04/07/2021 – Robert Neville Part 3: Religion

Religion! The last of a three-part series on Robert Neville’s trilogy. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. This video is closed-captioned here on YouTube and the transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com. Bob Neville published a three-volume series on philosophical theology, which isn’t really as much about theology as it is about explaining religion. You really have to be interested in analyzing religion at very high level, I mean a big-picture view. It’s very complicated stuff for most regular folks, I’m talking shoulder-deep in the weeds, but like the first two episodes, we’re gonna try and hit some highlights here, but there’s a lot of stuff. The first volume is titled Ultimates and the second volume is titled Existence. This third and last volume is titled Religion. As I mentioned in the previous episodes, all three books in Neville’s series have the exact same structure. Following an introduction to the book, they all have four parts and each part has four chapters, so each book has exactly sixteen chapters. The four parts of Religion are “Understanding Religion”, “Historical Religions,” “Normative Religion,” and “Religionless Religion.”

In this second volume, Neville really gets into applying the concepts he expressed in the first two books. A big part of the backbone of this entire series comes from Paul Ricoeur’s description of the first naiveté and the second naiveté as well as C S. Peirce’s understanding of symbols as either iconic or indexical. An iconic reference of a symbol is one in which a likeness exists between a sign and its object. An indexical reference is one in which a causal relation is established between a sign and is object such that the interpreter, seeing the sign, picks up on something important in the object. The first naiveté is people taking iconically false references which are only indexically true as iconically true. The second naiveté is people recognizing references as iconically false but believing them as indexically true. The point of symbolic engagement is to show how popular religious culture might be untenable when interpreted from a sophisticated perspective as if its beliefs and practices were iconically referential. But at the same time, that culture might be true in the sense of carrying over, through indexical reference things that are truly valuable in ultimate matters. And here’s the most important point Neville makes: the critique that sophisticated thinking brings to popular religion should never be only a rejection of claims that are iconically false. It should also include a careful assessment of whether living with those beliefs carries over theologically true elements through the indexical reference in the interpretive engagements. If not, one can be super smart in understanding philosophy of religion, but completely miss the boat if they cannot grasp the indexical reference of religious symbols. They cannot attain a proper second naiveté and the power of those religious symbols become lost or meaningless to them.

Religion is human engagement of ultimacy. There are five ultimate realities that all humans share, one ontological – meaning it has to do with our very being, and four cosmological ultimates – meaning after we have existence, then what? These were all mentioned in the first episode on this book series. The categories of the religions as well as the categories of ultimate realities is how the story is told across all three books. The symbol systems of what Neville refers to as sacred canopies, basically religions, help us cope with death and give us life in this present world.

The first part, Understanding Religion is about explaining the evolution of systems capable of engaging ultimate matters. This is because religion is always symbolic engagement with symbols embedded in cultural systems. The four sections in this part are a move from science and culture through axial age religion, theology and the religious situation, and finally, a viable sacred canopy. He addresses science and religion by noting that the cognitive science approach is limited because it has an exclusive sense of explaining religion which doesn’t include symbolic tools for engaging boundary conditions and ultimacy. In the next section, Neville’s usage of pre-Axial and Axial age religions comes from Karl Jaspers. Pre-Axial age religions were essentially competing tribes in local geographic locations. Axial age religions expanded this to the kingdom and empire levels. This gives rise to at least these two issues. Number one, in nearly every one of the major world religions a deep tension exists between conservatives who want to defend a specific religious culture over against competition, often demonizing the competition, and liberals who insists on tolerance of other religions, precisely because they are the ultimate identifying indicators of other people who should be respected on their own terms. Number two, sometimes people find that their inherited Axial Age religious traditions simply do not provide a sacred worldview that they can embrace so as to deal effectively with the ultimate predicaments of life. The transcendent symbols are not transcendent enough; the intimate symbols are too particular, no longer address the important issues of life, and cannot be connected with the transcendent symbols so as to have their own indexical truth. Local religious communities are not attuned to these difficulties, it often seems, and also are too often corrupt. All this gives an unhappy attitude about membership in one or several of the great world religions. This flows over into the third section on “Theology and the Religious Situation” when he further elaborates on transcendent vs. intimate symbols. The transcendent symbols are more likely to be similar while the intimate symbols are more likely to be different across traditions. Therefore, in order to ask the question of whether the different religious traditions are addressing the questions of truth in the same or different ways, we need to investigate the connection in each tradition between the intimate and transcendent symbols of ultimacy. The last section, “A Viable Sacred Canopy,” brings together the previous three sections to conclude the first part. Because people’s lives across the globe are so diverse, no one worldview can orient all of them, so there are many sacred worldviews. Being religious requires a sacred worldview whose intimate symbols of ultimacy are relevant to one’s own situation and that therefore one’s authentic religious practice needs to be different form the authentic religious practices of others. A viable sacred canopy cannot survive on highly transcendent symbols because they become too abstract. It also needs intimate symbols for the ontological and cosmological ultimate realities described in the first two volumes to the book to be engaged. It’s a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. The interpreting of symbols as iconic references needs to be laid bare and deconstructed, and then the same symbols need to be reconstructed with their proper indexical reference to re-energize them with religious meaning and purpose.

Then in the second part of the book, “Historical Religions,” he mentions “Abrahamic Religions,” “Buddhism,” “Hinduism,” and “Chinese Religion.” In the “Abrahamic Religions” there is an emphasis on in-group identification. This creates a tendency to place the good of the community above obligations which their respective symbols represent. There is also a tendency for these traditions to be more apocalyptic than others, further exacerbating the in-group/out-group distinction as well as privileging the humanity part of the story above anything else, especially the environment. In “Buddhism” he mentions that Buddhists have not spent much energy on developing sophisticated transcendent symbols of ultimacy which makes the connection between transcendent and intimate symbols in Buddhism as extremely close. His chapter on “Hinduism” is really tricky to try to summarize because of the nature of what we label as Hinduism being so varied. In highly diverse ways, most strains of Hinduism that have come down to the present define the ultimate identity of the self in relation to a deeper ontological reality. That deeper ontological reality has been symbolized on a wide spectrum of objects, from local temple statues with whom one might be joined in devotion, to transcendent images of Vishnu or Shiva beyond determination, to Brahman without qualities. In dualism, individual identity maintains. In nondualism the particularities of identity are unreal, illusory. The symbolic matrix that lies behind this ease of rejecting the particularities of achieved identity is that of consciousness. Even though the contents of consciousness are particular, consciousness itself is not. Removing the particularities of consciousness, the consciousness that is “I” is also the consciousness that is “you.” In “Chinese Religion,” the ontological dimension of humaneness is to become properly attuned to the depths of existence. To be in the world is to be under obligation, to have to work out or cultivate a sense of wholeness with the components of one’s life, to relate to other people, institutions, and nature beyond the human, and to find meaning in one’s value-identity. The sensitivity to be cultivated is not static, rather it has to do with grasping who the person is in context and the value of what the person represents or what they are doing, as well as contributing to the harmonizing of the situation involved. Failure of obligation is to be shameful, and to dislike oneself for the failure. But Confucianism, more than most, associates the failure of obligation with deep shame.

The third part, “Normative Religion,” has four chapters on “Value,” “Ethics,” “Spirituality,” and “Companionship.” In the chapter on “Value,” he mentions that the thought that the universe might not have a transcendent purpose has been devastating to many religious people who conclude from this that human life can have no ultimate purpose either. Most likely the crisis is one cultural fallout of the rise of modern science, which depicts nature as being without value. If nature is without value, then human life is without value, except in the dimensions that are created by the human will and projected onto nature (including human nature itself). But this is all part of the reductive character of science as there’s a difference between obligation as having an objective character vs. responsibility as having a subjective character. Whoooo. The chapter on “Ethics” focuses on decisions based on individual vs. community harmony. One of the best passages of this chapter says that the decisions about elements affecting community, with the tugs of individual pursuit of self-interest and self-definition in group terms, need to be complicated by how our decisions affect all the individuals involved. In light of the latter consideration, whether individuals should be helped or harmed by decisions has to do with how the decisions affect their own integrity, not so much whether they are members of our in-group. On to “Spirituality,” which is mainly about integration or the attainment of wholeness with respect to those components of life that are ultimate. There is discipline, desire, and the strive towards excellence. Then he gets into “Companionship,” which is really just community. He asks, why would one make a kind of faith commitment, granting authority to a sacred worldview, especially in this confusing age? The answer is, because of the utilitarian value of a religious community in the concrete shaping of a religious life. It creates one’s primary identity in their relating to ultimacy. A religious community is an in-group, distinguished from other people who are not part of it, who do not share its sacred canopy, and who are not regarded as companions in the community.

The four chapters of the last part, “Religionless Religion,” are the plausibility of sacred worldviews, the implausibility of sacred worldviews, imploding worldviews and ontological predicaments, and ontological salvation and ecstatic fulfillment. Neville joked at a retirement meeting at Boston University a few years ago that no one ever read this section because no one ever made it to the end of this three-book series. The same goes for this video series, but there’s a lot of great stuff going on in this section. Neville writes that one can live adequately within a sacred worldview when oriented by the finite site with the infinite side remaining a mystery. One can also live inadequately within a sacred worldview when the finite and infinite sides are equal meaning one is living with both the negation and affirmation of ultimate reality. This is because one has started to question the worldview and it begins to lose its orienting ability. Sacred worldviews are plausible when they are consistent, are applicable to human predicaments, sustain the finite/infinite tension through the balance of transcendent/intimate symbols and are authoritative in some sense. The consistency issue can be past to present whereby ancient symbols must continuously be reinterpreted with contemporary cultural meanings, or the consistency issue can be present to present in that competing domains might become radically inconsistent, such as science and religion and must therefore be segregated or remain dysfunctional. This is why Neville says in the next chapter on the implausibility of sacred worldviews that the conception of God as the otherwise indeterminate ontological act of creation is completely consistent with science as opposed to seeing science as some sort of neutral overarching perspective which Neville brands as false because it is based solely on a finite perspective. In the next chapter of “Imploding Worldviews and Ontological Predicaments,” Neville lists some responses when sacred worldviews implode. One is no response and live with little or no ultimate concern. Second is to reinvest in a past version which often results in some form of fundamentalism. Third is to simply embrace the despair and accept a deep skepticism. Fourth and last is to recognize the worldview as simply a hypothesis and now launch into finding a better one. In the last chapter of not only the last section, but also the last chapter of the book and the entire book series, Neville writes about “Ontological Salvation and Ecstatic Fulfillment.” In a lifetime one can only accomplish fragments of what one wants to, and one must learn to live with those fragments. It takes courage to accept the many aspects of our contingency. With one’s own death, existence goes out for one’s consciousness, but existence remains for the perspectives that follow. Such ontological faith as expressed in religion is a struggle to engage ultimate reality in its many dimensions and to find the symbols for doing so.

Neville’s book series is quite dense, so you have to go slow when reading it, but it is rather logically organized. The more one has read and studied philosophy the more one will understand all of the philosophical allusions in the books, but even without a philosophical background one can still gain a lot from reading through the series. I really enjoyed reading them and learned a lot in the process. Hats off to Professor Neville. I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.