Religion in Late Modernity

Introduction

Introduction Religion in late modernity is both vexed and stimulated by the following problematic issues: • Nature, in both scientific and ethical senses; • Human identity relative to nature and society; • The capacity of religious symbols to refer to real religious objects; • The conceptions of ultimate religious objects such as God or the Dao; • How people can participate in both the temporal world and eternal reality; • How religion itself can be understood objectively and yet from the inside; • The challenges of modernization; • The competition between religious and secular thought; • Religious pluralism; • Belief versus feeling; • The objectivity of religious assertions; • The limits of European Enlightenment thought about religion; • How both to understand tradition faithfully and to appropriate it usefully. These are roughly the topics of the chapters of this book, respectively. They are hardly unique to late modernity, but they have late-modern forms and together shape much of the complexity of religion in the late-modern situation. This book is organized into three sections. Part 1, “Late-Modern Topics,” treats five philosophical topics that are part of our religious problematic: nature , human nature, religious symbolism, personification of the ultimate, and the transformation of soul required to engage the ultimate in its eternal or transtemporal dimension. This section introduces the main philosophical ideas to be employed subsequently. Part 2, “Late-Modern Religion,” is about religion itself in five dimensions: the religious dimension of its study, its social embodiment, its political context, its cultural vitality in a pluralistic age, and its transformative capacity. Part 3, “Religion and Philosophy in Late Modernity,” focuses on the study of religion, dealing with truth, the discipline of philosophy of religion, and how to conceive of the history of philosophy, especially as philosophy means the intellectual dimensions of religions. The chapters in part 3 display more of the contexts of their original presentations than do the others, as recounted in the preface. The question of nature is particularly vexing because by and large the European tradition of philosophy has accepted Kant’s transcendental philosophic claim that only science can study nature itself and that philosophy and other theoretical modes of thought need to confine themselves to studying the character and limits of scientific knowledge. Since the eighteenth century, philosophy of nature has become philosophy of science. This has been disastrous for religion . First, it makes nature and God (or the Ultimate, Dao, Brahman, or whatever Religious Object) two separate, unconnectable, and incommensurable topics. Notions such as divine creation or the nonduality of Brahman seem only superstitious from the scientific standpoint because the languages of their customary expression are not those of science. Second, it makes human beings in their religious dimensions incommensurate with the scientific understanding of nature. When human beings are understood within the reductive languages of the sciences, the religious dimension is screened out or distorted. The problematic character of both of these points fuels the current “religion and science ” debates. Third, the conception of nature as amenable only to scientific understanding is an obstacle to the intercultural and interreligious dialogue so central to our late-modern situation because most religions whose core texts and motifs have not been shriven by modern science have important views of nature that cannot be registered in the scientific conversation. Chapter 1 addresses the conception of nature directly and offers a metaphysical theory making connection with a theory of God as ultimate creator; it also opens the conversation to conceptions of human identity, the topic of chapter 2, and the encounters of world religions, the topics of chapters 6–9. The late-modern take on human identity is that we must be wary of essences , for any attempt to define the essence of human nature is bound to re- flect the biases of our own class and social position. So bound, we are deceived (if not deliberately deceptive) about people very different from ourselves. To the extent that our attempt to define is persuasive we bamboozle the others into accepting our characterization of them. The deconstructionists’ moral from this point is to avoid characterizations of human nature or personal identity. Yet hard-won values such as human rights demand some normative conceptions of human nature. Chapter 2 presses the thesis that lying under obligation, being obligated by norms, is close to an essence of human nature when individuals are 2 Introduction contextualized in nature and history. This chapter proposes...