In The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View, a short book recognized as one of the year’s best on religion, philosopher Tim Crane attempts an intervention into contemporary debates on religion, which he sees as only so much sequestered shouting, neither atheists nor believers moved by the stance of the other. Writing against the crop of anti-religious books typically grouped under the banner of “New Atheism,” Crane presents a view on the nature and meaning of religious belief intended both to help make sense of the current debate and to give atheists a better practical understanding of the phenomenon of religion. In the excerpt below, Crane offers an outline of what he means by “religion.”
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The reader may press me to define what I mean by religion. In a strict sense of “definition,” this probably can’t be done. Friedrich Nietzsche said that only that which has no history can be defined, and if he is right (which he surely is), then religion cannot be defined. For religion is so wrapped up with human history and prehistory that we should not hope for a sharp definition of the kind that we get in mathematics, for example, the paradigm of a subject matter (numbers, functions, sets, and so on) without a history. Rather than looking for a strict definition, we should seek “an understanding of religions by following the way they developed historically”—in Émile Durkheim’s words.
Most large-scale attempts to define religion will encounter some counterexample, in the sense that a religion can be found to which the definition does not apply, or that we will find something to which it applies that is not a religion. This is one reason that it has become almost a commonplace among those who theorize about religion that it is impossible to be defined. In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James comments on the variety of definitions in circulation and concludes that “the very fact that these definitions are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word ‘religion’ cannot stand for any single principle or essence.” Some recent writers agree. Karen Armstrong observes that “there is no universal way to define religion” and argues that the concept itself is not obviously one that would have been recognized by more ancient societies: there is no single word in ancient Greek or Latin, nor in the Hebrew Bible, that we can translate as “religion.” In fact, the origin of the concept of the religious, as something opposed to the secular, is a matter of controversy and still somewhat obscure.
Nonetheless, if we are going to get a proper overview of our subject matter, we should try to specify as precisely as we can what it is we are talking about, even if we cannot answer the question of the historical origin of the concept, and even if what we come up with doesn’t amount to anything like a rigorous mathematical definition (after all, very few things do). James had the right approach: “Let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important in religion.” So I will start with my first attempt to identify these characters.
Religion, as I am using the word, is a systematic and practical attempt by human beings to find meaning in the world and their place in it, in terms of their relationship to something transcendent. This description has four essential elements: first, religion is systematic; second, it is practical; third, it is an attempt to find meaning; and fourth, it appeals to the transcendent. Let me say something briefly about these four ideas, whose exposition will be the substance of the rest of the book.
First, the systematic. Being genuinely religious is not simply having a vague sense of the spiritual, significant as this psychological phenomenon may be. Rather, it essentially involves a collection of ideas and practices that are designed to fit together. Someone does not count as religious simply because they think there is more to the world than what we see around us every day; this belief has to be fitted into a system of beliefs or metaphors or stories—about God and the sacred, for example, and about how to live one’s life from day to day. This system of thought and other attitudes are often embodied in sacred texts and developed in the official doctrines or the theology of a religious group. I mention here other attitudes, metaphors, and stories to accommodate the fact that many believers do not take themselves to hold doctrines that allow of strict literal expression as beliefs. More on this later.
Second, religion is practical. It involves not just believing in certain propositions or doctrines, or knowing certain stories, but also it involves acting in a certain way. Two broad kinds of action are important: the first is the participation in religious rituals, either collectively or individually; and the second is the group of actions directed at other people, such as codes of behavior and practices of morality or charity. This illustrates how morality is part of the practical element of religion, but it is not the whole of it—something to which I’ll return.
Third, meaning. It is of course a familiar idea that religion is a search for life’s meaning. But not every search for meaning is religious. Some people find meaning in their relationships with loved ones, their children, and their families. Others find it in their experience of art, music, and beautiful things; others in developing their life plans, or in their ethical, moral, or political lives. But this does not touch the question of the meaning of our lives as a whole. James Tartaglia has pointed out that when philosophers answer that question by talking about the meaning in a person’s life, they have in effect changed the subject, often without acknowledging it. Simon Blackburn, for example, briskly reminds those atheists who might find the world meaningless that “there is plenty of meaning to be found during life. The smile of a baby means the world to the mother; successes mean a lot to those who have struggled to achieve them, and so on.” These things, and the attempts I have just mentioned, are attempts to find meaning in life; religion, as I see it, attempts to find the meaning of life as a whole, what Armstrong has called the “investment of everything with ultimate meaning.”
Looking for the meaning of life is not the same as looking for an understanding of the world, of how things as a whole hang together. It is true that this kind of understanding—from science, or from metaphysics—can result in “making sense of things.” But this understanding is not the same as the religious grasp of the meaning of life. As Thomas Nagel says, “It is important to distinguish [the religious] question from the pure desire for understanding of the universe and one’s place in it.” The religious question, according to Nagel, is, “How can one bring into one’s individual life a full recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole?”
The religious answer to this question, stated most broadly and abstractly, is that one should live one’s entire life in an awareness of the transcendent—this is the fourth idea in terms of which I am defining religion. The transcendent is something that is beyond this world: beyond the ordinary, the everyday, the world of experience, and the world of science too. Living in the awareness of the transcendent is the way to achieve meaning, according to the religious point of view. The religious search for meaning ends in the transcendent. John Cottingham has argued, for example, that the religious life involves responding to “intimations of a transcendent world of meaning that breaks through into the ordinary world of our five senses.”
It is common, as we shall see, to describe the religious commitment to the transcendent as a commitment to the “supernatural” and to “supernatural entities.” To my mind, this is a somewhat problematic description in a number of ways. For one thing, belief in the supernatural cannot be sufficient for religious belief since it will not distinguish religion from magic (which, as Durkheim showed, is crucial for gaining a correct conception of religion). Second, the appeal to the idea of the supernatural relies on a conception of nature according to which nature, an autonomous, law-governed whole, is opposed to God and the divine. This conception of nature is a product of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and it would surely not have been acknowledged before that time. Durkheim, writing in 1912, put it well:
The idea of the supernatural is of recent vintage: it presupposes its opposite, which it negates and which is not at all primitive. In order to call certain phenomena supernatural, one must already have the sense that there is a natural order of things, in other words that the phenomena of the universe are connected to one another according to certain necessary relationships called laws.
So if we want to describe what I call the religious impulse from the point of view of the tradition in which it belongs, then we should not build the idea of the supernatural into our definition of religion. This why I define it in terms of the transcendent rather than the supernatural.
The transcendent is something beyond or outside our experience. Religion is the systematic, practical attempt to align oneself with the transcendent, and God (under various names and guises) is the principal way in which the transcendent has been conceived. But to get a proper overview of religion as a phenomenon, we should not start by just introducing God as a hypothesized entity and building our whole conception of religious belief outward from there. Rather, we should understand claims about God in the context of all the other elements of religion—in particular, the two central aspects I will describe in more detail: what I call the “religious impulse” and “identification.” The religious impulse is the need to live one’s life in harmony with the transcendent (for example, the will of God). And “identification” is my term for the fact that religions are social institutions; the fact that, as Durkheim says, one does not just believe in a religion, one belongs to it.
My rough definition of religion is therefore somewhat different from the definitions given by some recent atheist writers. Daniel C. Dennett defines religions as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” A. C. Grayling says that “by definition a religion is something centred upon belief in the existence of supernatural agencies or entities in the universe.” And Richard Dawkins describes what he calls the “God Hypothesis,” that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” What is common to these views is that religion is characterized principally in terms of supernatural agency. It is true that Dennett, Grayling, and Dawkins do not say that the belief in a supernatural agency is the whole of religious belief. But in making this idea so central to their conception, they give what I consider to be a distorted view of religious phenomena. The distortion comes with ignoring the element of practice and community (what I call identification) and conceiving of the metaphysical side of religious belief in terms that are at once too sophisticated and too simplistic—too sophisticated because religious believers need not operate with the clear-cut idea of the supernatural attributed to them by today’s philosophers and scientists, and too simplistic because the idea of God is not simply the idea of a supernatural agent who made the world; this is the truth in the familiar charge that the New Atheists have a “fundamentalist” or “literalist” conception of religious belief. As the anthropologist Pascal Boyer observes,
If people tell you “Religion is faith in a doctrine that teaches us how to save our souls by obeying a wise and eternal creator of the universe,” these people probably have not travelled or read widely enough.
This would be a good place to emphasize that when I talk about the “more sophisticated” content of religious belief, I am not talking about what theologians or philosophers think. The views I discuss here are not the complex philosophies or theologies developed by scholars over the centuries. Theology is one thing, religion is another. What I am trying to do is to give a description, from the outside, of the most general aspects of anything that counts as a religious worldview. But this worldview is the worldview of religious believers themselves—insofar as it is possible to generalize the views of billions of people. Again, this may strike you as an impossible or absurd ambition, but we have no choice but to attempt to do this if we let ourselves generalize about “religion” at all.
The important point is this: to understand a philosophy or a worldview, it is not enough simply to list the propositions held by some or all of those who subscribe to it. One also must understand what is central to the view and what is peripheral. The descriptions given by Dennett and others place the single idea of a supernatural agency at the center of the religious worldview. In The Meaning of Belief I will describe a different kind of center.
