Scruton-izing the Reasons for Religion

Roger Scruton is a fascinating thinker and writer, a philosopher whose work often possesses a sensibility and even vulnerability that can be quite striking and, even better, penetrating (Modern Culture is a personal favorite). His recent memoirs, Gentle Regrets, tells of how he seriously considered becoming Catholic, but finally entered the Anglican Communion (read an excerpt here). Recently he took part in a debate in England about religion—"Are We Better Off Without Religion?—which included (on the anti-religion side) Richard "Christians Are Idiots" Dawkins, Professor A.C. "Christianity Never Did Anything Good. Ever!" Grayling, Christopher "I Loathe Mother Theresa!" Hitchens, and (on the pro-religion side), Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Scruton, and Nigel Spivey (download the debate here). Scruton's basic (opening?) argument can be read on CatholicEducation.org. A couple of snippets:

As I see it, religion involves three different, but related, phenomena: ritual, membership and belief. A religion includes words, gestures and ceremonies, which must be repeated exactly, and which define a core experience of the sacred. This experience is a strange sediment in human consciousness; it might have an evolutionary cause, but the cause does not tell us what it means. ...

Suppose someone were to say that we would be better off without love. After all, love often leads to disaster: the love of Helen for Paris, for instance, which led to the Trojan war. Love brings with it jealousy, possessiveness, obsession and grief. People can love the wrong things and the wrong people. They can go astray through love as through hatred.

Most people would respond to that argument in the following way. Whatever the disasters that love may cause, they would suggest, love, judged in itself and without regard to contingencies, is a human good — perhaps the greatest of human goods. The important thing is to learn to love rightly and in the right frame of mind. The disasters, if they come, come as accidents and not by necessity.

That is the response that should be made on behalf of religion, too. Of course religion can lead to disasters, like the Thirty Years War. Of course people can believe in false gods and attach themselves to evil rituals. Of course religious belief can exercise a stultifying effect on the intelligence, the imagination and the humanity of those who subscribe to it. But none of those possibilities implies that there is not a proper development of the religious urge, in which people learn to worship the right things in the right way.

Certainly worth the read, as is Scruton's January 2006 article, "Why Dawkin's is wrong about God."

Speaking of Dawkins, British theologian Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, lecturer in the psychology of religion at University of London, have just published a booklet titled The Dawkins Delusion?  A March 26, 2007, Zenit interview with McGrath (himself a former atheist) about that book, Dawkins, and atheism can be read here. McGrath has written two longer books about atheism, including The Twilight of Atheism, which I found to be a solid, popular introduction to the history of atheistic thought.

Comments

[Rick]

Scruton seems to be traveling the same spiritual train as Mortimer Adler did, I wouldn't be surprised if the last stop is Rome!

[Scott Carson]

Scruton's argument seems so obvious that it is really rather striking that folks such as Dawkins, Hitchens, et al., folks who ought to know better, would think that their own arguments are sufficient to consign religion to the dustbin of history. The same can be said of those who point to the recent tragedy in Virginia as evidence that there can be no such thing as a loving, caring Deity. I suspect that the folks who rely on such weak versions of the argument from evil are, at heart, rather paternalistic themselves, since they seem to think that, if there is a God, he will turn out to be somebody who takes care of everything for us so that we can go about our business. I'll bet they're usually Statists, too.

[Carl Olson]

Good point, Scott. It appears to me that many atheists who obsessively deny the existence and authority of God and who talk about "being free to do as I wish," are all too happy to have the State step in and tell people what they can and cannot do, including what they can or cannot believe. As you likely know, this need for a paternalism aside from God has been examined by Paul C. Vitz in his intriguing book, Faith of the Fatherless (Spence). I continue to be fascinated by this argument re: love that Scruton articulated; it is similar to some points that I make in a soon-to-be published article in This Rock titled "An Apologetic of Love."