Abstract
Solomon’s thinking on spirituality interestingly connects a range of themes in his philosophical work. What he takes to be spiritual in the primary sense is a certain kind of ‘cosmic passion’ which implies a judgment about how ‘life’ or ‘the world’ is overall. Cosmic trust, for example, takes the world to be fundamentally trustworthy. Such a judgment, I suggest, can be justified even though its truth could not be ‘scientifically’ established on objective evidence: and I outline a defence of ‘doxastic ventures’ of this kind based on William James’s ‘The Will to Believe’. Noting that Solomon’s spirituality is naturalist only in the sense that it rejects the supernatural (and not in the sense that it views the world just from a natural scientific perspective), I consider whether it is coherent to adopt such a spirituality without at least implicit theistic or religious commitment. I discuss this question with special reference to the case of cosmic gratitude – thankfulness, not just for good fortune and advantages, but for all of life, including tragedy and death.
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Notes
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It is important to recognise that the word ‘cosmic’ is here used in a broader sense than ‘belonging to the natural cosmos’ or ‘pertaining to scientific cosmology’.
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For my own attempt at such a defence, see Bishop (2007a, Chapter 8).
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It is problematic also for theists for whom the Argument from Evil succeeds in removing the sort of personal omniGod Kant seems to need from their stock of live hypotheses. One might concede that the Argument from Evil fails theoretically to establish atheism (for example, because of the availability of a certain kind of ‘skeptical theist’ response), and yet still find that, relative to certain value commitments which one endorses but recognises not to be required on pain of irrationality, practical commitment to the truth of traditional theism is nevertheless morally ruled out. I explain this possibility in Bishop (2007b). I have also discussed elsewhere whether Christian hope could be of a ‘non-triumphalist’ type that does not require the kind of righting of all wrongs that Kant seems to need, and which continues to be affirmed by leading Christian philosophers, such as Marilyn McCord Adams. (See Bishop 1998; Adams 1999, 2006.)
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For my previous discussion of this topic see Bishop (2010: 530–533).
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Don Cupitt expresses just such a non-realist understanding of theistic beliefs:
I continue … to pray to God. God is the mythical embodiment of all one is concerned with in the spiritual life. He is the religious demand and ideal … the enshriner of values. He is needed – but as a myth (Cupitt 1980: 180).
This passage is quoted by Charles Taliaferro in a helpful discussion of theological non-realism. See Taliaferro (1998: 40–45).
- 8.
This view of faith has been advocated by Andrei Buckareff (2005). In fact, Buckareff argues that faith can be only a sub-doxastic venture, a view that I contest in Bishop (2005). Note that sub-doxastic venture does require belief that the world could (for all we know) really be as it is taken to be: there is thus an important if subtle distinction between someone who makes a sub-doxastic venture in favour of a certain meaning-endowing narrative, and someone who takes such a narrative to be a fictional construct. Though (coherent) fictional narratives enjoy merely logical possibility, to know them as fiction is to recognise that they are not (and cannot be, unless by a fluke) true accounts of what is independently real. Sub-doxastic faith-venturing does not, then, simply collapse into the non-realist position just set aside.
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This may yet be true even if Solomon takes commitment to the world’s deserving our gratitude to be sub-doxastic, since such commitment would seem motivated by the belief that it would be good for the world to be that way and that, for all we know, it could be. Such beliefs about the world are derivable from religious, in particular, theist traditions. Whether they can be derived independently is doubtful.
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‘The melioristic universe is conceived after a social analogy, as a pluralism of independent powers. It will succeed just in proportion as more of these work for its success. If none work, it will fail. If each does his best, it will not fail’ (James 1919: 228–229).
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I consider whether such a possibility might yield a recognisably Christian alternative concept of God in Bishop (2007b).
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Bishop, J. (2012). Solomon on Spirituality. In: Higgins, K., Sherman, D. (eds) Passion, Death, and Spirituality. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4650-3_18
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