Philosophy of religion: podcast response analysis

Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy Talk: (All-)Confirming God

While it is likely that some Americans are still pondering the problem of evil and other immediate questions about our human relationship with the divine, it is striking how thoroughly the verifiability of God and the basis of belief in a largely secular world have eclipsed other aspects of the philosophy of religion. Programs like this, produced for a relatively engaged mass audience, demonstrate the extent to which contemporary people have become concerned with justifying their antecedant inclinations in a social climate where such positions have become relatively fractious.

Instead of rehearsing the historical arguments for or against the existence of God, many of the callers seem far more interested in interpreting scientific or scientifically derived observations to support their existing position. Only a relative few situate their claims directly in a context of personal religious experience, much less a "leap of faith" in direct opposition to the prevailing sciento-secular point-of-view. None cited historical revelation as convincing. I found these appeals to science as the basis of faith interesting because this strategy, to me, re-situates the debate from the incommensurable tension between faith and logic as two irreducible spheres of human experience to a situation where religion and science now draw from the same source.

This is not surprising in an environment in which competing polemics from, on the one hand, the "intelligent design" community and, on the other, "pure scientists" like Richard Dawkins have struggled to interpret the same data (Darwin, natural selection, relativistic cosmology) to serve widely divergent worldviews. However, by competing with the prevalent secular teleology on its own terms, "religion" risks either being aestheticized or otherwise reduced to an optional interpretative overlay on that teleology, or else absorbing science into its own framework. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing -- perhaps it is one of the most robust and positive roles that religion can play in our society -- but it is highly vulnerable to confusions of vocabulary.

I thought the woman who discounted theistic models of the universe in order to promote an overtly "scientific" but pregnantly pantheistic vision of "Life" as cosmic organizing principle provided a good example of this confusion at work. While her biotic cosmology is undoubtedly rich and deeply rewarding as a way to explain and appreciate childbirth, natural selection, and other awe-inspiring biological systems, this very sublime character drives it to converge -- despite her vocabulary-driven assertions to the contrary -- with at least a quasi-religious point-of-view. Change "God's" name to "Nature" and you are still worshipping a transcendental force, only according to a somewhat different rite. Likewise, replace the "Big Bang" with "the Prime Mover," and where are you?