Abstract
At the beginning of this exploration, we bracketed the truth claims of religion. As a point of departure in our scientific exploration of religious and spiritual phenomena, it mattered little whether or not God or gods were real, nor whether miracles and supernatural phenomena were possible. What mattered was that people orient their lives around certain sets of beliefs and practices and that these profoundly influence their “moods and motivations,” to reference again Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion.
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Notes
John Bowker, Is Anybody out There? Religion and Belief in God in the Contemporary World (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1987), 74.
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, [1957] 2001).
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief: The Difference between Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Bowker, The Sense of God (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, [1973] 1995), 94.
George F. R. Ellis and Nancey Murphy, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996).
Holmes Rolston, for instance, argues that the observed pattern of evolution of life on the planet, in spite of a number of setbacks, favors this interpretation of increasing complexity. See Holmes Rolston, Genes, Genesis, and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, [1925] 1967), 35.
Whitehead developed this metaphysical system in Process and Reality (1929). This is a very difficult text to read, so it is advised to start with an introductory book. See, for instance, C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008). Whitehead’s process philosophy has been very influential in theology. Claremont School of Theology, for instance, is host to the Center for Process Studies http://www.ctr4process.org/.
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1992). For my discussion of Berry and Swimme’s ethics, see chapter five of my dissertation, Grassie, “Reinventing Nature: Science Narratives as Myths for an Endangered Planet,” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1994.
Raymond Chang, Chemistry, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 52.
This interpretation of information is a common theme in the writings of John Polkinghorne. See Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, The: Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker, Gifford Lectures for 1993–94 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Martin Gardner (1914-), a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and a regular contributor to the organization’s periodical, The Skeptical Inquirer, campaigned tirelessly against pseudoscience and yet maintained a very open mind toward some of the religious interpretations articulated in this chapter. His book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener makes a number of these arguments, with chapters titles such as “Why I Am Not an Ethical Relativist,” “Why I Am Not an Atheist,” “Prayer, Why I Do Not Think It Foolish,” “Immortality, Why I Am Not Resigned, Why I Do Not Think It Strange, Why I Do Not Think It Impossible,” and “Why I Do Not Believe God’s Existence Can Be Demonstrated.” Michael Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: St. Martin’s Press, [1983] 1999).
Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
For a discussion of religion and obsessive-compulsive disorder, see Sigmund Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 9 (1906–1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, 115–128 (London: Hogarth Press, [1907] 1959);
S. Dulaney and A. P. Fiske, “Cultural Rituals and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Is There a Common Psychological Mechanism?” Ethos 22, no. 3 (1994);
Pascal Boyer and P. Lienard, “Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological, and Cultural Rituals,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 595–650 (2006).
The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, is noted for separating the semiotic structure of language from the semantic meaning or parole. Saussure held that a science of language could be obtained by ignoring the individual uses of language in different contexts and focusing only on the systematic structure of signs. In his discussion of Saussure, Paul Ricoeur argues for a dialectic between the semiotic structure of language and the semantic uses of language. Without the latter, we would not be able to account for how languages evolved and continue to evolve. I am making the same distinction here between the semiotics of religion and the semantics of religion. See Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
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© 2010 William Grassie
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Grassie, W. (2010). God-by-Whatever-Name. In: The New Sciences of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114746_10
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