God v. Grab Bag

A lot of intellectuals are turning religious, but they are not necessarily turning to God, says Harvard's Philosophy Professor Morton White in the current Confluence (an international quarterly published by Harvard). Most do not believe "the simple, old-fashioned declarative statement of theology, God exists," but merely that "one ought, or that it is good to be religious." This shift from theological arguments about God's existence to arguments merely about the usefulness of being religious, continues White, "is the history of the philosophy of religion in our time . . .

"The answers to the question, 'What is religion?' have come trippingly in the 20th century. It is a species of poetry (Santayana); it is a variety of shared experiences (Dewey); it is ethical culture; it is insight into man's nature. (The last is the view of a group that might be called 'Atheists for Niebuhr')." All these views, says White, have one thing in common: the desire "to avoid identifying religion with any claim to knowledge that might have to run the gauntlet of scientific test." Most contemporary thinkers want "to make religion fill the void created by the dissolving effects of science, both physical, as at Hiroshima, and spiritual. This has been the outcome of the 19th century's hot war between science and religion. It has ended in an uncomfortable ceasefire, and in the creation of a line that would separate knowledge from all other human activities. Religion has too often agreed to accept the role of a nonscientific spiritual grab bag . . . while science has promised to give up its control over feeling and will."

But religion either as an abstract or a grab bag is not true religion. "If we ask it at all, we should not ask abstractly, 'Should I be religious?' but rather 'Should I be a Jew?' or 'Should I be a Roman Catholic?' or 'Should I be a Protestant?' "

Therefore, the widespread suggestion to teach some kind of interdenominational religion in schools strikes Philosopher White as nonsensical. "Any educational effort to nourish religious feeling by trying to present an abstract essence of religion must fail . . . [We should] become frankly sectarian . . . and therefore limit higher religious instruction to the divinity schools which are properly devoted to the study and the propagation of specific religions conceived as total ways of life, knowledge, emotion and action."

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