfection of universal Nothing with the momentary clutter and confusion of Something?” (85).