The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred

Chapter 3: Some Big Pictures

61 c h A p t e r 3 SOME BIG PICTURES One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the fact of one’s being there, of one’s queer bodily shape in the darkness . . . of one’s fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. —William James At the beginning of this book I intr oduced a school of philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, who in the seventeenth century advanced the Christian faith with a supreme focus on the good, the true, and the beautiful . For them, an experiential grasp of divine love animates and expands one’s love of nature. In A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, Peter Sterry writes: “If God is love, his work is the work of love, of a love unmixed, unconfined, supreme, infinite in wisdom and power, not limited in its workings by any preexistent matter, but bringing forth freely and entirely from itself its whole wor k both matter and form, accor ding to its o wn 62 T H E G O L D E N C O R D inclination and complacency in itself.”1 Sterry and the other Cambridge Platonists defended this vision of temporal and eternal love—they would have agreed with Dante that gravity and all celestial and terrestrial reality is the result of God’s creative love—over against the Daniel Dennett of their day, Thomas Hobbes.2 As noted in the last chapter, this rich, expansive portrait of love does not, ho wever, meet with enthusiasm among a host of naturalists. F rom the standpoint of secular naturalism, the P latonic Christian view of God and the good should be disparaged as mer e fable and superstition because of its lack of scientific credibility. Without taking on the big pictures of naturalism, I find that the debate over religious experience is seriously curtailed. I vividly saw the need to look at background assumptions in an exchange I had with coauthor Stewart Goetz and naturalist Matthew Bagger at an American A cademy of Religion meeting. Bagger was assigned the task of critiquing Naturalism, a book written b y Goetz and me that is highly critical of naturalism and raises some objections to B agger’s own work. There was an extraor dinary, bizarre book launch at a S an Diego cocktail lounge complete with bouncers and blaring disco music; and pages of our book (along with a fe w other books that w ere part of the launch) were projected on a scr een above the bar, where the bartender was mixing drinks with hard liquor. As muddled as that ev ening turned out to be, it became evident in our ex change with Bagger that only a critical challenge to naturalism could open the door to the possibility of theistic religious experience. Without considering which of these big pictures of reality may be true, the credibility or incredibility of religious experience cannot be productively examined. Bagger maintained—as he puts it in his Religious Experience, Justification, and History—that it is now unacceptable to appeal to “ a transcendent order of reality (and causation ) distinct from the mundane order presupposed alike by the natural scientist and the rest of us in our quotidian affairs.”3 While Goetz and I, like the Cambridge Platonists, think that a transcendent order may in fact be experienced under ordinary and extraordinary conditions, Bagger’s position is nonetheless consistent and lucid: “Our naturalism constitutes grounds for rejecting epistemological theories which permit supernatural explanation.”4 Some Big Pictures 63 In this chapter, let us consider , under less into xicating and noisy conditions, the naturalist critique and whether it utterly undermines the idea that the loves and goods of this world can be hints of an eternal God. The Incoherence of Theism Some naturalists charge that theism is utterly incoherent: it makes no sense or, putting the matter succinctly , it is nonsense. F or many decades the Canadian philosopher Kai Nielsen has argued that theism is incoherent. We are no better off with the stars in the heavens spelling out God exist s than with their spelling out procrastina tion drinks mel anchol y. We know that something has shaken our world, but w e know not what; we know...