However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted. According to the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the doxastic conception of religion is a relatively recent development, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Armstrong goes so far as to argue that our modern doxastic conception of religion is largely the result of mistranslation. In terms of Christianity, one difficulty with translating the Greek of the New Testament into English is that the English word “faith”, unlike the Greek equivalent “pistis”, does not have a verb form. Hence what should really be the verb “to faith” comes out as “to believe”. When the Bible was first rendered in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not a bad translation. The word “bileven” in middle English meant to prize or to hold dear (related to the German “belieben”) and when the King James Bible was published, “believe” was close in meaning to the Greek pistis, which has connotations of engagement and commitment. As one piece of evidence for this, Armstrong offers a line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (written shortly before the publication of the King James Bible) in which Bertram is urged to “believe not thy distain”; in other words, he is being told not to engage his contempt (in this case for the low-born Helena) and let it take root in his heart.[...]
Separating “faith” from “belief” also makes sense outside a religious context. Suppose a loved one is seriously ill and the prognosis is not good. You might say to that person, “I have faith that you’re going to live”. This does not necessarily mean that you believe that your loved one will live; you might be entirely realistic about the chances of survival. What you mean is that you are rooting for that possibility: you are personally committing to living in hope that the illness will be overcome. Faith is a matter of hopeful commitment. To take another example, anyone taking a cold hard look at the facts must accept that the odds of humans preventing climate catastrophe do not look great; certainly, it is more likely that we will fail than that we will succeed. Nonetheless, many continue to have faith that our species will rise to the occasion. Again, this is not a matter of believing, against all the evidence, that climate change will be dealt with. It rather means committing to live, and more importantly to act, in the hope of a better outcome. Such leaps of faith are not irrational; they are what give life meaning and significance. It would be a sad world if everyone apportioned their aspirations for the future in the manner of an insurance broker.[...]
Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion. [...]
While many atheists will no doubt see the benefit of shared traditions, they may find it hard to see the point of prayer and worship. In response, the fictionalist will point out that we are not cold-blooded creatures of reason motivated purely by an accurate understanding of the world around us. Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship.
No comments:
Post a Comment