1
Naturalism and Religious Experience
Christopher C. Kirby
NATURALISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
BREAKING INTO DIALECTIC
CHRISTOPHER C. KIRBY
Eastern Washington University (Cheney, WA)
It could be said that philosophy itself is a most peculiar response to the universally human
“life problem” – that is, the problem of knowing ourselves (in any meaningful sense) and
knowing our place in the world around us. With regard to this problem, the philosophical
inclination is often to turn inward – or, as my philosophical cousins in Limerick might poetically
state it, “There once was a boy who said though, it seems that I know that I know? What I’d most
like to see, is the ‘I’ that knows me. When I know, that I know, that I know.” 1 Simply put,
human beings are uniquely reflexive, and philosophers tend to be even more so. I believe this
reflexivity is where philosophy and religion most often intersect.
Socrates and Plato stand out among the greatest of philosophers in part because their
response to this human paradox, known as dialectic, was not only one of the first, but also one of
the most ingenious. At once method and ontology, understanding the interplay and unity of
opposites that is dialectic has been the cornerstone of some of the most insightful additions to
Western civilization. I believe this legacy is, at once, the inspiration and the stumbling block for
countless philosophers. In what follows, I will not pretend to fare any better, but I hope to at least
diagnose one facet of the difficulty.
To illustrate what I wish to pursue, consider a well known example – the allegory of the cave
in Plato’s Republic. Ostensibly, education is one of the many themes derived from this story. A
prisoner is released of his bonds and makes his way up towards the mouth of the cave. He
emerges from the cave of ignorance, and through a slow, arduous process of dialectical
edification, he reaches an understanding of the good itself. He is enlightened. Or, so the story
goes. But, how was he freed? Plato does not tell us. This omission should be a matter of no small
concern for us. If dialectic (or critical inquiry if you prefer the more contemporary parlance) is
the path one must traverse to become a philosopher, then how does one break the bonds of
ignorance and convention and start on that journey? How does one break into dialectic?
I choose the preposition “into” deliberately. The moment in question certainly is a break
from ignorance and convention, but I do not believe it involves stepping out of the world around
us. Rather, I will argue it involves recognition of immanence, a realization that we are “in” as
well as “of” that world. But how is this done?
I suppose one could answer that question simply by stating “it just happens,” whether by
some accident or miracle. But, this answer seems unsatisfactory, especially for those of us who
1
Cf. Watts, Alan. “Introduction to Oriental Philosophy.”
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have devoted our life to teaching the art. The notion that we simply drone on until the love of
wisdom happens to strike our students, or until the proper divine dispensation occurs, is a
thought at which most of us would likely balk. However, this is precisely how many
philosophers, even the some ardent non-theists, tend to treat the break into dialectic, and perhaps
why so many have reverted to the language of religious experience in so doing.
As an example of how philosophers tend to address the break, take phenomenology, one of
the few schools of thought to consider the moment in question directly. Once one is able to
decipher the specialized terminology which Husserl and his followers employed, it is clear that
the core of their philosophy is the type of shift, from the conventional and mundane to the
reflective and transcendent, which Plato’s allegory suggests. As one contemporary
phenomeologist, Robert Sokolowski has put it,
“In moving into the phenomenological [or transcendental] attitude we get ‘nudged
upstairs’ in a way that is unique. To move into the phenomenological attitude is
not to become a specialist in one form of knowledge or another, but to become a
philosopher.”2
This shift, as depicted by phenomenologists, requires something like a subjective ego to take an
active role in reaching a philosophical attitude, yet it offers no means or motivation to do so.
From within a natural attitude how could one comprehend anything like a subjective ego? On
such a view, the transcendental reduction is like a one-way pane of glass. Only from the other,
transcendent side could we see the difference between what these thinkers call the natural and
the transcendent, the paradox of the subjective ego, and the manifold of appearings in
phenomena. Yet, it seems impossible to even consider such notions while still within the natural
attitude. Therefore, the path phenomenology outlines seems to run up against the same problem
we faced in our example of the cave: the first step toward becoming a philosopher remains
undisclosed. For, only those who have traversed this ground before can understand the concepts
behind the other side. The existentialism of Sartre and Camus highlights this weakness, and I
think the story of Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger shows how such a shift is more like a
violent, Damascus-road-conversion experience than it is, as Sokolowski put it, a gentle “nudge.”
What I find problematic in the phenomenological or existential answer is that it separates the
transcendental from the natural, the subject from the object, and the experienced from the
experiencer. What I find hopeful, especially in existentialism, is the idea that one had influence
over their person, that humans are not in a state of Being, but of Becoming. Of course, as a
systematic account of the subjective, phenomenology is useful in extending Kant’s resolution to
the debate between rationalism and empiricism, but it offers little towards understanding how
2
Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology. [Cambridge Press. New York, NY. 2000] pg. 47
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Christopher C. Kirby
one starts the process of philosophical inquiry. For that question, I’d like to turn instead to a
group of thinkers from the classical period of American philosophy.
“Classical American philosophy,” refers to a tapestry of ideas which were developed and
advanced during the 19th and early 20th centuries. While the two most notable philosophical
positions to grow out of this era – pragmatism and naturalism – have colored much of
contemporary American philosophy, each term has, for better or worse, lost much of its original
potency. This is particularly true of the latter, which in contemporary contexts is often equated
with reductive physicalism, i.e. the view that only physical things exist and that nature is such
that it can be carved at its joints by scientific inquiry Such a view obviously relegates philosophy
to subservience with regard to the natural sciences.3 However, the naturalism that Classical
American thinkers like John Dewey, George Santayana, et al. had in mind, though arguably a
precursor to this later notion, was much more robust than the mere scientism that such a
conception might illicit. The difference between the scientistism advanced in physicalist circles
and the naturalism I wish to present can be seen as turning on four central theses. These are:
1. The phenomena of the world have definable traits.
2. The traits of these phenomena can be understood.
3. Understanding is always conditioned and perspectival.
4. Human interaction with the rest of the world, cognitive or otherwise, is active and
creative.4
For those thinkers who identified themselves as naturalists during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, naturalism was a metaphysical position underwritten by a suspicion of
dualistic ontology, reacting to post-enlightenment philosophy and aiming at melioration of the
problems arising from the debate between rationalism and empiricism. On a naturalist’s view,
rationalism failed because, without a theory of perception, it could not offer an account of the a
priori without falling prey to a reductio. On the other hand, empiricism failed because it could
not account for how a stream of sensory datum offers a robust understanding of the world. The
naturalists offered a way out of this dilemma by positing a more dynamic view of reality that
emphasized the temporal, in addition to the merely spatial, aspects of the universe. On such a
view, nature is understood in terms of events and transactions between organisms and
environments occurring in chorus rather than a series of analog causes and effects between static
objects. In this respect, the naturalists were informed by ancient Greek philosophy. As Werner
Jaeger has noted, the ancient Greeks, in general, always had “an innate sense of the natural,”
wherein,
The concept of ‘nature,’ […] was without doubt produced by their peculiar mentality.
Long before they conceived it, they had looked at the world with the steady gaze that
E.g. W.V.O. Quine’s “naturalized epistemology”
Cf. Ryder, John. “Reconciling Pragmatism and Naturalism.” In Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism. Ed.
by John R. Shook (Prometheus, 2003) pg. 64
3
4
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did not see any part of it as separate and cut off from the rest, but always as an element
in a living whole, from which it derived its position and meaning.5
The American naturalists also held an “organic point of view,” and this led them to a more
embodied and biological analysis of the intersection between experience and ontology than their
enlightenment predecessors. Yet, when it came to religious experience, many of the naturalists
seemed to waiver. Though they did agree on the superiority of science over religion in offering
an accurate depiction of the universe, many were reticent to reject religion outright – most often
retreating to the position that religious experience is somehow essential to the human condition.
This was the strategy of both John Dewey and George Santayana – perhaps two of the most
notable naturalists of this era – though each acquiesced in different ways.
The glaring question this raises is: why did the naturalists feel compelled to slip back into the
language of religious experience? And, the only obvious answer must have something to do with
tolerance and democratic equity among faiths. As Dewey wrote in Religion and Our Schools,”
If one inquires why the American tradition is so strong against any connection of
state and church, why it dreads even the rudiments of religious teaching in statemaintained schools, the immediate and superficial answer is not far to seek. The
cause was not, mainly, religious indifference, much less hostility to Christianity,
although the eighteenth century deism played an important role. The cause lay
largely in the diversity and vitality of the various denominations, each fairly sure
that, with a fair field and no favour, it could make its own way; and each animated
by a jealous fear that, if any connection of state and church were permitted, some
rival denomination would get an unfair advantage.6
Despite this admirable goal, I believe the concessions of the early American naturalists made
toward religious experience stand in need of re-evaluation. Can we discover an account of the
break into dialectic which can promote tolerance and at the same time avoid appeals to religious
experience?
In order to situate both Dewey’s and Santayana’s position properly, it may be useful here to
briefly sketch the position of William James, whose “radical empiricism” held sway over each in
significant ways. On such an account, as Dewey would put it, “if one wishes to describe anything
truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being.”7 Compare this with a passage from
James’s The Meaning of Truth (1909):
Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate… that the only things
debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms of
experience…. The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of
5
Jaeger, (Vol. I) pg. xx
John Dewey, "Religion and Our Schools, The Hibbert Journal, VI (July, 1908), 800
7
MW 3:158
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Christopher C. Kirby
experience hold together from next to next by relations that are
themselves parts of experience.8
In his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James wrote, “One may say truly, I think,
that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness.”9
According to James, mystical experiences are characterized as ineffable, transient, and passive.
Nevertheless, as he maintained, these experiences always seem to have a noetic quality, as well.
And, because James was a philosopher preoccupied with working out the meaning of truth (as
his employment of Peirce’s method, among other things, reveals), he was led to argue that
mystical experience could provide access to a specialized kind of truth. On his view, these truths,
though individual and ultimately unpersuasive to others, are the most profound and concrete.
This was a belief which he had defended elsewhere in relation to less phantasmal situations. As
he wrote in 1899 in “What Makes a Life Significant,”
Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of
which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the
absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's
existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect,
being victims of a pathological anæsthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely
the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating
little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic
interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes
Jill concretely, and we do not…. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of
taking it— so importantly—is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in
him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its
clouds about either of them again! 10
Of course, this view of “inner-revealed truths” had already led James to posit what he called “the
will to believe.” According to this idea, one is justified in believing in one part of a genuine
option (i.e. one that is live, forced and momentous) whenever said belief can bear fruit in our
life. Since the option between theism and atheism is a genuine one – viz. it is ‘live’ insofar as
both beliefs are viable comportments in contemporary life, ‘forced’ because one cannot be both
theistic and atheistic, and is ‘momentous’ in that such a choice will affect the whole of one’s life
– James concludes that we ought to will to believe in religious tenets because doing so will pay
dividends in our everyday lives. The argument he gives for this is a marriage between Pascal’s
wager and a version of the pragmatic method that prizes the “cash value” of beliefs. One must,
The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 17 vol., 1975. –
The Meaning of Truth, pp. 6-7 [emphasis added]
9
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. (New York: Dover, 2002) pg. 379
10
James, William. “What Makes a Life Significant.” The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive
Edition. Ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) pg. 645-646 [emphasis
added]
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he claimed, make an inquiry into both sides of a genuine option and choose that which will make
one’s life more significant.
Dewey made reference to religious experience in a slightly different way. Instead of looking
toward what made religious experiences unique, he sought the features they had in common with
all experiences. He was more interested in the “religious,” in the adjectival rather than in religion
proper, as an institution. Dewey argued in his manuscript A Common Faith (1934) that any
experience had the capacity to become a religious one, and that what made it “religious” in tone
depended entirely upon the effect it had on one’s life. But, even life altering experiences could
only be said to be religious from the vantage point of a re-ordered life, i.e. after they had
occurred. In his Art as Experience, published that same year, Dewey had called these
experiences “consummatory” and argued that the tone they adopt is filled in by subsequent
experiences, which hang on how the organism’s habits were affected by the consummation. As
he explained in A Common Faith, there are three ways that an organism can alter behavior
toward an experience, viz. accommodation, adaptation, and adjustment. Accommodation occurs
when an organism submits to the conditioning environment, adaptation when it changes the
conditions to meet its needs, and adjustment when, “There is a composing and harmonizing of
the various elements of our being such that, in spite of changes in the special conditions that
surround us, these conditions are also arranged, settled, in relation to us.”11 While the latter two
involve inquiry, according to Dewey, only through adjustment can potential religious
experiences arise. But, as he would go on to say, a religious experience need not be tied to any
god-conception at all. He sought to redefine the term “God” to denote “a unifying of the ideal
and the actual” in human development, which he argued should not be imbued with any of the
traditional, supernatural qualities.
Santayana’s view is perhaps the oddest among the early American naturalists. A selfproclaimed atheist who continued to attend Catholic mass throughout his life, Santayana claimed
religion to be “certainly significant…but not literally true.”12 As early as 1905, he advanced
religion as an “embodiment of reason,” i.e. he saw both reason and religion as attempts to order
the world, to “emancipat[e] man from his personal limitations.”13 Santayana argued that religion,
as a conveyer of tradition, was a vital institution in any society. Thus, he believed that the
aesthetic, poetic elements of the religious experience were essential for a fully human life,
although religion alone (without scientific modes of understanding) largely fails to attain the
“Life of Reason.” In other words, Santayana believed that religion was a necessary prerequisite
for reason, one which developed the capacity for working with symbols. In this way, Santayana
11
LW 9:12-13
cf. Santayana, George. The Life of Reason. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998) pg. 179
13
Ibid.
12
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would later draw religion and reason even closer together by making what he called “animal
faith” the precondition for knowledge.
I submit that those of us who face the religious intolerance of the twenty-first century should
use caution in adopting these accounts. The Jamesian view seems too subjective to achieve the
desired end of tolerance among religions. For, if we see religious experience as providing deep,
profound truths to which no others can have access, then two parties who claim different
experiences remain at an impasse. On the other hand, neither Dewey’s nor Santayana’s position,
which make cases for religion on aesthetic grounds rather than metaphysical or moral ones,
appears up to the task of fostering political tolerance when it comes to religious belief. Redefining terms, as Dewey seemed to suggest, is a strategy that might ask too much of our
educational institutions. Such an attempt to “change the language game,” as Richard Rorty was
fond of putting it, could be tantamount to fighting a culture war (as we have seen in recent U.S.
history) and in many places in the world religious belief is too deeply entrenched to be rooted out
by a few new metaphors. Likewise, asking the average man or woman to not take their religious
beliefs so seriously and rather derive poetic and aesthetic fulfillment from them, as Santayana
did, is unrealistic and impractical. Having such a sense of contingency about ones beliefs leads to
a sense of complacency and disregard toward the beliefs of others.
It is not surprising that even self-proclaimed naturalists should fall back on the language of
mysticism. Philosophers have long fancied themselves gurus. Looking back to Plato once again,
we find a similar sentiment: “For as they say in the mysteries, ‘the thyrsus-bearers are many, but
the mystics few’; and these mystics are, I believe, those who have been true philosophers.”
[Phaedo, 69c] But, it seems even Plato would stop short of viewing mystical experience as the
means through which his cave dweller is freed, since the remainder of the process involves the
prisoner discovering the truth of the world around him. Looking closer at this passage, the
philosophers are being described not as those who have some sort of numinous experience, but
as those who have lived well, precisely because they have come to see the identity of virtue with
knowledge. While those who bear the fertility staff of Dionysus may be many, those who do so
with practical wisdom, with phronesis, are few indeed. As such, the move toward philosophy
proceeds through the realm of external things and of action; it does not traverse the internal
avenues of pure subjectivity or mystical experience. After all,
The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within,
whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from his inner,
positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only
being, and so on. But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that
we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.14
14
Schopenhauer,Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. XLVIII
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This inability to convince would mean that education is not possible under the models of the
phenomenologist or the mystic, precisely because they focus on just one side of the dialectical
process. In the same way that one cannot simply say, “Today I will become a philosopher,” it
does not seem possible to take it upon ourselves to begin the task of reflection. It is an act that is
only available to us after we have disclosed ourselves through a context of harmony with the
world around us.15
With this insight there might be a way out of the dilemma regarding breaking into dialectic
for the naturalist, particularly if we focus on another feature of Dewey’s philosophy – viz. the
concept of growth. In Dewey’s philosophy human growth is seen as just an extension of the
growth of nature itself; perception and cognition are only different in degree. Reason is not
something over and above nature, but is immersed within it. Reason is not native or essential, it
is achieved, and it is not always operative in human beings. This somewhat deflationary view of
reason was advanced by many of the naturalists.16 However, Dewey came to it from a different
direction. Instead of positing reason as the tenant of a reified mind, as naturalists like Santayana
seemed to do, Dewey argued that the intellect was a function that emerged from the transaction
of experiencing natural events (or “organisms”) from within the context of other natural events
surrounding them (or “environments”) toward working out unstable situations – it was, in a
word, instrumental.
Dewey took Darwinian evolution philosophically, and as such believed that there can be
neither absolute natural conditions nor absolute human responses to these conditions (or
problematic situations) in which transactions take place. In an evolutionary cosmology, there are
only temporary stabilities, not absolute ones, so Dewey suggested that social institutions, and
ipso facto culture, were the stable outcroppings of the co-adjustment between the habits of
organisms and the habits of environments. On this view, culture is simply formalized experience
and is contiguous with nature.
With this in mind, Dewey believed that if the culture and education of a populace could be
reconstructed in such a way that its people could, through critical thinking, become the master
rather than servant of their habits, then it would be possible to have true democracy, or what he
called “democracy as a way of life,” a way of living that would be at once progressive and
cooperative, a way of life where our faith in some prime mover, be it intelligent or not, might be
replaced with a faith in each other.
As Emerson put it, “every mental act, – this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the
difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both.”
Cf. “Plato; or, the Philosopher” in Representative Men (1850).
16
e.g. Santayana wrote in Persons and Places (MIT, 1986), “So I believe, compulsorily and satirically, in
the existence of this absurd world; but as to the existence of a better world, or of hidden reason in this one,
I am incredulous, or rather, I am critically sceptical; because it is not difficult to see the familiar motives
that lead men to invent such myths.”
15
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I submit that if democracy is to become a “way of life,” as Dewey hoped, we must move
beyond a mere reliance on external institutions toward adapting our habits and attitudes in chorus
with our rapidly changing natural, political, and social environments. Notice how this idea could
foster the tolerance which Dewey sought in his writings on religion, but its key is that we take
encounters with others as an opportunity to grow. In Dewey’s words,
…to treat those who disagree - even profoundly - with us, as those from whom we
may learn, and in so far, as friends… To cooperate by giving differences a chance
to show themselves because of the belief that the expression of difference is not
only a right of the other persons but is a means of enriching one's own lifeexperience, is inherent in the democratic personal way of life… It is to realize that
democracy is a reality only as it is indeed a commonplace of living.17
This evolution of the human being into the truly democratic being is, I believe, what ties
Dewey’s naturalistic ontology to his unshakable hope for our future. In short, what all of those
who have become philosophers, those who have broken into dialectic, seem to share is some
form of the realization that their own person is connected to the world they inhabit and have
begun a process of reconstituting that person based on the insight. It is to understand, in some
degree, that I am who I am by virtue of the world I inhabit, my habitat, where I habit-at, and the
effort to enrich that understanding starts with enriching my surroundings.
Postscript
As a demonstration of my point, I’d like to look briefly at the work of one of the world’s
most notorious atheists, Richard Dawkins. Though his aim in 2006’s The God Delusion is an
atheist apology of sorts, I believe a philosophical point about breaking into dialectic and
promoting religious tolerance can be found in his final chapter, which is entitled, “A Much
Needed Gap?” There, Dawkins evaluates the common claim made by both religious and nonreligious alike, that religion is vital to human life because it fills a void which no other institution
can fill. This argument, as he states, takes on one or more of the following four modes.
1)
2)
3)
4)
Explanation – Religion has the capacity to explain, accurately, the objective universe.
Exhortation – Religion is uniquely equipped to exhort its adherents to act morally.
Consolation – Religion offers a consolation not found in other institutions.
Inspiration – Religion provides inspiration above and beyond any secular endeavor.
The first two of these claims seem easy to overcome in light of the success of science in
modeling the universe and in the slew of evidence of secular peoples acting ethically. However,
the latter two are less obviously refuted, even by philosophers. This is how Dawkins succeeds,
though unwittingly, where Dewey and Santayana faltered. On his view, the claim that life would
17
“Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us” [LW vol. 14 pg. 228]
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Christopher C. Kirby
be empty or meaningless or intolerable without the idea of god, is an infantile statement. The
logic, as he puts it, fails at the first fence – after all, life may very well be intolerable. However,
Dawkins doesn’t believe it is.
Just as Epicurus offered a four-part cure18 for alleviating the anxiety that had become so
predominant among the religious Greeks of his time, Dawkins suggests that if we give science
the chance, it can offer us great consolation. He quotes Bertrand Russell in this regard. As
Russell put it,
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and
I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness
is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose
their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the
scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the
world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor
warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the
great spaces have a splendour of their own.
Dawkins argues that it is only from beneath the great security blanket of ignorance that the
secular point of view appears so frightening. He sees the belief that religion is the best, or only,
means of consolation as a hindrance to human progress. His diagnosis echoes the words of
Lucretius,
Just as children plunged into darkness tremble and fear every little thing, so we sometimes
dread in the light things that are not one jot more to be feared than the imaginings of
children shuddering in the blackness. This terror, this darkness of the mind, must be
scattered, not by the rays of the sun and glistening shafts of daylight, but by a dispassionate
view of the inner laws of nature.19
And, his solution follows Kant,
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the
inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is selfimposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage
to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use
your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.20
When it comes to the inspiration of science, Dawkins points to authors such as E.O. Wilson, Carl
Sagan, Michael Shermer, and Paul Kurtz as a few who have written about the wonder and awe
and sense of togetherness that we can glean from scientific insights. He quotes Shermer’s The
Soul of Science,
What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant
galaxy, holding a 100-million year old fossil or a 500-thousand year old stone tool in ones
hand, standing before the great chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or
18
Do not fear the Gods. Do not fear death. That which is painful is easy to endure. That which is
pleasurable is easy to attain.
19
De Rerum Natura Book II
20
Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)
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listening to a scientist who has gazed upon the face of the universe’s creation and did not
blink? That is sacred science.21
As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins puts the point as follows,
In Unweaving the Rainbow I tried to convey how lucky we are to be alive, given the vast
majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA
will in fact never be born…However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn’t this be seen as a callous
insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?22
I believe that the philosophical point that can be gleaned from Dawkins is this: if it is the case
that human beings can find consolation and inspiration from a source other than religion, then it
is not the case that religion is necessary, but instead simply one way of achieving those ends. In
this sense, religious experience is not privileged over any other, but we need not try to repackage our non-religious experiences, either. They can have the same power to illicit beauty
and emotion as any religious imagery, if we only let them. If we philosophers can help ease the
perceived tension between science and religion… between believers of every stripe… religious
and non-religious alike, I believe that is the point we must hope to get across.
21
22
Dawkins, pg. 345
Dawkins, pg. 361