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The Ontology of Gods, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52359-0 106 CONCLUSION Reconceptualization Swings Faith

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The Ontology of Gods, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52359-0 106 CONCLUSION Reconceptualization Swings Faith CONCLUSION Using Max Weber’s widely used concept “Disenchantment of the World” as the point of departure, we have explored the cognitive and ontological structures of what is commonly understood as belief in the supernatural. We have seen that subtleties implicit in the cognitive and philosophical dimensions of belief and faith reveal in the place of uncompromising, monolithic ideas of a supernatural deity (or deities), and beliefs therein, the distinct philosophical possibility of a dynamic, flexible, mediated, and life-conducive gamut of shifting quasi-beliefs surrounding a God-signifier whose meanings alter along an ontological continuum with the change in the experiential matrix. What are the implications of this ontological continuum for our understanding of religion in the past, present, and future? The ontological continuum raises fundamental questions concern- ing the nature of enchantment, the antithesis of Weber’s Entzauberung.If God is only a metaphorical link among coincidences, only a name for a mystery, an absorbent signifier which captures myriad concerns, some of them having very little to do with faith per se, if mythical narratives can all be euhemerized, if putative faith is a matter of mediated ontological commitment and a function of “modular cognition,” it may be seen that there is no enchantment, or only a quasi-enchantment. Such a reconcep- tualization of faith can potentially transform our understanding of reli- gious history. Given the historically partisan character of reflections on religion, it might be of interest to the reader to find which way the present © The Author(s) 2017 105 J.M. George, The Ontology of Gods, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52359-0 106 CONCLUSION reconceptualization swings faith. Paradoxical though it might seem, these deliberations, instead of undoing faith, retrospectively place it on flexible but realistic foundations. What was long understood as superstitious supernaturalism is revealed to be part of a natural–supernatural conti- nuum. Past societies were not naïve societies. The ages of faith were not ages of naïveté. On the contrary, it turns out that religious subjects pragmatically negotiated their beliefs. Perhaps, it was less than belief but more than superstition. Conversely, it could be the case that beyond mere utilitarian perspectives and ecclesiastical prescriptivism, ordinary people were capable of greater metaphysical conceptions to the envy of institu- tional religions (and even of deities!) and to the surprise of reductive socio-psychological explanations. (The divine itself may be more complex than humans ever conceptualized!) If this hypothesis is proven true, the so-called revivals of religion may not be as dramatic as popularly assumed. Further, the understanding that religious conceptions are fluid and mediated, and have been historically relative, lends a greater-than-assumed validity to alternative conceptualizations and religious pluralism, proves conducive to inter-faith dialogue and harmony, severely undermines the possibility of religious conflict, and annuls the premises of fundamental- ism. Naturally, once we recognize our own beliefs to be based on fluid conceptions, apprehensions of incompatibility with, and hostility towards, another’s prove baseless. Once the mediated character of religious ideation and ruptures and ambiguities in its world conceptualization are revealed, the conflict between science and religion may also prove to be unfounded. Once we understand the nature of supernatural ideation entirely, cate- gories such as enchantment and disenchantment themselves may become redundant. FURTHER READING Aaron, David H. 2001. Biblical ambiguities: Metaphor, semantics, and divine imagery. Leiden: Brill. Abrams, M. H. 1989. Doing things with texts: Essays in criticism and critical theory. Ed. Michael Fisher. New York: Norton. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horheimer. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alighieri, Dante. 2008. Divine comedy – Inferno. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Accessed on 5 April 2016. http://www.paskvil.com. Ariès, Philippe, and Georges Duby, ed. 1987–1991. A history of private life. 5 vols. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 2000. Aristotle: Nichomachean ethics. Trans. and Ed. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, Karen. 1999. A history of God. From Abraham to the present: The 4000- year quest for God. London: Vintage. Arnold, John H. 2005. Belief and unbelief in medieval Europe. London: Hodder Arnold. Atran, Scott, and Joseph Henrich. 2010. The evolution of religion: How cognitive by-products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competi- tion generate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory 5(1): 18–30. Backman, Clifford R. 2003. The worlds of medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. Rabelais and his world. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. © The Author(s) 2017 107 J.M. George, The Ontology of Gods, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52359-0 108 FURTHER READING Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984b. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Theory and History of Literature 8. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin, and Michael Argyle. 1997. The psychology of religious behaviour, belief, and experience. London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A lyric poet in the era of high capit- alism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso. Berard, Victor. 1927. Lés Phéniciens et l’Odyssée. Paris: Colin. Berger, Peter. L. 1980. The heretical imperative: Contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation. London: Collins. Bergson, Henri. 1922. Creative evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan. Berlinerblau, Jacques. 2005. The secular Bible: Why nonbelievers must take religion seriously. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berman, Morris. 1981. The reenchantment [sic] of the world. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress. Besserman, Lawrence, ed. 2006. Sacred and secular in medieval and early modern cultures: New essays. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. The Bible: King James Version. Accessed on 7 April 2016. https://www.biblegate way.com/versions/King-James-Version-KJV-Bible/. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The principle of hope. 3 vols. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boër, Steven E. 2007. Thought-contents: On the ontology of belief and the semantics of belief attribution. New York: Springer. Boyarin, Daniel. 1999. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of reli- gion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brandewie, Ernest. 1983. Wilhelm Schmidt and the origin of the idea of God. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bremmer, Jan. 1994. Greek religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruce, Steve. 2002. God is dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Buber, Martin. 1970. I and thou: A new translation with a prologue “I and you” and notes by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner’s. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1984. New Testament and mythology. In New Testament and mythology and other basic writings. Ed. and Trans. Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1–44. Bultmann, Rudolf, and Karl Jaspers. 2005. Myth and Christianity: An inquiry into the possibility of religion without myth.Trans.R.J.Hoffman.Amherst,NY:Prometheus. Busia, K. A. 1954. The Ashanti of the gold coast. In African worlds: Studies in the cosmological ideas and social values of African peoples. Ed. Daryll Forde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 190–209. FURTHER READING 109 Cantor, Norman F. 1991. Inventing the middle ages: The lives, works, and ideas of the great medievalists of the twentieth century. New York: Morrow. Casanova, Jose. 1994. Public religions in the modern world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1965. The philosophy of symbolic forms. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1817. Biographia literaria. Chapter XIV. University of Pennsylvania. Accessed on 7 April 2016. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~ mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html. Cooper, David E., ed. 2000. Metaphysics: The classic readings. Oxford: Blackwell. Davie, Grace. 2010. Resacralization. In The new Blackwell companion to the sociol- ogy of religion. Ed. Bryan S. Turner. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 160–177. Davies, W. D., et al., ed. 1984–2006. The Cambridge history of Judaism. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The practice of everyday life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Signature event context. In Margins of philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 307–330. Dowden, Ken. 2000. European paganism: The realities of cult from antiquity to the middle ages. London: Routledge. Durkheim, Émile. 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Edwards, Mark, Mark Goodman, and Simon Price, ed. 1999. Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians. New York: Oxford University Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1954. The myth of the eternal return, or cosmos and history. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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