Highlights

From James C. Edwards: The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism (Penn. State University Press, 1997,  p. 231):

the problem with supernatural religion is belief. However lovely and powerful the stories of the gods and their minions for us are, there’s just no way that they are “required, as a necessity requires.” To say that we can’t really believe in them is just to say that we aren’t now forced to; they are not any more for us “inevitable knowledge.” There are plausible—more plausible—alternative accounts of the phenomena upon which the supernatural has based its claims on us:

It is important to realise, of course, that the gift is not of the freedom to believe whatever we like, rather it is the freedom to believe only what we can.

it is the freedom religiously to affirm only those things in which we can have full belief (pathos) and a clean heart. The natural sciences form an important measure for us in this regard. However, we must not forget to factor into this the human imagination.

we are looking for a religion that is driven not only by the intellectual necessity that is provided by the natural sciences but by that which he calls “artistic inevitability” — the poetic and fictional stories and ideas which, when they can be interpreted in ways which don’t flatly contradict the discoveries made by the natural sciences, inspire and challenge us to live rich and meaningful lives.

the chief problem that now exists for us is that we find ourselves in a beautiful and remarkable natural world but without any longer the powerful presence of an object of religious belief, let’s give it the name “God”, that can stand powerfully before us with intellectual or artistic inevitability.

“skeptical religion”

when we change the way look at time and look into both the deep future as well as the deep past, we come to see that humanity may well be at a very early stage in our development as a species for, as he points out, it is possible that the Earth will remain habitable for another billion years.

Schellenberg  asks, why would we think that our best ideas – even ideas about religion – are behind us? Consequently, right now, at this early stage of our development, Schellenberg argues powerfully that we need a religion of a different sort from that which we have seen before.

Schellenberg wants us to consider what might be the appropriate object of evolutionary religion, i.e. a religion that is radically open to the real possibility that we are still in the earliest stages of our religious development.

“If we are going to have faith that _____ to guide all our religious activities, what proposition should fill the blank? Jews, Christians, and Muslims, for example, have traditionally professed faith that there is a loving and all-powerful personal God. What propositional counterpart can be suggested for evolutionary religion? Put otherwise, how should a bottom-line religious reality (or “Divine” reality, as I will sometimes say) be conceived by temporally contextualised religious beings? (ER p. 93).

Schellenberg observes that any “Divine” reality needs to be “more” than our everyday world and life in three ways — he uses the word “transcendent” for this

It is also very important to note that the words which follow are found in a chapter called “Imagination is key”.

Firstly, “Divine” reality needs to be “a more fundamental fact about reality than any identifiable natural fact”. (Metaphysical transcendence)

Secondly, “Divine” reality’s splendour and excellence also needs “to exceed that of anything found in nature alone” (Axiological transcendence)

Thirdly, our relationship with “Divine” reality “will make for more well-being, fulfilment, wholeness, and the like for creatures than can be naturally attained” (Soteriological transcendence)  (ER p.94).

Schallenberg then introduces to us two pairs of distinctions, “Thick and Thin” and “Strong and Weak”.

• A thick concept of the Divine says the Divine is triply transcendent and also gives details as to the nature of its threefold transcendence.

• A thin concept of the Divine says the Divine is triply transcendent and it offers no additional details as to the nature of its threefold transcendence.

• A strong concept of the Divine says the Divine is ultimate in all three spheres of transcendence.

• A weak concept of the Divine says that the Divine is not in all three spheres ultimate.

Put all of them together and you get the following:

• Thick/Strong concept of the Divine gives details as to the nature of its threefold transcendence and moreover regards the Divine as ultimate in all three ways.

• Thick/Weak concept of the Divine gives details as to the nature of its threefold transcendence and holds that the Divine is not in all three ways ultimate.

• Thin/Strong concept of the Divine gives no details as to the nature of its threefold transcendence but regards the Divine as ultimate in all three ways.

• Thin/Weak concept of the Divine gives no details as to the nature of its threefold transcendence and holds that the Divine is not in all three ways ultimate.

old fashioned theism — which we no longer find persuasive — is Thick/Strong.

“The theistic God has all power, all knowledge, all goodness, is the absolute Creator of the natural world, and our deepest good, so theists say, lies in being related to God in love. Both details and ultimacy are here. And notice that the triple transcendence is here converted into triple ultimacy” (ER p. 96).

That’s a lot of detail, and for the great majority of us here today, way, way beyond what we could possibly believe in with full belief and a clean heart.

The second option, Thick/Weak, can be found in, for example in the thinking of John Stuart Mill (especially in his Three Essays on Religion), William James and Robert Nozick.

according to Schallenberg the problem with a thick religious concept, whether strong or weak, is that there is just too much content. It doesn’t satisfy our pressing need for an intellectual minimalism — this minimalism is required because, as Schellenberg's evolutionary point suggests, we’ve only just begun and it’s best to hang fire until we know a great deal more about the world and have grown up a bit. Given that we know we don’t know so much we need to keep open as many possibilities as we can. So, for Schellenberg (and for me), thin is to be preferred over thick.

Turning to the thin conceptions, the Thin/Weak option has certainly been adopted by many people within our own liberal religious movement. But the problem with this conception is that it is so very, very general and because of that, in our religiously primitive state, it can’t really challenge us, either intellectually or morally. This is why Shellenberg opts for Thin/Strong and says that:

“The religious idea needs to be big enough, surely, to embrace both reality and value. It needs to be worthy of our imaginations, and therefore, must present to us more than the limited deity that, in a concession to the limits of popular imagination [John Stuart] Mill advanced [and which we ourselves might be tempted to advance]. [The religious idea] needs to be big enough that we — impressive creatures though we may be — might exist at an extremely early stage in the discovery of its true dimensions” (ER p. 98).

(Schellenberg speaks of "imaginative religious faith" — ER p. 105)

“Whatever else the word God may mean, it is a term used to designate that Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare and increasing abundance. That there is such a Something cannot be doubted. The mere fact that human life happens, and continues to happen, proves that this Something, however, unknown, does certainly exist” (From Henry Nelson Wieman: Religious Experience and Scientific Method, Macmillan, 1926, pp. 9-10).

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “If We Are Going to Have Faith That _______ to Guide All Our Religious Activities, What Proposition Should Fill the Blank? On an Evolutionary Religion.” Caute, 2 Nov. 2014, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2014/11/if-we-are-going-to-have-faith-that-to.html.