2008-12-18T19:51:00.006-06:00

God-Talk 101: An Honest Look at Tough Questions

Catherine M. Wallace, Ph.D.

hosted by Wilmette Community Church
1020 Forest Ave.
Wilmette IL 60091

www.communitychurchofwilmette.org

Sundays, noon to 1:30 pm, Jan. 18 to Feb.15, 2008
tickets: $10 at the door.

RSVPs much appreciated: 847-251-4370

"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Tertullian asked. What has philosophy to say about religion? Not a thing, Tertullian thundered. He argued that faith is necessarily a leap beyond critical thinking. This was eighteen hundred years ago, but in some places his assertion still lingers: intellectual questions are illegitimate. They are failures of faith.

That position has never been tolerable for some of us. We cannot set aside our intellectual allegiances when we walk in the doors of a church. As a result, many of us have simply stayed away from churches, or else we sit restively in the pews, struggling with questions we can neither ask aloud nor silence. But in fact we belong to an equally ancient Christian tradition, one which insists that critical thinking is the foundation of faith—not its antithesis.

This course will provide an opportunity to discuss the core philosophic problems that orbit around the possibility of faith—faith in any religion, although we will be focusing upon Christianity. I do not believe in single, simple answers to questions this large. Nor am I willing to defend conventional Christian orthodoxy in its own terms. But I do think it's worthwhile to explore the humanly important issues at stake in these questions. I also believe that faith can be a reasoned and reasonable choice—one honest, thoughtful option among many honest and thoughtful options.

Format will be interactive, perhaps at times in small groups so that everyone can be heard.

Week by week descriptions below are followed by a few book titles. These are merely the most interesting sources I have found thus far. That's all: I'm not expecting you to read anything ahead of time. I'm simply trying to be transparent about the origins of my ideas. Please bring titles etc. of sources you would like to recommend to the group, or post them as comments on the Google group I'll be setting up for participants who might enjoy an online forum.

January 18: The Challenge of Social Science: Is Religion Obsolete?

From its origins circa 1875, contemporary social science has insisted that religion is a primitive or outmoded cultural artifact, doomed to fade away under pressure from science, philosophic rationalism, psychotherapy, and so forth. This "secularization thesis" has prestige and power far in excess of its own empirical evidence. That's intriguing, and I think it's worth talking about. Is religion a failed or primitive attempt at scientific explanation of phenomena? Is it simply myths and legends used to teach moral lessons? Is it essentially or necessarily repressive, or a means whereby an elite maintains its control of the masses? Is "God" a neurotic delusion or a naive projection? What's really at stake in questions like these? To what bigger truths do they point?

Daniel Pals, Eight Theories of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Identical to his earlier volume, Seven Theories of Religion, except for a new chapter on Durkheim. Quite readable profiles of major social scientists, including Freud; extensive bibliographies.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). The definitive, magisterial study of how secularism has arisen in the West over the last 500 years. It's amazing—and big: 874 pp.

January 25: The Challenge of Philosophy: Is Truth Possible?

Is it up to each individual to determine what is true? Is it up to the individual to decide what is right and what is wrong? We hear those assertions all the time, and they have venerable origins in the philosophy of the great Immanuel Kant. But if such claims are true in this popular formulation, if they are accurate as they are usually stated, then "truth" has no meaning. Worse yet, it becomes impossible to say that anything is morally wrong. Such "anything-goes" nihilism may be repugnant, but so is totalitarianism--and where does that leave us? Until or unless we can find a way out of this trap, there's no way to say anything meaningful about religion. Or about life. Or about politics or policy or, umm, whether or not to license civil engineers or regulate leverage on Wall Street.

Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Remarkably fun.

Michael Lynch, True to Life: Why Truth Matters (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005). Unfailingly lucid, almost conversational in its style.

Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Dense in patches but a very important bit of history, especially for the quantitatively oriented.

February 1. The Challenge of Global Awareness: Is Morality Merely a Local Cultural Construct?

One step back from the nihilism of "each person has to decide what is true" is the claim that cultural contexts determine what counts as "truth" for a given society. Maybe we think suicide bombers are wrong, for instance, but elsewhere they are hailed as heroes--and who is to say who is right? There is no position "outside" of cultural context. It's an old question: "Can we be good without God?" That is, do moral norms need "heavenly" authority? If so, how do we cope with religious differences globally? Here's another, closely related issue: What about "free will"? If we are not free, can we be held morally responsible? Are suicide bombers responsible, for instance, or does ultimate responsibility lie in their upbringing in a given cultural context? I've found an interesting convergence of ideas on these issues from an aggressively atheist cognitive scientist, a primatologist, and the chief rabbi of Great Britain.

Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003). Dense in places regarding computer simulations, but the core argument is clear and intriguing.

Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Great stories and clear, humane thinking.

Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2002). Beautifully written; makes imaginative use of Jewish scriptures and teachings.

February 8. The Challenge of History: Is the Bible True?

I admit: this is a trick question. By this point in our work together, I'm not going to get away with trick questions. So: what does "true" mean in relation to the Bible? It's historically accurate? Morally upright? Wise? Authoritative in some regard for a given community? But "authority" is a troubled topic: fundamentalists' claims are fundamentally untenable; claims about an inerrant "sola scriptura, scriptura sola" are profoundly erroneous; "papal infallibility" is profoundly fallible in its origins. What then are we to do with this very famous old book? What about other ancient texts in other religions? What real value might such texts have—both in theory and in practice? Can we claim what is valuable without falling prey to some version of religious absolutism?

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980, rpt. with a new afterword Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Intriguing, massively influential demonstration of how abstract thinking demands metaphor.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). A more fully developed argument of the position taken in Metaphors We Live By. Some sections will be interesting only to those with a background in philosophy. And like The Secular Age, a massive tome.

Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York, Knopf, 9.11.01) A literary-philosophical-political take on the New Testament. (Full disclosure: he is my brother.)

Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991; 2nd ed Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999). The first and second editions are identical. Written for beginning grad students in Biblical scholarship & ministry.

February 15. The Challenge of Spirituality: What Does Religion Have to Offer?

What is "spirituality"? What might religion offer that "spiritual but not religious" lacks? Can one be "religious" without buying into "organized religion"? What do we mean by "organized religion" in the first place? If religion ("organized" or otherwise) is going to leap across the nihilist abyss of post-modernism into a meaningful role in a networked, wired, global world, what will it look like--and why should anyone bother looking for it?

Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Terrific history.

Edward C. James, The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997). Thoughtful account of how philosophy has increasingly undercut religion in the last five hundred years.

Dan McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Very readable account of how our sense of self is shaped by the stories and storytelling traditions we inherit.

Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion, and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700-1999 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Dense, scholarly work but extremely important demonstration of how narrative underlies critical thinking in any field.

Phyllis Tickle, God-Talk in America (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997). Very readable account of how religion in American escaped the control of the institutional churches.

Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008). Superb short history of the cultural pressures reshaping Christianity in the 20th century—pressures that are of course exerted on every other religion in the West as well.

God Talk 101