I do not know at this point what I will end up writing in this piece; so, to begin, I do not mean to disparage anyone’s legacy or memory. I have a place that I want to go and Freeman Dyson’s Richard Feynman, as presented in the essay “Is God in the Lab?”, is simply the vehicle.
Dyson begins the essay by contrasting a lecture series given by Feynman to a series delivered by physicist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne. Dyson, a student of Feynman, takes Feynman’s side that religious is mostly good for encouraging right conduct while presenting Polkinghorne as being invested in the primacy of theology. In a large degree, I do agree with Feynman that right conduct is a major good to come along with religion. However, as I doubt Polkinghorne would have denied this, in total I agree more with him: theology is important, likely as important as empirical science. He and I may differ on details but the basic belief of theology’s value is shared.
One thing that I think Dyson gets quite wrong is his assertion that only Christianity is very interested in theology. To state this about the other Abrahamic religions is farcical, though I grant that Islamic and Jewish treatises on the nature of God may not have been available to him at the time he wrote (that said, the Talmud are not exactly forgotten so the excuse is half-valid at best). He admits his own limitations on Buddhism and Hinduism and so leaves the anecdotal “Asian friends” to dismiss the notion of theology in those religions.
This actually provides a useful pivot point. Many people take seriously the idea that Asia in particular, and non-European-descended societies in general, just do not view what westerners call “religion” in the same way that the westerners do. For someone with Feynman’s view, this is a nonsense claim because for him there is no special category of “religious things” to begin with. Polkinghorne would have a more difficult reconciliation, I imagine, but on this point I side somewhat with Feynman: obviously they have analogous customs to our idea of religion. The modern view of religion can lead us to believe that what is important about theology is what it has to say about divine beings. This is not the deepest truth. Fundamentally, the purpose of theology is to find the ultimate ground of human morality.
All understanding of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shinto, and other non-European creeds as non-religious is based solely on them not arising from the Abrahamic stock. It is a feeling that there is some essential difference between western and eastern forms of divinity. This is nonsense. Western cultures have historically (and even presently) been far more eclectic than most westerners (both the non-religious and the religious mainstream) choose to remember. Eastern ideas are not so unintelligible as many, again, choose to believe. On the question of theology this point is vital. If you discard the unspoken othering being made by assuming different divine essences, it becomes impossible not to understand ideas such as karma, the cycle of samsara, and the ultimate escape as theology. Though the European popular imagination says that the subject of many non-European ideas are meant to be understood only as advice for living, these ideas are all explications of a particular view of the natural and supernatural. This is theology.
If theology’s purpose is to find a ground for morality, what is the use of theology as separate from philosophy? Why are concepts such as the nature of the divine and the nature of the soul so important to discuss? I’ll try to tackle these two objections as one. Many will recognize the term “theodicy” and understand it as something like “squaring the idea that God is good with the reality of ‘evil’ acts and outcomes.” Dyson’s Feynman probably would have answered this through a disbelief in God, taking the necessity that God be good out of the equation. It does leave us with a thornier question, though: “Why is ‘evil’ evil?” Why shouldn’t a person commit murder, for example? The fact is that, at present, there is no final and universal answer to this question. There are various theories as to the true reason murder and similarly-discouraged acts “feel wrong” but, as far as a tangible answer, the main reason not to do these acts is to avoid punishment by an authority. That’s fine for what it is but it does allow philosophers to concoct a variety of “technically ethical” murderous thought-worlds. This type of thing is generally noxious to people who prefer a stable society.
The systems of sin, karma, and Roman piety (to take three examples) serve the same social purposes: first, contextualizing activities as desirable or undesirable; and second, requiring certain actions to be done by its devotees. As systems, each is fairly intuitive, such that many Americans believe in sin as well as in karma and patriotism. Each does have an essential flaw, and it’s the same flaw for all: death. For all mundane intents and purposes, a person does not have a human existence after they have died. Aside from attributed miracles, there is no evidence of living after true death (which can be equated to “brain death” or “the soul leaving the body” or any other working definition). Believers in said miracles are unable to prove the divine nature of an event beyond their own descriptions; the dead don’t rise, the lame cannot spontaneously walk, and so on. Because of that, the provability of such claims has never been necessary in any state or society. No one has to actually perform a miracle in order to be seen as divinely chosen; the king of England never really had to draw the sword from the stone. At best, rituals and duties may involve natural signs (such as smoke or the flight of birds) but these can always be explained by entirely natural means.
So we can be assured that, at the very least, there is the possibility of a final death which would mean the end of all religious responsibilities. This can obviously lead to situations where an authority’s condemnation has no effect since the condemned person has no fear of death (in the broad sense). The belief in the supernatural is what bridges this gap. The typical atheist reaction to this possible lack of empathy is ensuring that people value their societies and communities enough that they won’t want to break them. This would probably be considered naïve by those who truly believe the letter of their faith. Because apolitical atheism (a theoretical construct) has never controlled a society as such, it has not dealt with outliers from a place of authority. Established religions seem to understand that some people are happy to abuse others even in tightly-knit and strongly-founded communities. The immortal soul is a mechanism to circumvent this selfishness by forcing its devotees to be part of this system. Now, each person has the responsibility not to tarnish their soul purely for their own sake. This is hoped to reach even those who resist the social reasons for compliance.
Since I brought it up, I want to speak shortly on how Roman piety matches up with this framework. Roman mythology typically pictured the “afterlife” as a kind of endless gloom in which people were but husks of their living souls. This is very close to the concept of a perishable soul, which puts it at odds with the compliance device of immortality. For Romans, it was their state which would be truly eternal, so they sought their immortality through being part of the state. They sought fame that would put them in the history books as among those who contributed to Rome, names which would not be (and largely are not) forgotten. Even as Roman philosophers played with the idea of a single great God, they did not abandon the notion of Eternal Rome until the rise of Roman Christianity and its more straightforward personal immortality. This differs from, for example, leaders of atheist communist countries because communists rarely conceived of their movement in a theistic manner; even if they believed that they followed destiny, they sought a working and not a theoretical order.
The nature of the divine is important because it informs what must be done by devotees in this world. This is the frame in which prescriptions can be made. Take, for example, the tragedy of the Crusades. While I don’t exactly agree that this can be understood as the beginning of Christian holy war, the Council of Clermont did begin a period of violent Christian consolidation of Europe. For this to have been possible — that is, for Christians who swore by their faith not to murder to then wage war in God’s name — it was necessary that God be vindictive at times, capable of seeing the march of armies as a worshipful action. Though these qualities are strongly associated with the Christian God in our current age, it was clearly necessary at that time to clarify the matter theologically in order to get widespread (and, probably more importantly, compulsory) support.
The nature of the theological conflict — the manner in which each theology confronts death — provides context for the manner in which devotees are supposed to live their lives. This marks the religion’s priorities, the basics upon which morality and more complex theology are built. In another example that I don’t quite agree with, many people see the western Christian belief in John’s Apocalypse as directly informing their complacency with (and even encouragement of) destructive environmental policies. I think this is wrong because it tries to attribute the goals of Christian-supremacist capitalists to the mass of followers who are mostly uninvolved and at best ambivalent to the capitalists’ true goals. This is a discussion for another time. A cleaner example comparison is the difference between early Christianity and Modern American Christianity. Early Christians found virtues in self-sacrifice, caring for the poor, humility, and living for the next world. The theology of MAC is best described by the prosperity gospel and the fact that, about a week prior to this writing, a US congressperson suggested that Jesus should have shot the Romans with a machine gun instead of dying for the sins of humanity. In other words, Christian theology at present is so far removed from that of early Christianity that people take issue with the bedrock of Christian scripture.
It’s tempting to say that this congressperson (Larry Bobby) is simply wrong about what Christianity is. I think this is incorrect. The key part of American Christianity with many do not accept is American exceptionalism. Most don’t include this because they see it as a political stance, not remembering that politics and religion are often complimentary. If one looks at the styles of address for European royalty in the Middle Ages, the fact that royals of the English1, French2, and Spanish3 realms (along with others) had titles expressing superlative faith suggests that each had some idea of themselves as the most strongly Christian country of them all. This feeling is certainly shared by Americans who have the compounding situation of being the predominant world power. American Christians view this state of affairs not only as a product but also as a proof of their faith. Without this belief, which I say is a theological belief, most American actions in service of shoring up their empire become completely unjustifiable.
Philosophy is primarily about determining why certain mental and emotional results happen. Even prescriptive philosophy has to include an observed problem that it wants to solve. Theology is about deriving first principles. Often this is also done by starting from an issue. Unlike philosophy, theology’s conclusions are meant to be understood in a quasi-objective sense; they are to be generalizable. Philosophy answers the question of why murder is wrong by an appeal to internal experience whereas theology tries to derive external declarations. Where this becomes critical is in the relation of these concepts: namely, the fact that philosophy depends on theology but theology does not depend on philosophy. Most see theology as derived from philosophy but, conceptually at least, it’s useful to understand them as the other way around. The claims of theology supersede those of philosophy by definition. This is of course the point of theology (in a philosophical sense). It is meant to establish the base of what people should believe the world is like. By analogy, philosophy without theology is like studying light physics in a universe with no light at all.
This may be difficult for some to accept, especially those who reject the concept of the divine. This is the point of theology, though: determine what it is possible to think. I’m finding myself in a knot as I try to bring this out. Think of it like this. Imagine a town where everyone votes to legalize murder. As I said earlier, there isn’t an ironclad answer to why someone shouldn’t commit murder, so it’s impossible for a regular, mortal human to stop this town. However, if most of the town believes in a God and it can be persuasively argued that the God doesn’t want murder, promotion of murder can only be justified by a similarly compelling theological argument. The purpose of theology is to take a concept out of an arena where human analysis alone decides the outcome. It forces the debate to be continued in theological terms, meaning the debate can be greatly restricted to those with explicit theological education. An individual atheist may reject theology wholesale; but, if they are the only one among a group of believers, their anti-theology stance will have little weight.
So what can theology be used for? An example of a largely positive use for theology is liberation theology. Via this intellectual approach, it became more possible for people to contextualize their resistance in the moral framework they’ve already accepted. This can also be witnessed in the history of Vodou in Haiti, where rebels against their own slavery invoked non-Christian divinity to support and bless their struggle. Christian liberation theology has the benefit of coming from a tradition (Christianity) which was shared by the distressed and by the rulers (we’ll leave aside how these groups came to share a faith to be for the moment, but it was not voluntary). It begins to become necessary therefore for there to be theological responses to liberation theology, something which has proved difficult to do with credibility; I note that one of the only official censures from the Vatican was due to the liberation theology’s use of “Marxist concepts”, an empty (but not meaningless) swing for the fences.
The idea that theology has no value or that it, as a discipline, is limited to prose treatises comes in large part from our current bias toward empiricism. People believe that the divine is not real and, therefore, all ideas that assume the divine is real must be discarded. However, if we accept that the primary purpose of deities (in a pedagogical sense) is to explain or embody social functions, it follows that the study and manipulation of deity-concepts would also have important bearings on those who adhere to them. Many atheists consider themselves to be more advanced in thinking than religionists but more thought should be given to the idea that what pushes some atheists back towards religion is precisely this lack of interest in answering certain fundamental moral questions.
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