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Do American Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same god? Nominally, at least, the answer seems to be an obvious yes: I think Americans whose religion falls into the Abrahamic tradition in general identify their god as being the same god worshipped by other such Americans. But in practical terms, that may not be the case; even American Christians may functionally believe in a different god than other American Christians.
Last episode, I looked into the disastrous new religious movements of the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo by way of investigating the problems of religion. In this installment of A Satanist Reads the Bible, I’ll be continuing that investigation by examining religion as it exists in more popular and less fanatical forms.
In 2006, the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion released a report entitled “American Piety in the 21st Century,” which summarized findings from a survey on religion that the institute conducted the previous year. The survey included 29 questions about the character and behavior of God, responses to which were channeled along two axes of measurement: God’s level of engagement (“the extent to which individuals believe that God is directly involved in worldly and personal affairs”) and God’s level of anger (“the extent to which individuals believe that God is angered by human sins and tends towards punishing, severe, and wrathful characteristics”). These two axes were then mapped onto four very different concepts of God: the authoritarian God (high engagement and high anger), the benevolent God (high engagement and low anger), the critical God (low engagement and high anger), and the distant God (low engagement and low anger) (p. 26).
According to the survey, 16% of Americans believe in the critical God, 23% in the benevolent God, 24.4% in the distant God, and 31.4% in the authoritarian God. The remaining 5% are atheists. There are significant divides in belief in these different gods along lines of race, gender, region, education, age, religious tradition, and correspondence with other beliefs and religious activities such as church attendence and prayer.
Admittedly, these designations are somewhat arbitrary. If the researchers had included an intermediate value for engagement and anger, there would be nine different gods. Or the researchers might have chosen entirely different measures. This nevertheless illustrates that even those who share the same religion might potentially conceive of God in very different ways.
In a separate, informal study conducted by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, participants were asked to draw pictures representative of God.
The results of almost three hundred drawings revealed some interesting findings. For example, approximately 20 percent showed God in an anthropomorphic way, such as a person or face. Approximately 33 percent drew a natural scene such as a forest or mountain with the sun in the sky, or perhaps a picture of the galaxy. Still another third drew something abstract with circles, hearts, or swirling patterns. These results show that only approximately 20 percent of our sample actually conceived of God in some type of humanized form. Most viewed God as a spiritual or abstract essence of the universe.
Interestingly, about 15 percent of the pages we handed out were returned with nothing drawn. But these blank pages did contain descriptions of why they were left blank. For the atheists, they left it blank because they did not believe God existed, so there was nothing to draw. On the other hand, some religious people stated that God was “undrawable” and so they left it blank. In much the same way that the name of God is represented as the Tetragrammaton—YHVH—in Judaism, God sometimes cannot even be conceived in any kind of human mental process.
Newberg, 2016, p. 4
Evidently, theistic belief, which I’ve often seen described as if it were a monolith, is actually quite diverse.
Belief and Knowledge
In order to dig into the nature of popular religious belief, we need some grounding in epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge, of which belief is a component. We can believe things that we do not know, but we cannot claim to know anything that we do not believe. We also require a sense of what we mean by “truth,” as there is a clear relationship between truth and both knowledge and belief. In believing something, we consider it to be true, and it is often held that knowledge is always true, that we cannot claim to know things that are not actually true.
There are numerous theories about truth, belief, and knowledge, and I don’t necessarily subscribe to any one of those theories as being the explanation for those concepts. I think that we can talk about them in different ways, and we just need to be clear on what it is that we’re talking about. For our purposes here, I think the more interesting matter is not whether certain claims to knowledge are valid, but why it is that people claim to believe and know certain things.
As anthropologist Benson Saler points out in his essay “On What We Believe About Beliefs” (in Andresen, 2001), the noun “belief” and the verb “to believe” are highly polysemous, encompassing a variety of meanings and uses. There’s also the verb phrase “to believe in,” which is likewise highly polysemous. The prevailing folk understanding of belief, according to Saler, is the classical mental state theory, according to which “belief” is a mental state which changes when one entertains and assents to a given proposition. By way of example, not being a fan of sports, I rarely know the outcomes of any recent sports games. I’m not actually sure whether any games are happening right now, but that’s the example I came up with and I think we’ve all remained sufficiently familiar with the basic premise. Let’s say you happen to tell me that the Broncos won the game last night, and I believe you. Something has changed! Something has taken place! A belief has happened! Previously, I did not believe (or disbelieve) anything at all about the game and may not have even known that such a game happened, but now, some sort of internal mental state that I possess has changed in such a way as to represent the Broncos having won a game last night. In practice, of course, “belief” can encompass varying degrees of assent; one might say they believe something to be true when they are absolutely certain of it, but might also use the term meaning only that they think the proposition is likely to be true or even just possibly true. And this all seems fairly self-evident, which is why classical mental state theory is so popular as a folk theory of belief, but there are actually some considerable problems with it. I don’t have space to get into those here, but there are some great explanations found in the book Intuition Pumps and Other Tooks for Thinking by philosopher Daniel Dennett (2013). My favorite is chapter 14, entitled “An Older Brother Living in Cleveland,” and I’ll note that the book is a really excellent read overall.
A countervailing theory of belief is the disposition theory, according to which “belief” means a “tendency or readiness to act, feel, or think a certain way under appropriate circumstances” (Andresen, 2001, p. 54), with such actions possibly including public affirmation of a given proposition. Under this theory, there’s no actual belief sitting somewhere in my brain that my car runs on gasoline, for example; or if there is, then it’s only peripherally relevant and isn’t really what we’re talking about when we talk about belief. To say, then, that I believe my car runs on gasoline is simply to say that I will put gas in my car when one of dashboard gauges reads below a certain value, and that, when asked what fuel my car runs on, I will say that it runs on gas. Under this theory, I do not do these things because I believe that my car runs on gas; rather, my doing them constitutes my belief. It may ultimately be the case that the structure or contents of my brain is what causes those actions, but there’s no one thing you can point to and say, “Ah, there’s the belief!”
A third theory, which is referred to as cognitivism in my source, is also a mental state theory, but differs from classical mental state theory along several lines which I don’t think are relevant here, except for one point: on the cognitivist account, unlike the classical mental state theory account but like the dispositional account, the believer does not automatically possess the best knowledge about their own beliefs. “Cognitivists,” Saler explains, “sometimes explicitly allow that there can be beliefs of which the ‘believer’ is unaware” (Andresen, 2001, p. 58).
This point presents a problem for me, and for the study of religion in general. Religious studies concern beliefs, both my beliefs and the beliefs of all other humans. Presumably, I know my own beliefs well enough; the beliefs of others I can know only by report, but assuming they have the same insight into their own beliefs as I do into mine and I have no reason to suspect deception, I can presume that those reports are accurate. But both the dispositionist and the cognitivist positions indicate that, not only is it the case that those reports may be unreliable (i.e. people may be incorrectly reporting their own beliefs), but that it may be the case as well that my supposed knowledge of my own beliefs is not knowledge proper but rather another belief which may likewise be inaccurate. This problem is reflected in the Newberg study that I mentioned earlier. Recall that “…only approximately 20 percent of [their] sample actually conceived of God in some type of humanized form” and that “[m]ost viewed God as a spiritual or abstract essence of the universe.” This view of God is more in line with pantheism than with traditional theism. Is it the case that most theists are in fact secretly pantheist, unbeknownst even to themselves? Newberg’s study, being informal, is insufficient to make that claim, and in this case it may not be that people are unaware of their beliefs but rather unaware of other vocabulary that might more clearly express those beliefs—this is reflected as well in the Baylor study, which indicates that many American Christians practice under a particular Christian denomination but don’t always know what that denomination is (American Piety in the 21st Century, 2006, p. 15)—but it remains the case that what we think of popular religion and how it is experienced by most adherents may not coincide. I’ll be examining contemporary arguments against religion more in the next essay, but for the moment I think it’s worth taking a look at the work of biologist and prominent critic of religion Richard Dawkins, as his arguments rely strongly on a particular conception of what religion is that may not be accurate. In his famous book The God Delusion (originally published in 2006) he presents what he calls the God Hypothesis along with his claim against it:
[T]here exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
2008, p. 52
The book, again, is titled The God Delusion; in this passage, where he spells out exactly what that means, the phrase “in the sense defined” does some heavy lifting. What if one subscribes to a belief in God in a different sense? I’ll note two passages in particular where he addresses this. First:
…I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, of mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
2008, p. 41
Noting on the previous page that the atheist scientist Albert Einstein sometimes invoked the word “God” to describe his spiritual beliefs, this means that Dawkins should consider Einstein to be an “intellectual traitor”. That’s an absurd conclusion, one that I doubt that Dawkins actually accepts, so it seems likely that he doesn’t accept his own argument here and is rather attempting to be colorful and pugnacious. A bit earlier, he quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist and atheist Steven Weinberg, who describes (by way of dismissal) the broad definitions that the word “God” can convey. Dawkins’ response? “Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is ‘appropriate for us to worship’” (2008, p. 33, emphasis mine). I’ll quote Dawkins’ atheist compatriot Daniel Dennett on Dawkins’ use of the word “surely” here: “Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word ‘surely’ is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument…. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about” (2013, p. 53). Well, I myself am not so sure that Weinberg and Dawkins are right about this, so I think that this “surely” is indeed one of Dennett’s blinking lights. I think that Dawkins may be mistaken here on one or both of two points: one, Dawkins’ usage may not actually be “the way people have generally understood” the word “God;” and two, I don’t think it’s the case that a more inclusive usage will render the term “completely useless,” and my reasoning on that point is that I believe such an inclusive usage is already the norm, whether or not people are broadly aware of this, and that the word “God” is, despite that fact, not, in practice, “completely useless.”
I used to be more favorable towards Dawkins’ book—unlike Sam Harris, for example, Dawkins at least defines his terms rather than lambasting the whole of “religion” without bothering to make it clear what exactly he’s talking about—but in several places, Dawkins openly asserts that he, an ostensible scientist, has absolutely no interest in understanding the phenomenon he’s explaining (I’ll point to pp. 14-15 and p. 56 as examples, but such can be found throughout the text), even to explain it away. One might counter that Dawkins’ atheism makes such an understanding unnecessary, but this makes a problematic equivocation between “God” as a phenomenon and “belief in God” as a phenomenon. Dawkins is likely correct that the God he describes does not exist, but his argument to that effect is only a component of the broader argument he’s making. A delusion is a kind of belief; the argument of the book in total is not about God but rather about belief in God, which does exist, and which must be understood in order to be properly countered.
Defining Religion
Dawkins describes religion in general as existing in two forms: Einsteinian religion, which is the more abstract, metaphorical, and vaguely pantheist sort; and supernatural religion, which involves the God hypothesis and possibly other supernatural beliefs (2008, pp. 33-34, 36). This binary designation seems to me to be a gross oversimplification of an extremely complex concept. Even if we restrict ourselves only to Christianity, there seems to be a spectrum of belief between these two poles rather than a binary either/or, and the inclusion of other religions complexifies the issue even further. Is Buddhism, for example, Einsteinian or supernatural? Dawkins’ solution is to simply not give any thought to the matter: “…I shall not be concerned at all with other [i.e. non-Abrahamic] religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism,” he says, and continues, “Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life” (2008, p. 59). But Buddhism often, though not always, involves supernatural belief; rarely anything overtly theistic, but where and how do we draw the line? What is religion, exactly?
There are two philosophers I have in mind whose work will give us some guidance on this matter. The first is the early 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who likely wins the award for the greatest per-word influence of any philosopher in history. He published only one book in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (originally published in 1921), by means of which he considered himself to have solved all philosophical problems. Such problems, he claimed, were just the result of misunderstanding language, and the only remaining job for the philosopher was, should any philosophical problems arise, to demonstrate the underlying misunderstanding, and, in his words, “sh[o]w the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Wittgenstein, 1968, §309). Philosophy having been, in his mind, solved, he retired from the practice and went on to do other things. He returned to it later and re-examined some of his earlier assumptions, working through them in his book Philosophical Investigations (originally published posthumously in 1953), but in general maintained his view that many (if not all) philosophical problems could be not solved but actually evaporated by a proper examination of the language behind them.
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests that objects of a given class may not have any universally unifying properties at all but rather what he calls a “family resemblance:”
Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’”—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames, much that is common is retained, but much is lost…. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.
1968, §66-67
It may be the case, then, that there is nothing that all things that we call “religion” have in common, but rather that they form a family in which certain members have certain resemblences to certain other members but in which there are no features that each and every member has or must have in order for the resemblance to hold.
The other philosopher whose work I want to apply to this problem is the 20th-century American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, who, in his 1960 book Word and Object, described a thought experiment in which interpreters are working on a project of radical translation, the translation of the language of an isolated, uncontacted people. An interpreter is working with one of the natives and a rabbit scurries by. The native, apparently in response to the rabbit, says, “Gavagai!” Clearly, then, “gavagai” means “rabbit.” Or perhaps “rodent”… or “animal”… or “dinner”… or perhaps something more abstract like “instance of life in rabbit form.” The interpreter can try to verify which of these the native meant, but could only do so with any certainty if they already knew the general grammar and vocabulary of the language, and even then might be able to come up with multiple plausible ways of translating “gavagai.” So what, then, does “gavagai” really mean? According to Quine, that’s a question with no answer. It’s not that the native doesn’t intend something by it or that we can’t come to understand that intention, but rather that there is no fact of the matter as to what a given word “really means.” (Quine, 2013; Hylton & Kemp, 2020).
So what is Buddhism really? Is it really a religion, or is it really just an “ethical system” or a “philosophy of life?” Well, Buddhism certainly has at least a family resemblance to other religions, but there’s no fact of the matter as to whether it really is or really isn’t. Thus, the only basis upon which Dawkins could possibly assert that certain things that we call religion are better treated “not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life” is that doing so supports the argument of his book better than not doing so. One might characterize Dawkins’ book in general as being an argument against religion, and on his account, those things should be treated as religions which are demonstrably problematic within that framework, and those things which are not problematic within that framework should not be treated as religions.
One might imagine Dawkins the biologist working in a biology lab, setting up an experiment to see whether different microscopic organisms react a certain way to a particular chemical. “Which organisms do we include in the study?” an assistant asks. “Well, obviously,” Dawkins replies, “we include whichever ones react to the chemical!”
In the next essay, I’m going to explore the fascinating claim that religion doesn’t actually exist at all, or at least not as something that is distinct from other philosophies or ideologies that we don’t call “religion;” that religion as a category is purely a social construction rather than a natural distinction between different kinds of ideologies; that the distinction between religion and what might be called secular ideologies reflects not natural distinctions but rather power dynamics between different groups.
The Experience of Religion
Speaking personally, at the heart of all this investigation is a deep-seated question: what is the experience of religion? I have my own experiences of religion; presumably I know how I experience and have experienced religion, but even there it’s hard to parse that out from my general experience of the world, and I remain even more uncertain of how religion is experienced by others. I have so few opportunities to ever even talk about it with anyone; it’s considered an impolite topic to just bring up out of the blue, which I find very frustrating. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I’m so fond of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: it’s an endless source of exactly that kind of account. But however timeless these sorts of experiences might be, this was a book that was published in 1902 and religion is different now than it was then. William James, for examples, was very unlikely to encounter any Wiccans.
I see people wearing crosses in various forms, sometimes yarmulkes, or wearing their beards a certain way that I think might indicate a religious affiliation, and I want to ask them about religion. But considering the matter from a practical standpoint, if I as a white American come up to a Muslim- or Jewish-appearing person out of the blue and ask about their religion, they might be reasonably concerned that they’re about to get murdered, and I don’t want to put anyone in that position.
At various times in my life I have accepted Dawkins’ God Hypothesis. I try to remember how and why I came to that belief, and what it was like for me to believe it. I think that, as a child, I naturally adopted my mother’s religion, as she was the only one of my parents who, at the time, displayed any religiosity whatsoever. My father read books by Alan Watts and had perhaps adopted some of Watts’ Western adaptations of various Eastern religious ideas, but he never spoke on the matter and I didn’t discover his interest in Eastern religion until I discovered the books among his collection when I was in my teens. My mother had been raised in the Christian Science religion but had drifted into a kind of generalized theism—a basic belief in the God Hypothesis without positing anything beyond that—and did little to actively inculcate me with those beliefs but rather instilled them into me through a more passive process, as if by osmosis. On occasion, she brought me to the Christian Science church that she attended, not so that I would become an adherent of that particular religion but rather, I think, to expose me to the general spiritual milieu of her family.
I try to remember what it meant or was like for me at the time to believe in God in this way but I can really only hypothesize. Jesus was involved in some way but the particular relationship between God and Jesus was not something I gave much thought.
Early in high school I fell in with a friend who was an evangelical Christian, although I wouldn’t have known to call her that at the time. She invited me to church gatherings, which were of course very different from the ones I had attended as a child. On one such occasion, overwhelmed by the emotion and camaraderie of the gathering, I took up the pastor’s offer of accepting Jesus as my lord and savior. I remember this with a kind of embarrassed curiosity. The experience was quite powerful. It was not the case that the pastor had convinced me of the truth his religious claims; no such attempt was even part of the sermon, and in the subsequent months I thought of my religion not in terms of beliefs but in terms of my identity and belonging as a Christian. This not to say that such beliefs were absent but rather that they were not central to what it meant for me to be a Christian. I believed that I had joined a great cosmic struggle between good and evil and that I had joined on the side of good, but what I remember of this was not the belief itself but rather the feeling of justification and righteousness. As the novelty of being a Christian waned, so too did my belief. I dabbled in neopaganism for a while but I think that this too was more a matter of defining myself as a person than figuring out what it was that I believed to be true. By the time I was 20 I had landed solidly on Zen Buddhism, which I think was likely the first religion that made sense to me as a religion rather than as a social identity, and I practiced that for most of the subsequent two decades. What I believed of Zen was only that if I followed the practice diligently I would experience transformative spiritual realizations, and these beliefs were confirmed after years of diligent practice indeed resulted in transformative spiritual realizations. Exposure to Sam Harris in my mid-20’s led me towards anti-religious atheism, which largely characterized my religious stance until I encountered William James just before I turned 30. If you put together a timeline from what I just said, you might note that I was practicing the religion of Zen Buddhism—and quite devoutly at that—while thinking of myself as anti-religious. Had I read Dawkins at the time, I would have agreed with him that the Buddhism that I practiced was not a religion proper but rather a “philosophy of life.” And what basis would I have for asserting such a claim? As I see it now, my reasons were that it supported my arguments and resolved the cognitive dissonance.
I’ve written on the matter of my experience of my religion of Satanism before in “Foundations of Satanism: William James and Satanic Pantheism” and “Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology” (Bilsborough, 2020a and 2020b respectively). How was it that I became a Satanist? Much like my other experiences of religion, Satanism was not something that I reasoned myself into, as I would with a scientific theory or an endorsement of a particular political policy. Rather, in 2017, having become disillusioned with Buddhism after a trip to Nepal and India a few years earlier, I begun studying the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Georges Bataille, as well as delving into Bible studies, and from these studied emerged this new religious framework which, in a very compelling and even undeniable way, expressed my experience of the world and of myself. Satan the Accuser being its ultimate focus, I could find no better way of labeling it than as Satanism. As I’ve heard many Satanists express, it was less a transformation and more a realization of what had always been present.
Conclusion
I maintain that there are problems with religion; in particular: dogma, hegemony, and nihilism. The more I learn, the less I believe that these problems are unique to religion, but whether or not they manifest through other ideologies or institutions, they certainly manifest through religion in ways that are particular to religion.
I’ll be examining specific arguments against religion more in the next essay, but I’ll note here that, looking over my decades of experience with and exploration into religion, I have never once seen a single manifestation of religion as it has been described by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. This is not to exonerate religion; the religion of evangelical Trump-voters may not fit the reductive explanation of the New Atheists, but it may actually be far worse in any case! This makes the missteps of the New Atheists particularly egregious: faced with a problem that confronts us at the very depths of humanity, they reduced the problem to a simple set of propositions which can trivially be proven false and then went to bed. “Religion? What a trivial problem! God doesn’t even exist!”
What does “God” mean? Doctor Dawkins? Doctor Harris?
“Well, obviously,” they reply, “‘God’ means theistic propositions which can trivially be proven false!”
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Works Cited and Referenced
American Piety in the 21st Century: New Insights into the Depth and Complexity of Religion in the US. (2006). Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.
Andresen, J. (Ed.). (2001). Religion in mind: Cognitive perspectives on religious belief, ritual, and experience. Cambridge University Press.
Bilsborough, T. (2020a, July 25). Foundations of Satanism: William James and Satanic Pantheism. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/foundations-of-satanism-william-james-and-satanic-pantheism/
Bilsborough, T. (2020b, August 1). Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/entering-the-circle-towards-a-satanic-theology/
Dawkins, R. (2008). The God delusion (1st Mariner Books ed). Houghton Mifflin Co.
Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Norton & Company.
Hylton, P., & Kemp, G. (2020). Willard Van Orman Quine. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/quine/
McGinn, M. (2013). The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (0 ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203080955
Newberg, A. (2016). How God Changes Your Brain: An Introduction to Jewish Neurotheology. CCAR Journal, 6.
Quine, W. V. O. (2013). Word and object (New ed). MIT Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical investigations. Basil Blackwell.