A recent Live Science press release, titled “Believers Leave Punishment to Powerful God,” opened with the memorable words:

"Believing in an involved, morally active God makes people less likely to punish others for rule-breaking, new research finds."

Which is equivalent to saying that non-believers are less forgiving, less compassionate, less merciful, and—oh, let’s just say it: they are worse people. Don’t get mad at me. This is research!

But then maybe this summary is too telegraphic. Because the very same research that proves atheists are more bloodthirsty than theists also proves “that religious belief in general makes people more likely to punish wrongdoers — probably because such punishment is a way to strengthen the community as a whole” (emphasis mine).

In other words, theists are less forgiving, less compassionate, less merciful, and just plain worse people than atheists. Except when they aren’t and when their roles are reversed.

The press release explains the conundrum thusly: “In other words, religion may introduce two conflicting impulses: Punish others for their transgressions, or leave it to the Lord.”

This is the power of statistics, a field of science which, given the routine ease with which two opposite conclusions are simultaneously proved, we may now officially dub Orwellian Analytics.

Research Shows...

 
The paper which this popular article was based on is titled “Outsourcing punishment to God: beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment” by Kristi Laurin and three others. It was published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

After a lengthy introduction arguing that all morality (except presumably the morals of the authors) can be reduced to urges induced by evolutionary “pressures,” and defining something called “altruistic punishment”, the authors describe how they gathered small pools of WEIRD young people (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic undergraduates) and had them play games. The results from these games told the authors all they needed to know about who enjoys punishment more. Incidentally, about the punishment, they said this:

"Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, large-scale societies depended on individuals engaging in ‘altruistic punishment’—bearing the costs of punishment individually, for the benefit of society."

And did you know that “According to theory”—are you ready?—“Though administering punishment benefits society as a whole, it has immediate costs for punishers themselves.” Who knew?

Experiment one corralled “Twenty undergraduates” who “participated in exchange for course credit.” That’s one more than nineteen, friends. The supplementary data (which is mysteriously left out of the main article, but which is linked there) shows that these participants contained 8 whites and 9 Asians, with 1 black and 1 Arabic left over; 10 Christians, 1 Buddhist, 1 Hindu, 1 Muslim, 1 “Other”, and 6 Atheists. The authors claim to have “measured participants’ belief in powerful, intervening Gods, and their general religiosity.” Which makes you wonder how they classed the Buddhist and “Other.” No word on the breakdown of how participants answered the “religiosity” question.

But the next part is more fascinating: “We then employed the 3PPG–an economic game commonly used to measure altruistic punishment.” I'm struck by the words “commonly used.” It must be common, because there isn’t word one in the paper or supplementary material of what this creation is. But I can reveal to you it is the “Third-Party Punishment Game,” a frivolity invented by academics designed to flummox undergraduate participants in studies like this. More about that another day.

The “game” runs so (sorry for the length, but do read it):

"Player A receives 20 dollars, and must share that money between herself and player B in two-dollar increments, without input from player B. In the second stage, player C [who presumably knows what A did], who has received 10 dollars, can spend some or all of that money to reduce player A’s final payout: For every dollar that player C spends, player A loses three dollars. Player A’s behaviour does not affect player C, all players are anonymous and expect no further interactions, and punishing player A costs player C money. People treat sharing money evenly between players A and B as the (cooperative) norm; thus, player C’s willingness to punish player A for selfishly violating this norm can be taken as an index of altruistic punishment of non-cooperators."

In other words, Player C looks at how much A gave B. If C thinks this too low, C sacrifices some of his own money to reduce the amount A kept. But A and C got the money for free and since these are students we do not know if A actually knew B in real life, or if C knew either. For example, if I as A and Uncle Mike as B and Ye Olde Statistician as C were to play this game, I would split the money with Uncle Mike and Ye Olde Statistician would go along. This is because we were pals before the game commenced. But if we were enemies, something entirely different would occur. The authors never mention if they look for these kinds of effects in this or in any experiment. Leave finding flaws and contrary evidence for others.

But never mind, because C giving up some of his play money is scarcely the same thing as C desiring that a child rapist be tossed in jail to rot, even though C knows that the cost of the rapist’s cell will be taken from his wallet. But C in real life hardly knows even that. C knows that he pays taxes and that some of his taxes go to prison upkeep, but those taxes also go to pay for the fuel to ferry the president around on Air Force One from fund raiser to fund raiser. That is, most of us Cs don’t think that ponying up taxes is altogether altruistic.

The authors are mute on this objection, too.

Enter The P-value

"We regressed participants’ levels of altruistic punishment [amounts of money] on their God beliefs and their religiosity (both centered around 0) simultaneously…participants who believed more strongly in a powerful, intervening God reported less punishment of non-cooperators, β = -0.58, t(17) = 2.22, p = 0.04; whereas more religious participants showed a trend towards reporting greater punishment, β = 0.33, t(17) = 1.67, p = 0.11."

And there it is. Theists reported less punishment and more punishment. Except that the p-value for the “more punishment” isn’t small enough to excite. (And a linear regression is at best an approximation here.) The authors also discovered “more religious people tended to believe in powerful, controlling Gods.” The correlation wasn’t perfect, but neither should it be when you mix Buddhists and Christians. Let’s don’t forget that this regression model only included 6 atheists for its contrast.

The really good news is that “Given the strong correlation between religiosity and conservatism (r = 0.52), we conducted an additional analysis including conservatism in the regression. Results are reported in table 1; we found no evidence that conservatism explains the religion–punishment association.” Sorry, Chris Mooney.

The authors did four more studies, all similar to this one, but with increasingly complicated regression models (lots of interactions, strong hints of data snooping, etc.). The findings don’t change much. In their conclusion, however, they include these strange words: “In our research, we found it necessary to remind participants of their beliefs for these beliefs to influence their decisions.” This sounds like coaching, a way to induce results the authors expected.

So what's the real lesson here? That one of the largest science sites on the Internet has no problem squeezing a complex mass of data into a terse and misleading headline.
 
 
(Image credit: Steve Dease)

David Bentley Hart is one of our foremost theologian-philosophers, an American intellectual treasure who has ransacked the thesaurus while writing books such as The Beauty of the Infinite, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, and the recent The Experience of God.

One of the things I enjoy about his writing is how he rightfully gives credit to Nietzsche for recovering the scandalous nature of Christianity. In The Beauty of the Infinite he goes as far as saying:

"Nietzsche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift, a needed anamnesis of itself—of its strangeness. His critique is a great camera obscura that brings into vivid and concentrated focus the aesthetic scandal of Christianity’s origins, the great offense this new faith gave the gods of antiquity, and everything about it that pagan wisdom could neither comprehend nor abide: a God who goes about in the dust of exodus for love of a race intransigent in its particularity; who apparels himself in common human nature, in the form of a servant; who brings good news to those who suffer and victory those who are as nothing; who dies like a slave and outcast without resistance; who penetrates to the very depths of hell in pursuit of those he loves; and who persists even after death not as a hero lifted up to Olympian glories, but in the company of peasants, breaking bread with them an offering them the solace of his wounds. In recalling theology to the ungainliness of the gospel, Nietzsche retrieved the gospel from the soporific complacency of modernity (and at a time when modernity had gained a commanding advantage over it) …"

Singing the praises of Nietzsche is one thing. And it is a good thing. Rene Girard does the same in his I See Satan Fall Like Lightening. But there is no need to hearken back to a Golden Age of intellectually respectable atheism as David Bentley Hart does in his latest piece in First Things entitled “Gods and Gopniks.” Here’s what he said:

Which brings me to Adam Gopnik, and specifically his New Yorker article of February 17, ‘Bigger Than Phil’—the immediate occasion of all the rude remarks that went coursing through my mind and spilling out onto the page overhead. Ostensibly a survey of recently published books on (vaguely speaking) theism and atheism, it is actually an almost perfect distillation of everything most depressingly vapid about the cogitatively indolent secularism of late modern society. This is no particular reflection on Gopnik’s intelligence—he is bright enough, surely—but only on that atmosphere of complacent ignorance that seems to be the native element of so many of today’s cultured unbelievers. The article is intellectually trivial, but perhaps culturally portentous.

Stephen Bullivant’s Faith and Unbelief offers a better strategy for Christians who want to engage atheists. He proposes that Christians should seek out the best among them, those who are most open to dialogue. It makes sense to engage the Nietzsches of our age without forgetting that the 19th century had its fair share of Feuerbachs, Renans, and Thomas Huxleys.

To this end, I came up with a list of ten books by ten living atheists who engage religion (mostly) charitably.

It didn’t take me very long. I’m sure you can think of some prominent figures that I’ve omitted. They are listed below along with representative books, and their publisher blurbs.

1. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe

“Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of ‘frightening’ either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism.”

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our “incredible need to believe”—the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, John Paul II, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

2. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf

The Puppet and the Dwarf offers a close reading of today’s religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today’s spirituality—New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism—and then tries to redeem the “materialist” kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a “postsecular” age, this book—with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy—is certain to stir controversy.

3. Jurgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism.

In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing’, with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas’s essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas’s reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.

4. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.

5. John N. Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions

By the author of the best-selling Straw Dogs, this book is a characteristically trenchant and unflinchingly clear-sighted collection of reflections on our contemporary lot. Whether writing about the future of our species on this planet, the folly of our faith in technological progress, or the self-deceptions of the liberal establishment, John Gray dares to be heretical like few other thinkers today.

6. Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

In this bold and provocative work, French philosopher Alain Badiou proposes a startling reinterpretation of St. Paul. For Badiou, Paul is neither the venerable saint embalmed by Christian tradition, nor the venomous priest execrated by philosophers like Nietzsche. He is instead a profoundly original and still revolutionary thinker whose invention of Christianity weaves truth and subjectivity together in a way that continues to be relevant for us today.

In this work, Badiou argues that Paul delineates a new figure of the subject: The bearer of a universal truth that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic Law and the conventions of the Greek Logos. Badiou shows that the Pauline figure of the subject still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential today: The subject is that which refuses to submit to the order of the world as we know it and struggles for a new one instead.

7. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning

Mary Midgley in this book discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather around the notion of science, and, in particular, some very odd recent expressions of them. When everyone viewed the world as God’s creation, there was no problem about the element of worship involved in studying it, nor about science’s function in mapping people’s lives. But now these things have grown puzzling. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much vaster and grander from it—the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age.

8. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless

The return to religion has arguably become the dominant theme of contemporary culture. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era where political action flows directly from theological, indeed cosmic, conflict. The Faith of the Faithless lays out the philosophical and political framework of this idea and seeks to find a way beyond it. Should we defend a version of secularism or quietly accept the slide into theism? Or is there another way?

9. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an “economy,” that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?

The greatest novelty to emerge from The Kingdom and the Glory is that modern power is not only government but also glory, and that the ceremonial, liturgical, and acclamatory aspects that we have regarded as vestiges of the past actually constitute the basis of Western power. Through a fascinating analysis of liturgical acclamations and ceremonial symbols of power—the throne, the crown, purple cloth, the Fasces, and more—Agamben develops an original genealogy that illuminates the startling function of consent and of the media in modern democracies. With this book, the work begun with Homo Sacer reaches a decisive point, profoundly challenging and renewing our vision of politics.

10. Michael Ruse, Science and Spirituality

In Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, Michael Ruse offers a new analysis of the often troubled relationship between science and religion. Arguing against both extremes—in one corner, the New Atheists; in the other, the Creationists and their offspring the Intelligent Designers – he asserts that science is undoubtedly the highest and most fruitful source of human inquiry. Yet, by its very nature and its deep reliance on metaphor, science restricts itself and is unable to answer basic, significant, and potent questions about the meaning of the universe and humankind’s place within it: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate source and foundation of morality? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the meaning of it all? Ruse shows that one can legitimately be a skeptic about all of these questions, and yet why it is open for a Christian, or member of any faith, to offer answers. Scientists, he concludes, should be proud of their achievements but modest about their scope. Christians should be confident of their mission but respectful of the successes of science.
 
 
Originally posted at Ethika Politika. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Uroboros)

Pew Forum recently released the results of their study on religion in America. In accord with many surveys over the past fifty years, this poll showed that the vast majority (over 90%) of Americans believe in God but that an increasing number prefer their own spiritual experience to the dogmas and doctrines of traditional Christianity. Also, there is, among Americans, a general acceptance of positive, life-affirming beliefs but a deep suspicion of negative ideas such as divine judgment and hell.

The director of the Pew Forum summed up the findings as follows: Americans are wary of dogmas precisely because we live in such an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse society. To place a stress on doctrine, it seems, would lead to conflict and, at the limit, violence in such a pluralistic context. Another commentator observed that the embrace of positive beliefs is a concomitant of the premium that we place on choice and the right to choose. After all, who would ever opt for belief in hell and judgement? I would like to say a word about each of these points.

The reticence about making religious truth claims in the public forum is, of course, a consequence of the Enlightenment. Almost all of the philosophers and social theorists of the modern period—from Descartes and Spinoza to Kant and Thomas Jefferson—were mortified by the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, and they accordingly wanted to find a means of controlling religious violence. Their solution, adopted in most of the modern political constitutions, was to tolerate religion as long as it remained essentially a private matter, something confined to the hearts of individual believers. The result of this “peace treaty” was what Richard John Neuhaus characterized as “the naked public square,” that is to say, a political forum stripped of properly religious assertions and convictions. The events of September 11th simply confirmed for many in the West the wisdom of this arrangement. Since religious people cannot defend their claims rationally, the argument goes, the public appearance of religion will always be accompanied by some form of direct or indirect violence.

I have always found the either/or quality of this analysis tiresome: either religious antagonism or privatization; either September 11th or bland toleration. Our problem is, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, that we have forgotten how to have a good argument about religion in public. The most dramatic indication that rational discourse has broken down is, of course, warfare between the disputants. Once conversants have resorted to fisticuffs, we know that the careful process of marshaling evidence, presenting argument and counter-argument, responding to objections, and avoiding contradictions, has been abandoned. But there is another sure sign that rationality has been left behind, and that is the slide into an anything-goes, your-opinion-is–just-as-good-as-minde sort of toleration.

Truth claims, by their very nature, are public because truth, by its very nature, is universal. It would be ludicrous to say that 2+2= 4 for me but not for you or that adultery is wrong for me but not for you. Therefore, if I were to tolerate your view that 2+2 just might be equal to 6, or that adultery is, depending on the circumstances, acceptable, then I have stepped out of the arena of rationality and public argument, and I’ve essentially given up on you. It’s glaringly obvious that the perpetrator of violence is a disrespector of persons, but the perpetrator who "tolerates" irrational views is just as disrespectful, since he’s despaired of reason.

And now just a brief observation about our unwillingness to accept the tougher, more “negative” features of the religious traditions. In a thousand different ways, we reverence choice in our culture. We choose our political leaders, the products we purchase at the store, the kind of films that we watch, the sort of people with whom we associate. And we revel in the wide variety of choices available to us. But there are certain realities that are so basic in their goodness, beauty, and importance that they are not so much chosen as given. Beethoven’s 9th symphony, the Swiss Alps, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French language, and moral absolutes are goods that give themselves to us in all of their complexity and compelling power. We don’t choose them; they choose us. We don’t make demands of them; they impose a demand upon us. We wouldn’t presume to excise those sections of Beethoven that are “unpleasant,” or those features of French that are too difficult, or those dimensions of morality that are hard to live up to.

Similarly, Catholics hold, religious truth is a supreme value of this type. Catholics can't, therefore, speak of choosing sections of revelation that they like, while leaving behind that which bothers them. Rather, like the atheist embracing Beethoven’s 9th symphony, we must let it, in all of its multivalence and complexity, claim us. Challenging ideas, I know, for us Americans, but important ones if we're to re-inaugurate a healthy, rational, public square.
 
 
(Image credit: The Flash List)

Some news hooks are irresistible, even when they're false or at least incomplete. Case in point: the alleged conflict between science and religion. Is science opposed to religion? The answer depends in large measure on what you mean by religion. If your "religion" is, say, astrology, then you could say there's a conflict between science and "religion". The science of astronomy does conflict with the "religion" of astrology.

Probably most people who speak of a conflict between science and religion, though, don't mean the "religion" of astrology—if they think of astrology as a religion at all. They mean Christianity or perhaps Judeo-Christianity. They have before their minds Galileo and his struggle with the Inquisition of the Catholic Church over geocentrism or, more recently, the argument certain Christians have with the theory of evolution. Or perhaps they have only a vague idea that as science progresses religion becomes more and more problematic. Religion, in this view, is simply a way of talking about things science hasn't yet explained. When science gets around to explaining them, no role for religion will remain, and like the State in the Marxist paradise, it will wither away.

Those ideas about science and "religion" suppose an inherent conflict between the two fields. Conflicts, of course, make for more exciting news stories. But does the constant "hook" of a battle between science and religion reflect reality? Are science and religion—specifically Christianity—inevitably at odds with one another?

No, says physicist and Catholic Stephen Barr, author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press). Dr. Barr is professor of physics at the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware. His writings include essays such as "A new Symmetry Breaking Pattern for SO(10) and Proton Decay" and "Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron and of the Neutron." He also contributes essays and reviews in First Things magazine, where he writes on such topics as evolution, Intelligent Design, and naturalism.

Dr. Barr recently agreed to answer some questions regarding science and religion.
 

 
Q: What is your background in science? In religion?

Dr. Barr: I received my Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1978. Since 1987 I have been a professor at the University of Delaware. My field of research is theoretical particle physics, and I have worked primarily in the area of "grand unified theories" and the cosmology of the early universe.

I am a lifelong Catholic.

Q: The controversial issue of Intelligent Design involves a basic question: What is science? How would you define science, as opposed to philosophy and theology? And would you call the "design hypothesis" put forward by the Intelligent Design movement science?

Dr. Barr: Science is sometimes divided into the "natural sciences" (astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology) and the "human sciences" (like anthropology and psychology). The goal of the "natural sciences" is to understand the "natural order" of the physical universe. There are, of course, realities beyond the natural order and beyond the physical, but they lie outside the purview of natural science. Philosophy and theology have a much broader scope.

As I understand the "Intelligent Design movement", they are saying that certain biological phenomena can only be explained as miracles. They don't use that language, but that is in effect what they are saying. I firmly believe that miracles do happen. But a miracle, since it is something that contravenes the natural order, lies outside of natural science. I think it is quite legitimate to use scientific arguments and evidence to make out a case that some event is in fact miraculous. But that means that you have run up against the limits of what natural science can explain, and are invoking something beyond those limits. That is why I do not regard the ideas of the Intelligent Design movement as being hypotheses within natural science.

Let me put it this way. Science may show that a person turned water into wine, but that would be a miracle, not a new effect in the science of chemistry. Nor was the parting of the Red Sea a new effect in hydrodynamics. I am not sure that the "design hypothesis" is a part of biological science. That is not to say that it is wrong.

Q: Some scientists write as if they think that science can answer any question capable of being asked and answered. How would you respond?

Dr. Barr: It's absurd, and I wonder if anyone really believes it. I suspect that most of the people who write such things actually have all sorts of firmly held personal convictions that they could not prove by "scientific" demonstration.

There are many important questions about which natural science has nothing to say. Can science say whether murder is wrong? Or whether human beings have free will? Or whom a person should marry? Or whether a nation should go to war? Or what a man should live for or be ready to die for? And yet these are questions that not only can be answered but must be.

Q: What, in your view, is the most significant misunderstanding when it comes to religion and science?

Dr. Barr: Many atheists believe that all religion is at bottom either a pre-scientific attempt to understand natural phenomena through myth or an attempt to obtain worldly benefits through magic. And since they see science as the antithesis of myth and magic they cannot help but see all religion as antiscientific. Of course, such people have little understanding what true religion is all about.

Q: Do you know many scientists who are also religious believers?

Dr. Barr: Yes, quite a few. Indeed, I have about half a dozen friends in my own field who are devout Catholics. In fact, one of the real geniuses in my field (he would be ranked at or near the very top) is a practicing Catholic. However, in my experience most scientists are non-religious. That may have more to do with general cultural attitudes than with them being scientists. I have found as much atheism in humanities departments as in science departments.

Q: The science/religion debate operates on a number of levels. One is on the cosmic level—the existence of the universe. What can science tell us of the universe's origins? Are there limits to what science can say? What roles do philosophy and theology play in considering the question of the universe's origin?

Dr. Barr: One has to distinguish the question of the universe's beginning moments from the question of why there is a universe at all. In my view, science will never provide an answer to the latter question. As Stephen Hawking famously noted, all theoretical physics can do is give one a set of rules and equations that correctly describe the universe, but it cannot tell you why there is any universe for those equations to describe. He asked, "What breathes fire into the equations so that there is a universe for them describe?"

As far as the beginning moments of the universe go, science may eventually be able to describe what happened then. That is, when we know the fundamental laws of physics in their entirety—as I hope someday we will—it may well turn out that the opening events of the universe happened in accordance with those laws. In that sense, "the beginning" could have been "natural". However, that would not explain the "origin" of the universe in the deeper sense meant by "Creation".

Let me use an analogy. The first words of a play—say Hamlet—may obey the laws of English grammar. They may also fit into the rest of the plot in a natural way. In that sense, one might be able to give an "internal explanation" of those beginning words. However, that would not explain why there is a play. There is a play because there is a playwright. When we ask about the "origin" of the play, we are not asking about its first words, we are asking who wrote it and why. The origin of the universe is God.

Q: What do you think about efforts to develop a "Theory of Everything"?

Dr. Barr: I prefer to speak about a "Theory of Everything Physical". The goal of fundamental physics is to find the ultimate laws that govern all of physical reality. Most physicists, myself included, are convinced that such ultimate laws exist. There are good reasons to suspect that "superstring theory"—or what is now called "M-theory"—may be that ultimate theory. However, we are very far from being able to test it. In any event, to call any physics theory a "Theory of Everything" is to make the unwarranted—indeed false—assumption that everything is physical.

Q: What about the idea of multiple universes? Can we speak meaningfully of more than one "universe"?

Dr. Barr: As most people use the phrase, "multiple universes" is really a misnomer. What they usually really mean is that there is just one universe that is made up of many "domains" or regions, which are mutually inaccessible in practice—for example, because they are too far apart. The physical conditions in the various domains could be so different that they would appear superficially to have different physical laws. However, in all such scenarios it is assumed that the various domains actually all obey the same fundamental or ultimate laws. This "multiverse" idea is a perfectly sensible one. In fact, there are reasons to suspect that our universe may have such a domain structure.

Q: Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time, talks about God and the mind of God. Yet he also seems to question whether there really is the need for a Creator in order to explain the existence of the cosmos. How do you see the matter? Is God a "necessary hypothesis"? Does science have anything to say about the question?

Dr. Barr: Hawking asked the right question when he wondered why there is a universe at all, but somehow he cannot accept the answer. The old question is, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Science cannot answer that question, as Hawking (at least sometimes) realizes. I think his problem is that he doesn't see how the existence of God answers that question either. Part of the reason that many scientists are atheists is that they don't really understand what is meant by "God".

Anything whose existence is contingent (i.e. which could exist or not exist) cannot be the explanation of its own existence. It cannot, as it were, pull itself into being by its own bootstraps. As St. Augustine says in his Confessions, all created things cry out to us, "We did not make ourselves." Only God is uncreated, because God is a necessary being: He cannot not exist. It is of His very nature to exist. He said to Moses, "I AM WHO AM. ... Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: 'I AM hath sent me unto you.'"

I think scientists like Hawking would be helped if they could imagine God as an infinite Mind that understands and knows all things and Who, indeed, "thought the world up". If all of reality is "intelligible" (an idea that would appeal to scientists), then it follows really that there is some Intellect capable of understanding it fully. If no such Intellect exists or could exist, in what sense is reality fully intelligible? We need to recover the idea of God as the Logos, i.e. God as Reason itself. I note that Pope Benedict stressed this throughout his papacy, especially in his speech at Regensburg. It is an idea of God that people who devote their lives to rational inquiry can appreciate.

Q: You've written about the creation/evolution/ intelligent design controversy. What is your understanding of the main issues in that debate? Where do you come down?

Dr. Barr: There are really two quite distinct debates going on. One is between so-called "Creationism" and Evolution. The other is between Darwinism and the "Intelligent Design movement".

The so-called Creationists—a specific movement within the broader group of people who simply believe in a Creator—deny that evolution happened. They are charging off an intellectual cliff. There is overwhelming and convergent evidence from many directions for the evolution of species. So it is embarrassing that this "Creationism" versus Evolution battle is still going on. Fortunately, it has never been a Catholic fight. The Catholic Church has never had an objection to the idea of the evolution of species of plants and animals. As far as the evolution of man goes, the Church has always insisted that the human soul, being spiritual, cannot be explained by, or be the product of, merely material processes, whether biological reproduction or biological evolution. The soul of each human being is directly conferred on him or her by God, as taught symbolically in Genesis 2:7. However, the Church never condemned the idea that the human body evolved from pre-existing organisms. The natural origin of the human body by evolution is no more a threat to anything we believe as Catholics than is the natural origin of each human body by sexual reproduction.

Evolution as a biological theory has never bothered the Church, though she has always vigorously rejected radical philosophical ideas that were offshoots of it.

The debate between "Intelligent Design" and Darwinism has to be taken more seriously. The self-styled Intelligent Design (or "ID") movement says that while evolution may have happened the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations is not adequate to explain it. In particular, the ID people point to the great complexity of life, especially at the cellular level. If they are right, that would be very interesting, as it would almost force one to invoke miraculous intervention by God to explain many of the facts of biology. It would give us a slam-dunk proof for the existence of God. I, for one, would be very happy about that.

But are they right in saying that the Darwinian mechanism is inadequate to explain biological complexity? Most biologists, including most of those who are devout Christian believers, doubt it very strongly. And even if the ID people are right, it will be virtually impossible to prove that they are right because they are asserting a negative. They are saying that no Darwinian explanation of certain complex structures will ever be forthcoming. Well, there may not exist such an explanation now, but there might exist one later. So, in practice, I don't see a slam-dunk proof for miraculous intervention in evolution as coming out of this movement.

Frankly, I don't see this debate as one in which Catholics, as Catholics, have any stake. The traditional arguments for the existence of God are much deeper and more reliable than the ones the ID movement is trying to make. The Catholic Church herself has taken no stance on this controversy. A 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, Communion and Stewardship, issued with the approval of then Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), said it was an interesting dispute that should be left to scientists to decide, since it could not be decided by theological arguments.

Q: Critics of evolution point to statements made by some evolutionists to the effect that life emerged by chance occurrences or "random mutations" and natural selection. The "randomness" thought to be involved critics take as undercutting a claim that life on earth is the result of the creative act of God. What is your view of the matter?

Dr. Barr: The idea that chance plays a role in events is in no way contrary to Catholic doctrine. St. Augustine in The City of God says that no one in this life "can escape being tossed about by chance and accident". St. Thomas Aquinas devoted a whole chapter of his Summa Contra Gentiles (Book 3 chapter 74) to defending the proposition that "Divine Providence does not exclude chance and accident." The Bible itself talks about chance: "Time and chance happen to them all" (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

Things are matters of chance from a certain point of view. From God's point of view everything is known from all eternity. As Proverbs 16:33 says, "The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from the Lord."

In everyday life we talk about the probabilities of things happening, and we talk about chance events, and such talk in no way implies a denial that God is in charge of everything and foreknows everything.

Scientists use the concepts of chance, probability, and randomness in much the same way. In a reasonably well-defined mathematical sense, the motions of the air molecules in a room are "random". There is nothing necessarily atheistic in saying this.

Q: The SETI project seems predicated on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. Do we have good scientific grounds for thinking such life exists? Would the existence of extraterrestrial life pose any special problems, in your view, to religion in general or Christianity in particular?

Dr. Barr: There are too many things we don't know for anyone to be able to say that extraterrestrial life "probably exists" or "probably doesn't". For one thing, we don't know how big the universe is. Given what we now know, it is not unlikely that it is infinitely large. (I have found that many people have the false impression that the Big Bang theory implies a universe of finite size. Actually, in the standard Big Bang theory the universe can be either finite in volume or infinite depending on the value of a certain parameter, called Omega, and whether it is bigger or smaller than 1. Present theory suggests that Omega is so close to 1 that it will be very hard, and probably impossible, to determine by observation whether it is larger or smaller than 1.) Even if the universe is of finite size, it is likely to be exponentially larger than the part we can observe with telescopes. In short, we cannot set any limit at present on how many stars and planets exist. It could be 10 to the 20th power, or 10 to the millionth power, or indeed infinite. That is all-important in deciding how likely it is that advanced life exists elsewhere.

However, if there is life elsewhere, there are strong reasons to suspect that it is so far away that we will never make contact with it. So many conditions have to be satisfied for a planet even to be habitable, that it seems probable that we are the only sentient beings in our galaxy.

I don't see why extraterrestrial life raises any problems at all for Catholic theology. God might have created free and rational beings in other parts of the universe. If so, they would have immortal souls. If they fell, Christ could have redeemed them. He could have redeemed them in the same way He redeemed us. If the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity can assume unto Himself a human nature, He can assume unto himself the nature of another kind of rational creature as well.

Q: You've written about the issue of artificial intelligence. Many scientists and technicians seem to think it only a matter of time before a genuinely artificial intelligence, capable of engaging in all the kinds of intellectual activities of human beings is created. What is your view?

Dr. Barr: I think they are wrong. I do not believe that the human intellect and will are reducible to the operations of a machine. There are philosophical arguments going back to Plato and Aristotle for the immateriality of the human intellect. And I think that there are very suggestive indications from both modern physics and mathematics that seem to dovetail with these philosophical arguments. I am thinking in particular of quantum theory in its traditional formulation and Goedel's Theorem in mathematics. There are some great scientists (like Sir Rudolf Peierls and Eugene Wigner) who argued on the basis of quantum theory that the human mind could not be explained by mere physics. And there are several eminent philosophers and mathematicians who believe that Goedel's Theorem shows that the human mind cannot be explained as a mere computer. I explain these arguments in the latter part of my book.

Q: What do you think of Nancey Murphy's non-reductive physicalism? (Assuming you've followed her discussion.)

Dr. Barr: I haven't followed her writings, but I know that there are many people who would argue that "spirit" is an "emergent" property of matter. I look askance at such theories. As far as I am concerned, to say that the spiritual is "physical" is reductive. "Non-reductive physicalism" sounds to me like a contradiction in terms.

While the spiritual can be incarnate in matter, it cannot emerge from matter. The spiritual powers of man (i.e., his intellect and will) cannot be explained as growing out of the natural potentialities of matter, in my view. As I argue in my book, matter cannot understand and the merely physical cannot have freedom. I think Pope John Paul II said the same thing when he claimed that between man and the lower animals there is an "ontological discontinuity". And I think that Pope Pius XII was saying the same thing when he insisted that the human spiritual soul cannot have evolved by material processes. And I think that Genesis 2:7 is saying the same thing in speaking of God "breathing" the soul into Adam.

There are a lot of people nowadays who are made uncomfortable by the idea of a human "spiritual soul". I am not one of them. I am happy to see that we in English-speaking countries now once more say at Mass "and with your spirit" and in the Domine non sum dignus "only say the word and my soul shall be healed". There has been too much embarrassment over the idea of the soul.

Q: Many scientists are outspoken when it comes to social issues. Does science, qua science, provide objective values and an ethical code that is in principle universal? Or do scientists get their ethical principles elsewhere, like the rest of us?

Dr. Barr: Even Richard Dawkins admits that science cannot provide us with the answers to moral questions. I frankly don't see how materialism can ground any objective morality. In fact, I think materialism leads logically to a denial of freedom of the will; and if there is no free will any talk of morality is utterly meaningless.

Q: Obviously, such things are beyond the power of strict prediction, but do you think it likely that we will see another Copernican revolution in thought that affects our worldview, including our theological worldview? If so, in what area of science do you think it likely this will occur?

Dr. Barr: Before answering that, let me say something about the past revolutions in scientific thought. It can be argued that the Copernican Revolution and Newtonian Revolution gave rise to a worldview that was in some tension with traditional Jewish and Christian theology. However, in my view, several of the "revolutions" in twentieth-century science have actually moved us back toward a view of the universe, of human beings, and of our place in the universe that is more consonant with traditional Jewish and Christian ideas than with materialism and atheism. In fact, that is what my book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, is all about.

If there are future revolutions in thought that come from science, we should not assume that they will move us away from traditional theological positions. I expect them to move us closer.

In physics, the most likely revolution in thought, in my view, would concern our understanding of space and time. I don't think that would have any significant effect on theology, except on naive theologies that are already at odds with what we presently know about space and time (like "process theology"). The greatest blank areas on the map of science are in biology and in the understanding of mind. I don't think those blank areas will ever disappear altogether, since it is unlikely that man is capable of fully understanding himself.
 
 
Originally published at Ignatius Insight. Used with permission.

Rodney Stark is one of the leading authorities on the sociology of religion. For many years, the Pulitzer Prize nominee was professor of sociology and professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he became Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and codirector of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He has authored more than 150 scholarly articles and 32 books, including several widely used sociology textbooks and best-selling titles like The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.

His most recent book, America's Blessings: How Religion Benefits Everyone, Including Atheists (Templeton Press), looks at the measurable effects of religious faith and practice on American society.

Starting with a historical overview, Stark traces America’s religious roots from the founding of the country up through the present day, showing that religiosity in America has never been consistent, static, or monolithic. Interestingly, he finds that religious practice is now more prevalent than ever in America, despite any claims to the contrary.

From here, Stark devotes whole chapters to unpacking the latest research on how religion affects different facets of modern American life, including crime, family life, sexuality, mental and physical health, sophistication, charity, and overall prosperity. The cumulative effect is that when translated into comparisons with western European nations, the United States comes out on top again and again. Thanks in no small part to America’s rich religious culture, the nation has far lower crime rates, much higher levels of charitable giving, better health, stronger marriages, and less suicide, to note only a few of the benefits.

Despite the increasing outcry against religion, the remarkable conclusion is clear: all Americans, from the most religious among us to our secular neighbors, really ought to count our blessings.

Rodney recently sat down with me to discuss the new book including the rise of the "nones", the state of American atheism, and how religion saves the country over $2.6 trillion each year.
 

 
Q: In America's Blessings, you note two seemingly contradictory facts. First, about 20% of Americans claim no religious affiliation. Second, these "nones" are also deeply religious. What are some characteristics of this rising group and how do they affect the religious landscape?

Rodney Stark: I am not sure their percentage of the population has actually been increasing. As the number of “nones” found by surveys has increased, so too the completion rate of surveys has decreased. The completion rate is the percentage of those drawn in the original sample who are interviewed.

Years ago, all good surveys had completion rates in excess of 85 percent. Several years ago many surveys had completion rates of only around a third. Most recently it has fallen to close to 10 percent. It is well-known that those who still participate in surveys are quite different from those who do not participate—they are less affluent and less educated. Contrary to the popular wisdom, more affluent and better educated people are more likely to belong to a local church. Hence, the bias in completion rates easily could account for the rise in the percent who say they have “no religion.”

Indeed, these people are not really saying they have no religion, but merely that they have no church membership. That is very different and is consistent with the fact that the majority of them are quite religious in terms of belief, prayer, and the like.
 

Q: What is the atheist demographic like in America. Has it risen in past decades and is it growing today?

Rodney Stark: In 1944, the Gallup Poll asked a national sample of Americans if they believed in God. Four percent said “no.” Since then the question has often been asked and the percent of atheists has held steady at about four percent and never exceeding six percent.
 

Q: After examining hundreds of relevant studies, what's the biggest misconception you've found about the typical religious believer?

Rodney Stark: Even some leading evangelical scholars take it for granted that religious Americans are lacking in appreciation for “high culture,” for music, art, literature, and the like. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more often Americans attend religious services, the more likely they are to read newspapers, poetry, novels, and to admire writers. The same applies to liking classical music, to attending symphony concerts, operas, and stage plays, and to dislike rock ‘n roll.
 

Q: Some recent books, like Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, suggest that "religion poisons everything." But your book indicates that religious belief offers society many tangible benefits. What are some of these benefits?

Rodney Stark: Religious Americans are more law abiding, have superior mental and physical health, are far more generous vis-à-vis charities, have much better family life, are more successful, and religious couples even have more satisfactory sex lives!
 

Q: In the book's Conclusion you look at religion's effect on many areas of society—crime, schooling, health, employment, welfare—and you determine that, by a conservative estimate, religion saves America over $2.6 trillion each year. What are some of the biggest contributors to this savings?

Rodney Stark: The biggest by far has to do with the criminal justice system. If all Americans committed crimes at the same level as those who do not attend religious services, the costs of the criminal justice system would about double to, perhaps, $2 trillion annually. Second is health costs. The more often people attend religious services, the healthier they are. However, the net savings involved is reduced somewhat by the fact that religious Americans live, on average, seven years longer than those who never attend religious services.
 

 

 
A few years ago, a debate between atheists and religious believers spilled out from the halls of academia and the pews of America’s churches and into the public spotlight. As both sides exchanged spirited volleys, accusations were leveled; myths, stereotypes, and strawmen arguments were perpetuated; and bitter hostility filled the air. Today many of these misconceptions and myths linger on, along with the generally acrimonious spirit of the debate.

In America’s Blessings, distinguished researcher Rodney Stark seeks to clear the air of this hostility and debunk many of the debate’s most widely perpetuated misconceptions by drawing from an expansive pool of sociological findings. Looking at the measurable effects of religious faith and practice on American society, Stark rises above the fray and focuses exclusively on facts. His findings may surprise many, atheists and believers alike.
 

The great 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke of three stages that one passes through on the way to spiritual maturity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. During the aesthetic stage, a person is preoccupied with sensual pleasure, with the satisfaction of bodily desire. Food, drink, sex, comfort, and artistic beauty are the dominating concerns of this stage of life. The ordinary fellow drinking beer at the baseball game and the effete aristocrat sipping wine in this box at the opera are both fundamentally enjoying the aesthetic life in Kierkegaard’s sense. The pleasures of this stage are pure and intense, and this is why it is often difficult to move to the next level, the ethical.

At this second stage, one transcends the preoccupation with satisfying one’s own sensual desire and accepts the moral obligation which ties one in love to another person or institution. The young man who finally abandons his bachelor’s life and enters into marriage with all of its practical and moral responsibilities is passing from stage one to stage two, as is the soldier who lets go of superficial self-interest and dedicates himself to the service of his country.

But finally, says Kierkegaard, there is a dimension of spiritual attainment which lies beyond even the ethical. This is the religious. At this stage of life, a person falls in love with God, and this means that she falls unconditionally in love, since she has found the infinite object which alone corresponds to the infinite longing of her heart.

For the religious person, even the objects of deepest ethical commitment—family, country, business, etc.—fall into a secondary position. When Thomas More said on the scaffold, “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” he gave evidence that he had passed from the ethical to the religious stage of life.

This famous account of the stages on life’s way came to my mind as I was watching Woody Allen’s recent film “Vicky, Christina, Barcelona”. Like most of Allen’s movies, this one concentrates on the mores and behaviors of the cultural elite: wealthy business executives, artists, poets, and writers. Vicky and Christina are two young New Yorkers who have resolved to spend a couple of summer months in Barcelona. While enjoying a late meal at an elegant restaurant, they are propositioned by Juan Antonio, an infinitely charming painter, who invites the women to join him for a romantic weekend. Despite Vicky’s initial hesitation, they accept. Juan Antonio is a consummate bon vivant, and he introduces Vicky and Christina to the pleasures of the Spanish good life: the best restaurants, vistas, art galleries, music, etc. And then, of course, he seduces both of them. In order not to spoil the movie for you (and to keep a PG rating for this column), suffice it to say that they become involved in a love triangle—and eventually quadrangle. None of the lovers is capable of a stable commitment, and all make appeal continually to the shortness of life, the importance of enjoying the moment, and the restrictions of conventional morality.

What they all do—to varying degrees—is to reduce sexual relationship to the level of good food and music and art, something that satisfies at the aesthetic level. And what makes this reduction possible is precisely the disappearance of religion. All of the players in this film move in the world of the sophisticated European high culture, an arena from which God has been rather summarily ejected. Kierkegaard thought that the three stages are ordered to one another in such a way that the highest gives stability and purpose to the other two. When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

This film is a vivid presentation of precisely this declension. And the end result of this collapse is deep unhappiness. What struck me throughout Woody Allen’s film was just this: how unhappy, restless, and bored every single character is. So it goes when souls that are ordered to God are bereft of God. There is, however, a sign of hope. As in so many of Allen’s movies—“Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” come to mind—religion, especially Catholicism, haunts the scene.

At the very commencement of their weekend together, Juan Antonio showed the two young women the sculpture that, in his own words, “inspired him the most.” It was a medieval depiction of the crucified Jesus. It’s as though even this postmodern bohemian, this thoroughly secularized sophisticate, realizes in his bones that his life will not hold together unless and until he can fall in love unconditionally. The joy that none of them finds can be had only when they order their aesthetic and ethical lives to the divine love made manifest in that cross of Jesus.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Hiper Cultural)

Is atheism a religion?

 
Let us deal with the question quickly: atheism is not and could not be a 'religion'. Religions are complex, three-dimensional things, typically involving—among much else—beliefs, moral codes, authoritative texts or people, rituals, customs, etc. Atheism, meanwhile, is simply an absence of belief in the existence of a God or gods.

(I'll argue the precise ins and outs of this definition in a later post. For now, suffice it to say this is the one favored in both The Cambridge Companion to Atheism and The Oxford Handbook of Atheism. Pretty much every other mainstream, scholarly definition would make the point just as well.)

For the very same reason, theism is not and could not be a religion either. Theism is a major component of many of the world’s religions. But simple 'belief in the existence of a God or gods' alone is not enough to constitute a religion—and nor is an absence of such belief. To suppose otherwise would be to commit a category mistake.

But if theism, while not itself capable of being a religion, can be a component of religions, might the same be true of atheism? Could there be a genuinely atheistic religion? It is traditional here to appeal to one of the eastern religions, usually Theravada Buddhism or Jainism. However, while I don't know that much about either of them, I do know several scholars of these religions who dispute (sometimes with great irritation, as I have discovered) these kinds of claims. Much hangs, I understand, on whether or not the powerful, supernatural beings (i.e. devas), affirmed in both classic Theravada and classic Jainism, are counted as being actual 'gods' or not. This is an interesting question, but one that won't detain us here. Let's be honest: most discussions about whether atheism itself, or else a particular atheistic worldview/movement, is a religion or not are not really concerned with the ancient East. What they're really concerned with is the modern West. So let us instead ask the question: is there, or could there be, a modern western atheistic religion? And to answer that, we first must briefly ponder the meaning of religion.

What is a 'religion'?

 
We've already alluded to the difficulties of defining 'atheism', but they're nothing compared to the difficulties of defining 'religion'.

Some sociologists argue for functional definitions: defining religions by what they actually 'do', such as binding groups or societies together, or fulfilling certain (alleged) psychological needs. At their broadest, these kinds of approaches end up discovering religion in all kinds of unlikely places—e.g., in the ‘secular liturgies’ enacted at football stadiums, or in the contemporary ‘cult of brand-names [which is] a form of icon veneration’, as I once read in a (very sincere) German article. Without denying the worth of exploring the genuine parallels such things might well have with religious practices (and vice versa), there is certainly a danger here of our definition of 'religion' becoming so broad as to be practically useless.

At the other extreme, lies an opposite danger: the elevation of a particular, substantive feature of some religion-contenders to the status of a necessary (or even sufficient) condition for 'religion' itself, thereby excluding a number of, otherwise apparently exemplary, examples. Belief in a God or gods would be a prime example. Even if Jainism turns out not to be theistic after all, it possesses pretty much a full complement of other religion-type indicators—why arbitrarily privilege this one, over all the others? Or suppose we decided that all true religions include some kind of hierarchical ministerial structure: that would exclude a number of Protestant congregations, among others.

For this and other reasons, other scholars of religion prefer a kind of Wittgensteinian 'family-resemblance' model (see, especially, Clarke and Byrne's Religion Defined and Explained). This recognizes that there are certain 'clear-cut' religions that pretty much everyone agrees are religions (i.e., most mainstream forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, etc.). There are lots of similarities and overlaps between them, even if there is no single feature (or group of features) that all of them hold in common. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, of course, made the same point about 'games'. Chess, baseball, hopscotch, I Have Never, and Divinity: The Catholic Catechism Learning System are all considered to be games. However, it is probably impossible to produce a single, essentialist definition that is broad enough to fit them all, but narrow enough not to include lots of other things we don't regard as games.) On this model, membership of the genus 'religion' is not necessarily black and white (e.g., is Scientology a full religion, or a religion-like business; is Falun Gong a close niece or nephew of the family, or a black-sheep fifth cousin, three times removed?). While it also has its problems, my own view is that the positives of Wittgensteinian's approach far outweigh its negatives. (If anyone really cares about my reasons on this, then by all means ask below!)

With that in mind, let's get back to the question at hand: is there, or could there be, a modern western member of the 'religion' family?

The Religion of Humanity

 
Actually, like our very first question ('is atheism a religion?'), I think that this one admits of a fairly short, clear answer too: Yes.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was a French positivist philosopher, and is widely regarded—along with Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Freud et al.—as one of the founding fathers of the social sciences. For the atheist Comte: "While the Protestants and deists have always attacked religion in the name of God, we must discard God, once and for all, in the name of religion." In God’s place, Comte sought to install Humanity, ‘the Great Being’, as the object of worship for "the only real and complete religion." Nor did he intend this in any figurative or poetic sense. This was indeed to be a religion of humanity, including: scriptures and dogmas (from Comte’s own writings); liturgies, sacraments (nine of 'em!); private devotions; churches and cathedrals (Notre Dame was to become ‘the great Temple of the West’); saints and icons; missionaries and priests (Comte’s Catéchisme positive specified 100,000 worldwide); and even a Paris-based pontificate (with Comte himself as its first incumbent).

Though not as successful as 'Pope Auguste I' had hoped, la religion de l’Humanité was not without its followers. Largely-defunct chapels 'to humanity' can still be visited in France. In Brazil, where the Church still lives on, it even found its way onto the national flag (and is still there today). Regardless, I think a clear case can be made for counting the Religion of Humanity as a bona-fide member of the family Religion—not least because it consciously imitates Catholic Christianity in (almost) all respects.

St Vladimir Ilyich and Humanist Hymns

 
While Comte's bizarre experiment may be the most obvious example, it is not the only one. More controversially, it can certainly be argued that some manifestations of both Marxist-Leninism and Humanism come close to being at least distant family members of religion (the kind you only see at weddings and funerals). At various times, for instance, the Russian authorities tried explicitly to replace Orthodox customs with Soviet substitutes: 'Red Baptisms', a 'Great Winter Festival' (complete with red stars atop erstwhile Christmas trees), and—most obviously—the preservation of Lenin's corpse in the manner of an Orthodox saint, in a tomb bearing the inscription 'The Savior of the World', as an object of pilgrimage and veneration. (Some Russian scientists even looked forward to a time when Soviet science had advanced so far that he could actually be resurrected.) Humanists, meanwhile, may avail themselves of a range of liturgical celebrations (Baby Namings, Weddings, Funerals), and the ministrations of dedicated chaplains in colleges, hospitals, and the armed forces. They can even, should they so choose, literally all sing from the same (humanist) hymnbook: on my bookshelf I have a copy of Social Worship, published in 1913.

Does that also make Marxism-Leninism or Humanism modern western atheistic religions? I'm not sure—some minority strands of them perhaps. (At the very least, it would be easy to make a fairly full-blooded religion out of them, even though the vast majority of Marxist-Leninists and Humanists don't and wouldn't.) Like I say, the family-resemblance model isn't black and white—but then neither are religions or 'religion-ish' groups. There are other possible examples here, not least the self-identifying 'atheist churches' which have recently sprung up—apparently independently—in Britain and the USA.

Atheist religions?

 
Even though atheism itself is not, and cannot be, a religion, it does not follow that 'atheism' and 'religion' are necessarily mutually exclusive categories. This does not mean that all, or many, or any more than an unrepresentative handful, of modern western atheists are in fact members of modern western atheistic religions. But the above does, I hope, help us to think more clearly about both 'atheism' and 'religion', and the kinds of things they actually are (and aren't).
 
 
(Editor's Note: A much fuller (and properly referenced) version of the basic argument here can be found in Stephen's The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2012).
 
 
(Image credit: Worship Matters)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today's guest post is from popular atheist blogger Chana Messinger, who writes at The Merely Real, and it's in response to Jimmy Akin's article, Why We Should Be Cautious Using the Big Bang Argument. Jimmy has since written another piece in response.

Jimmy Akin’s piece warning Catholics not to put too much stock in any given scientific explanation of the Big Bang is very interesting. For most atheists, the first and perhaps only question about religious claims is, “How do you know?” It is a request for evidence only satisfiable within the epistemological framework of modern rationality, which in a case like this means scientific, empirical findings.

Empirical Religion?

 
Religious people have a number of philosophical responses to such a request. They may claim that they share standards of evidence with their atheist interlocutor, and that the science is simply on the religious side. This is frequently the purview of creationists, who are often very well informed about the intricacies of radioactive dating and the weaknesses of paleontology. That’s a dangerous business, though, since a rationalist epistemological framework demands that one is only as sure of a result as the evidence allows, and that one be willing to change one’s mind if the evidence doesn’t turn out as expected. As far as I have been led to believe, such a way of thinking is not particularly compatible with sincere religious faith.

In addition, this approach comes off to atheists as intellectually dishonest. There is something crass about claiming that there is a religious realm of knowledge entirely distinct from empiricism which truth can be found and yet that all empirical evidence lines up distinctly and without exception in your favor as well. It’s similar to political partisans whose interpretation of the Constitution just happens to line up extraordinarily well with their beliefs about ideal public policy. Mike Adams, in his recent piece on Mormonism, criticizes Mormonism both for its inconsistency with the Holy Bible and for its inconsistency with archeological fact (implying, of course, that his religious beliefs were perfectly consistent with both, and that both are legitimate avenues to truth). To claim both standards of truth at once is mildly suspicious.

Non-Overlapping Magisteria?

 
But only mildly, because in fact this difficulty is trivially simple to dispose of. Many, many people have thought of the solution before. If you have two standards of truth that you’d like to keep intact, never let them answer the same questions. From here we get Stephen Gould’s Nonoverlapping Magisteria and who knows how many religious folks’ conception of the same idea, and, all within the same intellectual tradition, Jimmy Akin.

If Akin successfully makes his point, and no one thinks that the Bible makes scientific claims, then there’s never any conflict, no double-truth. Science answers the what and religion answers the why, as a common saying goes.

But it can’t be that simple. It can’t be, because Christianity does answer certain empirical questions. For instance: Did Jesus really live? Did he really die and resurrect 3 days later? My understanding is, if the answer to these questions is no, then Christianity is a false religion.

A Hierarchy of Sureness

 
So what are we to make of Akin’s argument? When Leah Libresco converted from atheism to Catholicism, every atheist I knew seemed to be asking what evidence she had seen that had convinced her. What did she know that we didn’t?

But that was the wrong approach. The reason, as far as I remember, that Leah Libresco converted is that she was more sure of objective moral facts than she was of the empirical evidence against God. That’s the key. She was more sure of her morality than of her epistemology. So she backslid and changed her epistemology. This is rare, but within her system, it makes perfect sense.

Akin is not merely more sure of God and Catholicism than of science. He is infinitely more sure. As he says,
 

“Losing scientific support from the Big Bang would not disprove the existence of God. It wouldn't even disprove the Kalaam cosmological argument. It would just mean that the premise in question would have to be supported some other way.
 
If it were to turn out that the Big Bang was not the beginning of the physical universe then this argument in apologetics would have to be revised.
 
That's nothing to be ashamed of, though. Apologetics, like the physical sciences, is subject to revision based on the evidence available at the time.”

 
There is simply no evidence that will change his mind about God.

Given this hierarchy of sureness, this theology, this epistemology, Akin’s piece is exactly right. In fact, what I find most interesting about it is that it resonates in part with the Less Wrong style of looking at the world. Everything adds up to normality, say the rationalists, and everything that is true is already the case, so we must let the evidence push us towards truth and keep ourselves unattached to beliefs we may not want. And so the theists say, everything adds up to God, and God is true, and God is the case. Any scientific truth will lead to God and no scientific finding can overturn God. Thus, theists may be light as a leaf regarding scientific truth, and let the evidence take them where it may. To imbue a model, whether the Big Bang Theory or Creationism, with religious truth, is to chain God’s truth status to that of a changeable fact. This is theologically unacceptable and argumentatively ill-advised.

Perhaps we are now saved from the horns of contradiction. To be that much more sure of religion than of empirical truth makes religion a trump card; any time there’s an overlap between religious epistemology and empirical epistemology, religion wins the trick. Apparent contradictions can be dissolved by a total faith in God and God’s truth.

What would that mean?

 
If this model is accurate, then I am tempted to say that we should throw our hands up and decide that Wittgenstein was right all along. The world consists perhaps less of people who have different predictions about what the world looks like, and more of people who have different orientations to the world, who take different axiomatic truths as obvious, who orient themselves to the world in different but individually unjustifiable ways. This takes us back, in some ways, to the general tradition that gave us non-overlapping magisteria. People just evaluate truth differently and there’s no objective way to decide which is best, at least from among the most reasonable options. There’s simply no discussion about the fundamental points to be had. The apparent contradiction disappears because the standards of truth are different.

But this just doesn’t hold up. Many religious people I know wouldn’t want the “out” that the first option provides; they are willing to make empirical claims and believe in them wholeheartedly. And Akin, as I argued above, does believe that the Bible requires making the empirical claim that Jesus lived as is recounted in the Gospels, died and was literally, empirically, resurrected. The intersection is inevitable. But no scientific fact will change his mind about the bible or God; his Bayesian priors for both are 1. This gives us the same contradiction and potential for intellectual dishonesty as above. If you agree on science as an epistemology, and you hold empirical facts to be true, you no longer get to retreat to Non-Overlapping Magisteria or anything similar.

Or...

 
The other option religious people and atheists and agnostics have is to agree on standards of truth so that they can engage within the same framework. After all, questions like who the Problem of Evil is more of a problem for, while fascinating, don’t answer the fundamental question; they are no one’s (or almost no one’s) True Rejection to either atheism or Catholicism.

But it is blatantly obvious that Catholics and atheists don’t have the same standards for truth, and to pretend to for the sake of dialogue would be a farce.

So we have a problem.

 
Atheist argumentation may have its flaws, but it is generally consistent on its epistemology: reason and empiricism. Perhaps the Catholic response is well documented in the literature, and I am simply insufficiently familiar with it. But as I currently see it, the onus is on Catholics to give a more thorough account of exactly how the epistemologies of faith, reason and empiricism interlock, what predictions they make, and which beliefs they feel are fundamental, versus which they would be willing, in the final analysis, to relinquish to the cleansing fire of truth.

I think Akin provides a useful and thought provoking model of how to deal with science and religion. But it is not enough.
 
 
(Image credit: Presentation Process)

It was recently revealed that, toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein wrote a letter in which he dismissed belief in God as superstitious and characterized the stories in the Bible as childish. During a time when atheists have emerged rather aggressively in the popular culture, it was, to say the least, discouraging to hear that the most brilliant scientist of the twentieth century seemed to be antipathetic to religion. It appeared as though Einstein would have agreed with the Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harrises and Richard Dawkins of the world in holding that religious belief belongs to the childhood of the human race.

It just so happens that the revelation of this letter coincided with my reading of Walter Isaacson’s wonderful biography of Einstein, a book that presents a far more complex picture of the great scientist’s attitude toward religion than his late career musing would suggest. In 1930, Einstein composed a kind of creed entitled “What I Believe,” at the conclusion of which he wrote: “To sense that behind everything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense...I am a devoutly religious man.” In response to a young girl who had asked him whether he believed in God, he wrote: “everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a Spirit vastly superior to that of man.” And during a talk at Union Theological Seminary on the relationship between religion and science, Einstein declared: “the situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

These reflections of Einstein—and he made many more like them throughout his career—bring the German physicist close to the position of a rather influential German theologian. In his 1968 book Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, offered this simple but penetrating argument for God’s existence: the universal intelligibility of nature, which is the presupposition of all science, can only be explained through recourse to an infinite and creative mind which has thought the world into being. No scientist, Ratzinger said, could even begin to work unless and until he assumed that the aspect of nature he was investigating was knowable, intelligible, marked by form. But this fundamentally mystical assumption rests upon the conviction that whatever he comes to know through his scientific work is simply an act of re-thinking or re-cognizing what a far greater mind has already conceived.

Ratzinger’s elegant proof demonstrates that, at bottom, religion and science ought never to be enemies, since both involve an intuition of God’s existence and intelligence. In fact, many have argued that it is no accident that the modern physical sciences emerged precisely out of the universities of the Christian west, where the idea of creation through the divine word was clearly taught. Unhappily, in far too many tellings of the history of ideas, modernity is seen as emerging out of, and in stark opposition to, repressive, obscurantist, and superstitious Christianity. (How many authors, up to the present day, rehearse the struggles of Galileo to make just this point). As a result, Christianity—especially in its Catholic expression—is often presented as a kind of foil to science, when in fact there is a deep congruity between the disciplines that search for objective truth and the religion that says, “in the beginning was the Word.”

What sense, then, can we make of Einstein’s recently discovered letter? Given the many other things he said about belief, perhaps it’s best to say that he was reacting against primitive and superstitious forms of religion, just as St. Paul was when he said that we must put away childish things when we’ve come of age spiritually. And what of his dismissal of the Bible? Here I think we have to make a distinction. A person can be a genius in one field of endeavor and remain naïve, even inept, in another. Few would dispute that Einstein was the greatest theoretical physicist of the last century, but this is no guarantee that he had even an adequate appreciation for Sacred Scripture. The “infantile” stories of the Bible have been the object of sophisticated interpretation for two and half millenia. Masters such as Origen, Philo, Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman have uncovered the complexity and multivalence of the Bible’s symbolism and have delighted in showing the literary artistry that lies below its sometimes deceptively simple surface.

So I think we can say in conclusion that religious people can, to a large extent, claim Einstein as an ally, though in regard to Scripture interpretation, we can find far better guides than he.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Majzooban)

Ronald Knox once quipped that “the study of comparative religions is the best way to become comparatively religious.” The reason, as G. K. Chesterton says, is that, according to most “scholars” of comparative religion, “Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.”

But any Christian who does apologetics must think about comparative religions because the most popular of all objections against the claims of Christianity today comes from this field. The objection is not that Christianity is not true but that it is not the truth; not that it is a false religion but that it is only a religion. The world is a big place, the objector reasons; “different strokes for different folks”. How insufferably narrow-minded to claim that Christianity is the one true religion! God just has to be more open-minded than that.

This is the single most common objection to the Faith today, for “today” worships not God but equality. It fears being right where others are wrong more than it fears being wrong. It worships democracy and resents the fact that God is an absolute monarch. It has changed the meaning of the word honor from being respected because you are superior in some way to being accepted because you are not superior in any way but just like us. The one unanswerable insult, the absolutely worst name you can possibly call a person in today’s society, is “fanatic”, especially “religious fanatic”. If you confess at a fashionable cocktail party that you are plotting to overthrow the government, or that you are a PLO terrorist or a KGB spy, or that you molest porcupines or bite bats’ heads off, you will soon attract a buzzing, fascinated, sympathetic circle of listeners. But if you confess that you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, you will find yourself suddenly alone, with a distinct chill in the air.

Here are twelve of the commonest forms of this objection, the odium of elitism, with answers to each.

1. “All religions are the same, deep down.”

That is simply factually untrue. No one ever makes this claim unless he is (1) abysmally ignorant of what the different religions of the world actually teach or (2) intellectually irresponsible in understanding these teachings in the vaguest and woolliest way or (3) morally irresponsible in being indifferent to them. The objector’s implicit assumption is that the distinctive teachings of the world’s religions are unimportant, that the essential business of religion is not truth but something else: transformation of consciousness or sharing and caring or culture and comfort or something of that sort—not conversion but conversation. Christianity teaches many things no other religion teaches, and some of them directly contradict those others. If Christianity isn’t true, why be a Christian?

By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach.

• Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal authority.
• Then comes Protestantism and any “separated brethren” who keep the Christian essentials as found in Scripture.
• Third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ.
• Fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies.
• Fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism;
• Sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos;
• Seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but only ethics;
• Eighth, idolarity; and
• Ninth, Satanism.

To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat.

2. “But the essence of religion is the same at any rate: all religions agree at least in being religious.

What is this essence of religion anyway? I challenge anyone to define it broadly enough to include Confucianism, Buddhism, and modern Reform Judaism but narrowly enough to exclude Platonism, atheistic Marxism, and Nazism.

The unproved and unprovable assumption of this second objection is that the essence of religion is a kind of lowest common denominator or common factor. Perhaps the common factor is a weak and watery thing rather than an essential thing. Perhaps it does not exist at all. No one has ever produced it.

3. “But if you compare the Sermon on the Mount, Buddha’s Dhammapada, Lao-tzu’s Tao-te-ching, Confucius’ Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Proverbs of Solomon, and the Dialogues of Plato, you will find it: a real, profound, and strong agreement.”

Yes, but this is ethics, not religion. The objector is assuming that the essence of religion is ethics. It is not. Everyone has an ethic, not everyone has a religion. Tell an atheist that ethics equals religion. He will be rightly insulted, for you would be calling him either religious if he is ethical, or unethical because he is nonreligious. Ethics maybe the first step in religion but it is not the last. As C.S. Lewis says, “The road to the Promised Land runs past Mount Sinai.”

4. “Speaking of mountains reminds me of my favorite analogy. Many roads lead up the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It is provincial, narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other roads than yours.”

The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that the roads go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that religion is man’s search for God, not God’s search for man. C. S. Lewis says this sounds like “the mouse’s search for the cat”.

Christianity is not a system of man’s search for God but a story of God’s search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father’s hand thrust downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. “No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.”

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God’s God-made one.

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me.”

5. “Still, it fosters religious imperialism to insist that your way is the only way. You’re on a power trip.”

No, we believe it not because we want to, because we are imperialistic, or because we invented it, but because Christ taught it. It isn’t our way, it’s his way, that’s the only way. We’re just being faithful to him and to what he said. The objector’s assumption is that we can make religion whatever we want it to

6. “If the one-way doctrine comes from Christ, not from you, then he must have been arrogant.”

How ironic to think Jesus is arrogant! No sin excited his anger more than the arrogance and bigotry of religious leaders. No man was ever more merciful, meek, loving, and compassionate.

The objector is always assuming the thing to be proved: that Christ is just one among many religious founders, human teachers. But he claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life; if that claim is not true, he is not one among many religious sages but one among many lunatics. If the claim is true, then again he is not one among many religious sages, but the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

7. “Do you want to revive the Inquisition? Don’t you value religious tolerance? Do you object to giving other religions equal rights?”

The Inquisition failed to distinguish the heresy from the heretic and tried to eliminate both by force or fire. The objector makes the same mistake in reverse: he refuses to condemn either. The state has no business defining and condemning heresy, of course, but the believer must do it-if not through the Church, then by himself. For to believe x is to condemn non-x as false. If you don’t believe non-x is false, then you don’t really believe x is true.

8. “I’m surprised at this intolerance. I thought Christianity was the religion of love.”

It is. It is also the religion of truth. The objector is separating two divine attributes. We are not. We are “speaking the truth in love”.

9. “But all God expects of us is sincerity.”

How do you know what God expects of us? Have you listened to God’s revelation? Isn’t it dangerous to assume without question or doubt that God must do exactly what you would do if you were God? Suppose sincerity were not enough; suppose truth was needed too. Is that unthinkable? In every other area of life we need truth. Is sincerity enough for a surgeon? An explorer? Don’t we need accurate road maps of reality?

The objector’s implicit assumption here is that there is no objective truth in religion, only subjective sincerity, so that no one can ever be both sincere and wrong; that the spirit does not have objective roads like the body and the mind, which lead to distinct destinations: the body’s physical roads lead to different cities and the mind’s logical roads lead to different conclusions. True sincerity wants to know the truth.

10. “Are non-Christians all damned then?”

No. Father Feeny was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for teaching that “outside the Church, no salvation” meant outside the visible Church. God does not punish pagans unjustly. He does not punish them for not believing in a Jesus they never heard of, through no fault of their own (invincible ignorance). But God, who is just, punishes them for sinning against the God they do know through nature and conscience (see Rom 1-2). There are no innocent pagans, and there are no innocent Christians either. All have sinned against God and against conscience. All need a Savior. Christ is the Savior.

11. “But surely there’s a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us. There’s good and bad everywhere, inside the Church and outside.”

True. What follows from that fact? That we need no Savior? That there are many Saviors? That contradictory religions can all be true? That none is true? None of these implied conclusions has the remotest logical connection with the admitted premise.

There is a little good in the worst of us, but there’s also a little bad in the best of us; more, there’s sin, separation from God, in all of us; and the best of us, the saints, are the first to admit it. The universal sin Saint Paul pinpoints in Romans 1:18 is to suppress the truth. We all sin against the truth we know and refuse it when it condemns us or threatens our self-sufficiency or complacency. We all rationalize. Our duty is plain to us—to be totally honest—and none of us does his duty perfectly. We have no excuse of invincible ignorance.

12. “But isn’t God unjust to judge the whole world by Christian standards?”

God judges justly. “All who sinned without [knowing] the [Mosaic] law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law” (Rom 2:12). Even pagans show “that what the law requires is written on their hearts” (Rom 2:15). If we honestly consult our hearts, we will find two truths: that we know what we ought to do and be, and that we fail to do and be that.

Fundamentalists, faithful to the clear one-way teaching of Christ, often conclude from this that pagans, Buddhists, et cetera, cannot be saved. Liberals, who emphasize God’s mercy, cannot bring themselves to believe that the mass of men are doomed to hell, and they ignore, deny, nuance, or water down Christ’s own claims to uniqueness. The Church has found a third way, implied in the New Testament texts. On the one hand, no one can be saved except through Christ. On the other hand, Christ is not only the incarnate Jewish man but also the eternal, preexistent word of God, “which enlightens every man who comes into the world” (Jn 1:9). So Socrates was able to know Christ as word of God, as eternal Truth; and if the fundamental option of his deepest heart was to reach out to him as Truth, in faith and hope and love, however imperfectly known this Christ was to Socrates, Socrates could have been saved by Christ too. We are not saved by knowledge but by faith. Scripture nowhere says how explicit the intellectual content of faith has to be. But it does clearly say who the one Savior is.

The Second Vatican Council took a position on comparative religions that distinguished Catholicism from both Modernist relativism and Fundamentalist exclusivism. It taught that on the one hand there is much deep wisdom and value in other religions and that the Christian should respect them and learn from them. But, on the other hand, the claims of Christ and his Church can never be lessened, compromised, or relativized. We may add to our religious education by studying other religions but never subtract from it.
 
 
Excerpted from Fundamentals of the Faith. Copyright 1988 by Ignatius Press, all rights reserved, used with permission.
(Image credit: Nirvana)

 
Like every religion, Catholicism has three aspects, corresponding to the three parts of the soul.

First, every religion has some beliefs, whether expressed in creeds or not, something for the intellect to know. Second, every religion has some duty or deed, some practice of program, some moral or ethical code, something for the will to choose. Finally, every religion has some liturgy, some worship, some "church", something for the body and the concrete imagination and the aesthetic sense to work at.

In Fundamentals of the Faith, Dr. Peter Kreeft uses these three divisions as the basic outline. He considers all the fundamental elements of Catholicism, explaining, defending, and showing their relevance to our life and the world's yearnings.