Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, a nearly 800-page magnum opus that delves deep into the roots of humankind's encounter with mystery and the search for meaning. Underwritten in part by funding from the John Templeton Foundation, Bellah's book, out this month from Harvard University Press, is the fruit of 13 years of research and analysis. It has been described as "the most important systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber. It is a page-turner of a bildungsroman of the human spirit on a truly global scale, and should be on every educated person's bookshelves."
Guided by the latest findings in the biological and social sciences, Bellah identifies the roots of the religious sense in human biology and culture—but by no means reduces religion to a mere expression of biological determinism or cultural preference. In fact, Bellah is all too aware that a big book with the words "religion" and "evolution" in the title will strike some as a culture-war bunker-buster. He says that both religious and atheistic "fundamentalists" mistakenly believe that both religion and science deal with the same kinds of truth claims and logical system.
"Science operates with scientific method in terms of which different theories can be tested and proved or disproved, though if Karl Popper is right, proof is always problematic and we are safer to stick to disproof," Bellah tells Templeton Report. "Religion on the other hand is a way of life more than a theory. It is based on beliefs that science can neither prove nor disprove. Its 'proof' is the kind of person the religious way of life produces."
Religion can be better understood not by examining its propositions, but by looking at the way its myths and truth claims are embodied in ritual practice. In the Axial Age—the first millennium BCE, which saw major leaps in religious progress occurring independently but concurrently in Israel, Greece, India, and China—enlightened religious teachers brought a more theoretical approach to myth and ritual, thus laying the philosophical groundwork for the world's great religious traditions as we know them today.
"This has led some religious people and many secular people to think that religion is only another form of theory alongside philosophy and science," Bellah says. "But while understanding the theoretical achievements of the great traditions is important, we will not really know what they are about unless we make the imaginative effort to see how the world might seem if we lived in the embodied practices and narratives of these traditions, a difficult but not impossible task. Indeed it is the joy of the study of religion to undertake this imaginative task."
Because religion concerns itself with understanding the general order of existence and how we are to relate to it, says Bellah, anyone who commits to this quest will be in some sense religious. "I was surprised in reading some of the great cosmologists and biologists at finding them express their own response to their work in ways that I could only call religious. Some of them recognized that and some didn't and perhaps it would be better in a world of culture wars over religion if those who were speaking beyond science in ways that were to me clearly religious would have recognized that."
He continues: "I think there are, however, people who are just not interested in a general order of existence and we must respect that too. But when I hear a scientist like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg say 'The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,' I can't help feeling that he is disappointed, that he really did want the universe to have a point. Maybe he should look a little longer."
In the 13 years he spent working on the book, Bellah, a practicing Episcopalian, experienced what he calls a "partial conversion." He explains that in order to understand the religions he studied, and what human longings from which they emerged, he had to learn to see the world through the eyes of believers within those traditions and their stories.
"If you spend a lifetime reading and rereading the great dialogues of Plato, as I have done, can you possibly escape being something of a Platonist? And if you immerse yourself in the Analects of Confucius or the Pali Suttas of the Buddha can you really avoid not being changed by what you find?" he says. "I think one must have one religious home from which one gets one's most basic orientation, but I see no reason why one can't also learn a great deal from other traditions that perhaps see some things to which your home tradition has not always attended."
Now, at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era, Bellah seems hopeful that humankind's religious evolution may be at the beginning of a new Axial Age. This may be an era in which science, a growing belief in universal human rights, and other features of modernity are leading religious believers the world over to an acceptance that religious pluralism is our common destiny. How is one reconciled to religious pluralism without falling into fundamentalism (understood as the hostile rejection of all religions except one's own) or relativism (understood as the belief that no religion is more true than another)?
The answer, says Bellah, is to resist evaluating the truth or falsity of religions by testing their truth claims, but rather to examine the lives of the people who live by those creeds. By recognizing something of worth in the lives and actions of people of other faiths—as the Christian pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., did by looking to the Hindu sage Mahatma Gandhi for insight into non-violent protest—we may come to understand our own faith in a deeper way.
"This is not relativism, nor is it saying all religions are identical," Bellah argues. "Christianity and Hinduism overlap in some areas but differ greatly in others."
"Opening one's self to other religions is always dangerous because you might get converted—that's what we ask of those of other faiths when we live our own in their presence," Bellah says. "What we need to remember is that this is an immense universe, and that there is enough truth to go around without our falling into relativism or losing our grasp on our own tradition. Individuals who hold on to their own faith for dear life and have to deny validity to any other suggest to me that they are deeply insecure and are using their opposition to other faiths to deny the doubts they have about their own."
"Much work is going on now on the evolution of religion, the cognitive science of religion and other kinds of scientific studies," says Paul Wason, director of life sciences at the John Templeton Foundation. "Because Professor Bellah writes from a perspective of the humanities, yet also engages these sciences, his work is uniquely valuable in helping us better understand what religions have actually been like through the millennia."
Source: The Templeton Report [October 15, 2011]
Guided by the latest findings in the biological and social sciences, Bellah identifies the roots of the religious sense in human biology and culture—but by no means reduces religion to a mere expression of biological determinism or cultural preference. In fact, Bellah is all too aware that a big book with the words "religion" and "evolution" in the title will strike some as a culture-war bunker-buster. He says that both religious and atheistic "fundamentalists" mistakenly believe that both religion and science deal with the same kinds of truth claims and logical system.
"Science operates with scientific method in terms of which different theories can be tested and proved or disproved, though if Karl Popper is right, proof is always problematic and we are safer to stick to disproof," Bellah tells Templeton Report. "Religion on the other hand is a way of life more than a theory. It is based on beliefs that science can neither prove nor disprove. Its 'proof' is the kind of person the religious way of life produces."
Religion can be better understood not by examining its propositions, but by looking at the way its myths and truth claims are embodied in ritual practice. In the Axial Age—the first millennium BCE, which saw major leaps in religious progress occurring independently but concurrently in Israel, Greece, India, and China—enlightened religious teachers brought a more theoretical approach to myth and ritual, thus laying the philosophical groundwork for the world's great religious traditions as we know them today.
"This has led some religious people and many secular people to think that religion is only another form of theory alongside philosophy and science," Bellah says. "But while understanding the theoretical achievements of the great traditions is important, we will not really know what they are about unless we make the imaginative effort to see how the world might seem if we lived in the embodied practices and narratives of these traditions, a difficult but not impossible task. Indeed it is the joy of the study of religion to undertake this imaginative task."
Because religion concerns itself with understanding the general order of existence and how we are to relate to it, says Bellah, anyone who commits to this quest will be in some sense religious. "I was surprised in reading some of the great cosmologists and biologists at finding them express their own response to their work in ways that I could only call religious. Some of them recognized that and some didn't and perhaps it would be better in a world of culture wars over religion if those who were speaking beyond science in ways that were to me clearly religious would have recognized that."
He continues: "I think there are, however, people who are just not interested in a general order of existence and we must respect that too. But when I hear a scientist like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg say 'The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,' I can't help feeling that he is disappointed, that he really did want the universe to have a point. Maybe he should look a little longer."
In the 13 years he spent working on the book, Bellah, a practicing Episcopalian, experienced what he calls a "partial conversion." He explains that in order to understand the religions he studied, and what human longings from which they emerged, he had to learn to see the world through the eyes of believers within those traditions and their stories.
"If you spend a lifetime reading and rereading the great dialogues of Plato, as I have done, can you possibly escape being something of a Platonist? And if you immerse yourself in the Analects of Confucius or the Pali Suttas of the Buddha can you really avoid not being changed by what you find?" he says. "I think one must have one religious home from which one gets one's most basic orientation, but I see no reason why one can't also learn a great deal from other traditions that perhaps see some things to which your home tradition has not always attended."
Now, at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era, Bellah seems hopeful that humankind's religious evolution may be at the beginning of a new Axial Age. This may be an era in which science, a growing belief in universal human rights, and other features of modernity are leading religious believers the world over to an acceptance that religious pluralism is our common destiny. How is one reconciled to religious pluralism without falling into fundamentalism (understood as the hostile rejection of all religions except one's own) or relativism (understood as the belief that no religion is more true than another)?
The answer, says Bellah, is to resist evaluating the truth or falsity of religions by testing their truth claims, but rather to examine the lives of the people who live by those creeds. By recognizing something of worth in the lives and actions of people of other faiths—as the Christian pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., did by looking to the Hindu sage Mahatma Gandhi for insight into non-violent protest—we may come to understand our own faith in a deeper way.
"This is not relativism, nor is it saying all religions are identical," Bellah argues. "Christianity and Hinduism overlap in some areas but differ greatly in others."
"Opening one's self to other religions is always dangerous because you might get converted—that's what we ask of those of other faiths when we live our own in their presence," Bellah says. "What we need to remember is that this is an immense universe, and that there is enough truth to go around without our falling into relativism or losing our grasp on our own tradition. Individuals who hold on to their own faith for dear life and have to deny validity to any other suggest to me that they are deeply insecure and are using their opposition to other faiths to deny the doubts they have about their own."
"Much work is going on now on the evolution of religion, the cognitive science of religion and other kinds of scientific studies," says Paul Wason, director of life sciences at the John Templeton Foundation. "Because Professor Bellah writes from a perspective of the humanities, yet also engages these sciences, his work is uniquely valuable in helping us better understand what religions have actually been like through the millennia."
Source: The Templeton Report [October 15, 2011]