On That Yes, The Future of the World Depends
Polemical atheists have been giving us religious people a whipping for the last few years.
Philosophers like Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), journalists like Christopher Hitchens (god Is Not Great), and scientists like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) argue that religion is an ignorant, fanatical, puritanical, infantile fantasy. Let the world improve itself by shedding this feedbag of myth and superstition. Let us free ourselves, they say:
- from attempts to pass off religious doctrine, like “intelligent design,” as science;
- from misguided disputations, such as those over contraception, that keep condoms away from African countries ravaged by AIDS;
- from fanaticisms that nurture terrorism;
- from wishful thinking that a Big Guy in a White Beard is in charge of this dark world, making all good things happen to the right people, and rewarding us all after death.
These folks have some good points. And these evangelical atheists are growing ever bolder about missionizing – persuading us benighted people of the true way. Dawkins, for instance, has begun what he calls the “Out Campaign” to persuade closet atheists to leave their oppression behind and liberate their true inner lives. Dennett wants to drop the word atheist and replace it with what he takes to be a simpler, more descriptive term: bright. (He proposes no term for the rest of us, but you can probably guess.)
So here I stand, one dim bulb proud to be a religious Jew, confident that my religion – both my own inner life, and the cluster of beliefs and practices of Conservative Judaism – can withstand the challenges the polemical atheists pose. Subjected to the critical thinking the anti-religious writers espouse religious orthodoxies might shrivel, but liberal religion should thrive.
There is no need to recount the factual and conceptual errors that mar the anti-religious arguments. (“I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject,” said Hitchens’ reviewer in the Washington Post.) Instead, we are perfectly capable of defending our religion against these polemics, because the antireligious evangelists totally misunderstand the experience of faith. They see human understanding as consisting ultimately of brute facts, stripped of whatever they mean in the human heart. Religion’s tales cannot compete in that conversation, for faith teaches secrets that cannot be weighed or measured.
Hitchens’ and the others’ overarching claim against religion is twofold: first, that it is plagued by pervasive error, from its beliefs about the origins of the world, to the attributed authorship of its sacred books, to the elaborate metaphysics, whether they involve sefirot or trinity or Vishnu. Then, religion compounds its errors with ecclesiastical hierarchies that make doctrine out of falsehood and forbid the truth, keeping followers submissive and retaining their own power. The typical religion, in their view, is Renaissance Catholicism, persecuting Galileo, or today’s far-right evangelicals, denying evolution – both hopeless attempts to shore up scientific mistakes. (Judaism provides fewer examples of such silliness, but it is not totally guiltless. In ultra-Orthodox circles a common view is that God created fossils to test whether people would succumb to science or have faith in creation ex nihilo, 5768 years ago. Who you gonna believe, a rabbi or your lyin’ eyes?)
Such examples should embarrass modern religious people, and we must answer for the shortcomings of Judaism, if not other religions. But the atheistic polemic takes a fundamentally wrong turn in thinking that contemporary religion stands or falls on the factuality of its truth claims.
The power of Judaism, or any faith, is not that its ancient texts once and for all time accurately described the world as it is. Does today’s average 8th grader know more science than Isaiah the Prophet or Rabbi Akiva? Yes. But we can admit this without shame, because a religion’s true power is that it prescribes a path for making us better people, and attaining a better world than the one we live in today. Admittedly, that path must conform to the basic truths of physics and cannot be built on falsehood. But faith is not about reporting the facts of reality. Faith is our attempt to make reality meaningful.
Religious beliefs are not facts in the simple sense, such that they can be tested and proven right or wrong. Instead, these beliefs organize our experiences, helping us discover our destinies, our lives’ missions.
As such, true faith is a journey of self-transcendence and of service, more demanding than reassuring, more questing than defending. The world’s religions are some of humanity’s profoundest responses to life’s sacredness, both embracing the world and committing to caring for it. Faith affirms that though the world includes rough-knuckled ugliness, it is overwhelmed by fragile beauty, which we must care for. Though chaos rears up, order transcends it. Though hatred can destroy, the world is bathed in love. Faith asserts that there can be times of meaninglessness, when God hides God’s face, but in the end, the world is meaningful and good, and God is present, in truth.
The poet Wallace Stevens expressed this affirmation with particular power: “After the final no there is a yes. And on that yes, the future of the world depends.”
Now, the evangelical atheist smirks and says: how lovely. But your religion does not explain the meaning of reality. It explains a false picture of reality. After Copernicus it is dumb to speak of the sun rising and setting, and after Darwin it is pointless to speak of God creating human beings in the divine image. Homo sapiens just evolved to become what they are, no different than orchids, porcupines, or bacilli. So quit building a system of meaning and ethics on fairy tales of divine creation! “There is no future for sacred myths,” Dennett writes.
Truth is, many religious myths must become metaphorized, as science reveals that they describe something other than factual reality. (Kabbalists and Hindus alike would be hard pressed to explain reincarnation in any but the most metaphoric terms.) But even sacred metaphors remain valuable, because they point toward spiritual truths, which, while they cannot flout science, are not limited to what is provable in a lab.
For instance, everyone knows love is real, though not in the way a quartz crystal is real or even in the way an electron is real. Similarly, we may still speak of God creating people in the divine image, because this language expresses the remarkable – perhaps unique – human capacity to understand the universe’s objective physical order and its implicate moral order.
Now the atheist vanguard grows more frustrated with me. They think such active reinterpretation is clever cheating at best, ducking the inconvenient truth that we follow extremely imperfect faiths. How could Judaism be a guide to transcendent truth, when it makes innumerable mistakes about the world? If God really communicated with Israel at Sinai, shouldn’t the written record display incomparable perfection? Or at least freedom from contradictions? Moral excellence without exception? Independence from historical limitations? But since none of that is true, and if God did not really reveal a book to Israel, then why bother taking life guidance from this fictitious tradition?
If you want to challenge the world’s fundamentalisms – those who claim that ancient tales are not metaphors but factual reports, and that classical practices are God’s specific will – these may be good points. But against liberal religion, like Conservative Judaism, these arguments are limp spaghetti.
Why should we feel shame that our religious forms are human constructions? How could they be otherwise? When the infinite divine mind engages the finite human mind, the books in which we record such insights can only be finite, and conditioned by the times and places in which their authors lived.
And on this point, Conservative Judaism and other liberal religions stand proudly. We know our traditional faiths are imperfect, because they are constituted by mortal men and women who experience life’s immortal dimension, who try to express that infinity through the words and deeds available to them in specific times and places. Moses’ ideas of God depended on the society around him, as did R. Akiva’s, and Maimonides’ likewise. This does not make theology worthless; it makes theology a noble human attempt at sacred poetry.
When the Messiah comes, human beings may traverse the gap between us and God. Until then, I am proud to be a faithful Jew, who knows that although religion cannot answer every question, even imperfect religion is a uniquely powerful path for affirming the goodness and meaning of this imperfect world.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky is rabbi of Ansche Chesed in New York City.
