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13 c h a p t e r 1 Ultimism and the Aims of Human Immaturity 1. A Diachronic Conception of Religion One of the main ways Skepticism opens up space for religion, as noted in the preface, is in what it has to say about our future, which may be ridiculously longer than the human past. Estimates vary, but it is about 50,000 years since the Earth first saw beings anatomically and behaviorally like us, capable of practicing some form of religion. Now contrast that with the fact, so routinely overlooked or neglected, that although the Sun will eventually scorch our planet, Earth may remain habitable for as long as another billion years more.1 The moral of the story is that we (and/or other intelligent species of the future) may yet have an extremely long way to go—this is epistemically possible. What emerges from this idea—and here we move beyond Skepticism though proceeding on the foundation it has laid—is that we need more fully to apply what I call a diachronic conception of religion, according to which religion is a propensity having many possible incarnations, a feature of human life (and perhaps other forms of life to come) that can in important ways grow and change and evolve throughout the life of species and of the planet. Most philosophical discussion of religion these days appears to be carried out under the influence of what I call a synchronic conception, by which I mean a view that identifies religion with attitudes and/or practices of religious humans living at the present time, in the early twenty-first 1 As recently confirmed by K. P. Schröder and Robert Connon Smith, “Distant Future of the Sun and Earth Revisited,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 386 (2008), 155–163. 14 The Will to Imagine century (together, perhaps, with whatever from our past is presupposed thereby). This is a severely and inappropriately restricted view. For even if all existing religion were seriously flawed and all existing religious claims false, one would intuitively want to say, in the light of a broader evolutionary awareness, that these facts provide no good reason to give up on religion—thus revealing the presence and operation of the diachronic conception. Because the intellectual results of the exercise of the religious impulse may over much future time become greatly improved, we ought not in this context tie religion to its existing instantiations. We should, indeed , get used to thinking about the possibility that religion may flourish even if its presently existing instantiations are eventually well covered over by the sands of history. But to this a critic may be inclined to respond: “You have yet to show how the story you’re telling is compatible with rational religion in the present . I’m ready to accept that the future includes new religious possibilities that we ought not ignore. And I can also see the point of a diachronic conception of religion. But what do these realizations provide one now, other than a basis for a kind of evolutionary religious skepticism, and for wishing one had been born 100,000 or 1,000,000 years later to see how things pan out? How can we ourselves, today, approach any unequivocally positive perspective on religion?” The skepticism to which the critic refers is indeed justified; it is defended at length in Skepticism. But precisely because this is a skepticism dynamically turned toward the future, we can provide a crucial distinction to answer the critic’s distinction between future possibilities and rational religion right now. This crucial distinction is a distinction between what rational religion might be expected to look like at later times in an evolutionary process and what it might be expected to look like at earlier times. The point is that we must recognize how rational religion may look very different at an earlier time, such as ours, than at later ones (100,000 or 1,000,000 years in the future). When considering whether the problem of faith and reason can be solved, therefore, we need to think about what form of religion, if any, is fitted to our place in time. This point cannot be overemphasized. And now we need to go all the way back to Prolegomena to apply it: for even if any kind of detailed religious belief and religious practice grounded therein is arguably premature at present—appropriate, if ever, only after...

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