Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
values supposedly grounded upon some alleged Absolute2 or Infinite may be stretching our imagination at the very outset of this examination.
Emanating from a presupposed Absolute of most religions are usually numerous alleged eternal or Absolute truths, causes, values, and ethics.3 The most pressing question surfaces when the totality of our experiences does not show anything Absolute. Instead, we recognize what is before us as the “given,” as invariably relative, while, if we are religious, it is probable that we are expected to believe in the Absolute and act as if it directs us, as is often thought, even if it is totally Invisible or Imperceptible and even thought to be Incomprehensible. However, religions do not warn us that their Absolute is difficult or impossible to access. Instead, they assume the Absolute reveals itself to humans, somehow intervening very obviously in the natural world, perhaps even supports the entire galaxy and universe, but manifesting itself convincingly in nature, historical events, messages, sacred scripture, and select persons.
When queried about how that occurs and how one would verify and understand that, if those manifestations of the Absolute are real rather than imagined, the answer is basically that the Absolute has made itself known. It would seem logical that only the Absolute could make known the Absolute; otherwise, it could hardly be thought of as Absolute. But most religions go further and explain that the Absolute is knowable through the various forms it elects to use: prophets, mediums, oracles, priests, miraculous events, or disclosures called “theophanies,” or even through written texts, unique symbols, sacred rituals, or other similar media, or through one or more full incarnations of the Absolute, somehow in a finite form, or mystically in the Absolute dwelling within a person. Or it is merely through a personal relation, whether mystical or not, what the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, called an “absolute relation with the Absolute,”4 in which case it is nothing that can be generated by human will or action or even mediated? His definition countered by saying that if the Absolute chooses to relate to a person, it will be so obvious to that person that he or she cannot ask the question whether it is real. To ask the question would prove that what one experienced certainly was not the Absolute.
The problem with that answer appeared when, in writing about what constitutes the Christian faith by analyzing the story about Abraham, Kierkegaard drew the conclusion not only that “faith” is the human response to this “absolute relation with the Absolute,” but even faith is not something a human can initiate nor is it necessarily reasonable. In fact, in that story, he was asserting that the relation’s demand from the Absolute did not even have to meet human moral standards, not if the Absolute is Absolute. It could involve even a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” That means human thinking can neither inform nor make intelligible this Absolute or even its mode of relating or communicating, and certainly not of judging it. So even the faculties of human judgment have never been able to evaluate this claim about the Absolute or “God”? That was at least Kierkegaard’s reply to Hegel and the latter’s “Absolute Spirit.”
If human reason and language are inadequate to do justice to the Absolute—the human mind is incapable of understanding that absoluteness—how is it that any human could even recognize it if the Absolute happened to choose to relate to one in an Absolute way? When one begins such an inquiry, the first question that appears is whether perhaps the entire idea of “Absolute” is something only fastened on to some idea or experience in retrospect, whereas when the idea or event originally occurred, one could recognize it and understand it. In fact, when one studies the history of the beginnings of most religions, that seems plausible, perhaps verified. The originating experience, whatever it was, was quite unusual, perhaps judged as even “miraculous” in those ancient days, but the disciples who began to try to convince other people to embrace that idea or reality spoke quite intelligible words to convince others. There was no appeal to an Absolute.
How else would have Gautama’s “sermon” to those ascetics in “Deer Park” have had any power to convince them? How else would Muhammed’s recitation of his call by Allah through Gabriel have persuaded anyone? Or, how else would those disciples of Jesus have made any converts on “Pentecost” if the message was not understandable? Or, how else would “Moses” have convinced anyone to risk their lives in trying to flee with him from Egypt? Of course, over time those originating events were remembered as more glorious, more supranatural, more obvious than they were originally. Scholars recognize that these days. But no one was ever converted to a religion that emphasized that it was based on the Absolute, which could not be understood or spoken of, was completely Transcendent and therefore beyond question.
If later generations described that departure from Egypt as the Exodus in which Yahweh divided the waters to save His people, thereby also closing back the waters to drown the enemy, and then appeared mysteriously and miraculously to Moses to talk with him at Mt. Sinai where he adopted the people and began to direct their lives, they certainly had embellished the event. But it was still not of an Absolute. After all, even Moses shortly thereafter asked to see God, and was allowed only to see “God’s back.” That is no recitation of an Absolute yet.
If later generations described the birth of Gautama as beginning with a white elephant entering the womb of Maya, the queen, and her pregnancy and the birth of Gautama through her side or armpit being painless, after which the radiant golden child immediately uttered “I am born to be enlightened for the well-being of the world; this is my last birth,” even this later embellishment did not depict the child as Absolute. He was immediately visited by a great seer who realized and spoke of Gautama’s eventual departure from his inherited life of wealth and power in order to find the truth or be enlightened. He would thereby bring rebirth to an end, “dispelling the darkness of delusion in the world.” His father, a king, went to great length, however, to protect him from any suffering. Finally, when Gautama was mature, the Shuddhadivasa gods managed to help him escape the palace, and they provided four passing sights of pain, suffering, death, and a mendicant, which pierced Gautama to the heart, from which his questioning led eventually to a six-year period of asceticism. After all those years, he abandoned the ascetic life, and after meditating under the bodhi tree and fighting off the forces of evil, he finally attained Enlightenment. Yet even when he began teaching others, he was not concerned with questions of whether there is an Absolute or infinite being, a god or many gods or supranatural beings (of which India had many). His focus, instead, was whether humans suffer pain, and if so, how it can be eliminated. When he died, he did not make any claim of being Absolute, but simply advised his disciples to look within themselves; he had “no closed fist.”5 No matter how supranatural the birth was depicted, it took a long time for him finally to be conceived as a god. But that eventually happened in certain branches of Buddhism.
The same is true with the other examples I mentioned above, that in much later retrospect the origins were related in more splendor, greater power and authority, quite extravagant hyperbole, even though still not regarded as the Absolute. That required many generations and even centuries. No religion began with the notion of the Absolute, which could not be communicated, but rather much more modestly, much more relative and human, even if they quickly had supranatural elements injected into them from retrospective positions of later followers. As Charles Hartshorne mentioned the six “theological mistakes,” that came not from ancient Judaism or even the Christian Bible, but later from Greek philosophy,6 Friedrich Nietzsche saw this absolutizing or rejection of any “becoming” as the idée fixe of philosophy from the Greeks through even Descartes: only “being” has value, not “becoming” or “appearance” or the “body” or the “senses.” Nietzsche claimed this showed philosophers’ “Egypticism,” in which they “de-historicize it [the body], sub specie aeterni—as they turn it into a mummy,” and they exhort “Let us all be mummies! Let us represent monotono-theism . . . and above all, away with the body, this wretched Idee fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!”7
Despite Kierkegaard’s glorification of the individual and subjectivity, and despite the hubris of Hegel against which Kierkegaard was intoning, no religion would ever have come into existence if he were right.8 Clearly, no coherent religious group could exist without having concepts,