Chapter Two Religions and Ethical Value 57 2.1 Philosophy and Religious Belief Introduction What should be the role of philosophy with respect to religious belief? The question is hard to answer since people have different ideas as to what constitutes philosophy and religion. A traditional answer, however, is that philosophy can help us to see whether or not religious beliefs are worthy of acceptance'. The idea here is that philosophers can single oi;t particular religious beliefs and ask questions like Ts this belief rationally 4efensible?’ or ‘Can this belief be supported by argument or appeal to evidence?’ lying behind such questions is the assumption that religious beliefs ar^ either true or false and that their truth or falsity can be settled or discussed at an intellectual level. Is there any relationship between ethics and religion? Is there any substantially based objective ethical code or not? Does God exist? How about the view that God’s Will determines what is morally obligatory? To an outside observer, .these, debates, among.. Western philosophers, and theologians concerning the relationship between religion and morality may seem culture-bound. The emergence of ethics as a separate fieldl of inquiry, the effort to distinguish morality from religion, and the countervailing effort to reassert a place for religion in human life all arise from a very particular cultural and social context. Nevertheless, the fact that systematic thinking about ethics emerged in the West, and that it generated a series of divergent explorations of the relationship between religion and morality, does not mean that this thinking or aspects of these views have no validity across 58 cultural lines. The physical sciences, too, have been most fully developed in the Western context, but the value of their findings, and even of their different hypotheses, is not limited to this setting. In trying to understand the relationship between religion and morality, therefore, it may be useful to employ concepts and approaches developed over the past centuries by Western philosophers, theologians, and social scientists. If one keeps in mind that concepts or ideas developed in a Western context are at best tentative efforts to penetrate complex realities and that they may not be wholly applicable to moral and religious traditions elsewhere, this approach can provide an interpretative guide through diverse religious and moral traditions. Much of what follows is concerned with talking aboU)t the nature of religion and philosophy and their rektionship to each oth(?r, and that whether morality is part of religion or not. The Nature of Religion and Philosophy and Their Relatipn to Each Other A fine example of the interaction between religion and philosophy is found in the thought of Clement (A.D. 150?- A.D. 250?)^ and Origer^ (c. 185- c. 254)^, usually known as the Christian Platonists of Alexandria because their school was located in that ancient center of Hellenistic culture. As this appellation implies, they were engaged in interpreting the basic beliefs of Christianity concerning God, Christ, man, and the world in terms of the insights of the Neoplatonic philosophy current in their time. More than a century earlier, the Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus (d. 45-50 C.E.) 59 carried out much the same enterprise for the Hebraic tradition, drawing chiefly on the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 429-347 B.C.E.), and the Pythagorean and Stoic schools. This type of interpreting- or dialogue- involving the use of the Greco-Roman philosophical systems for formulating the ideas and elucidating the religious insights of the biblical tradition, continued throughout the Middle Ages and lasted until the end of the Renaissance. Despite the fact that the historical interactions between religion and philosophy must always be concrete- since it is the thought of a particular philosopher or school of philosophy that is interacting with a specific religious tradition- both are themselves enduring forms to be foij|nd in every culture and they are marked by general features that serve to distinguish one from the other. It is on this account that we not only can but must come to some theoretical understanding of how religious faith and philosophical reflection are related not only as a matter of historical fact but as one of principle. To speak of principle means to approach the task of reaching down to the roots of these two spiritual forms, universal in the experience of mankind, in an attempt to grasp what they essentially are and to determine how they should be related to each other. That the task is not easy should be obvious in view of the enormous variety of religious experiences and of philosophical outlooks recorded in human history. And therefore we must not be discussed by the knowledge that no one characterization of either religion or philosophy can capture everything or satisfy everybody. The American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), in his epoch-making study The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), 60 quite rightly described religion as concerned chiefly with a .'Strategy for redemption calling all human beings away from the snares and illusions of natural existence and back to their true selves'*. That such a strategy is needed follows from the fact, not always sufficiently recognizecj, that every religion offers a diagnosis of the human predicament, a judgment focusing attention on some flaw or defect in natural existence' that stands as an obstacle between ourselves and the ideal life envisioned by the particular religion in question. Redemption, in short, means being delivereid from that flaw through a divine power capable of overcoming it. And the mature of the deliverance is determined in every religious faith by the character of the flaw envisaged. Both the diagnosis and the strategy of redemption derive from the lives and insights of the founders, sages, and prophets upon which the religious tradition rests. The articulated beliefs and practices that define a particular religious tradition are transmitted from age to age through historical communities of faith. Individuals owe their lives to the tradition in which they stand, but the tradition owes its life to the continuing community sustained by the spiritual bonds existing between the members. Philosophy, on the other hand, has as its chief concern the att^irmient of a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the many types and levels of being in the universe and their relations to each other, including a, conception of the place to be assigned in the cosmic scheme to human beings and their experience. As far as Western philosophy is concerned, two different lines of inquiry manifested themselves in the earliest stages of development. On one side curiosity was directed toward the discovery of the most pervasive or universal traits exhibited by everything that is. Such features as unity and plurality, identity and difference, spatial and temporal location, acting and 61 being acted upon were singled out as constituting the universal order holding sway throughout the universe. This line of inquiry can be called the quest for the categories ingredient in both the world and the structurei of human thought and knowledge about it. Without pushing the identification too far, we may say that this side of philosophy is one that it shares with science. The affinity is nicely illustrated by the fact that what we call science today went by the name of “natural philosophy” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as can be seen from the full title of the famous treatise? written by the English physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis (1687). On its other side, philosophy meant a bolder and more speculative inquiry prompted by wonder about the being of things. Wonder in the face of the fact that there is anything at all and wonder about what there might be about things that sustains them and causes them to stand out against nothingness and the void. This concern for what came to be called metaphysics in one of its senses has expressed itself in the quest for a ground not only pf the being of things but of human being as well; the latter concern led to the inclusion of speculative insight about the good and ideal human existence within the scope of philosophy. Understood in this sense, philosophy shows its affinity with the concerns of religion, an overlap of interest that has in the past occasioned both fruitful cooperation as well as conflict between them. The two, however, remain distinct by virtue of their different aims and approaches. This difference may be summed up in a way that is symbolic for both: the reality of the divine, however conceived, is always the initial conviction of the religious outlook, while for philosophy that reality remains the final or ultimate problem. 62 There is yet another difference between religion and philosophy, and its meaning becomes clear when we take into account what was said previously about the role of the religious community. Philosophical analyses and visions are the products of solitary thinkers whose doctrines have indeed formed the basis of traditions and schools of thought, witness Plato and Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-3-22 B.G;E.), but such- schools do not perform the same functions as a religious community. The latter exists to bring together many individuals in a spiritual unity that transfigures life; schools of thought are primarily focal points of understanding and a place for the meeting of minds. Much of the foregoing analysis has, of course, been, based entirely on the situation in the West, where the three major faiths- Judaism, Islam, and Christianity- found themselves confronted with the autonomous philosophical systems developed in the classical world. These systems were autdnomous in the sense that they were not developed under the special aegis of religious belief, even if they were sometimes influenced by religious ideas.