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Behind, Between, and Beyond Anthropomorphic Models of Ultimate Reality

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Abstract

The plurality of models of ultimate reality is a central problem for religious philosophy. This essay sketches what is involved in mounting comparative inquiries across the plurality of models. In order to illustrate what advance would look like in such a comparative inquiry, an argument is presented to show that highly anthropomorphic models of ultimate reality are inferior to a number of competitors. This paper was delivered as a keynote address during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.

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Notes

  1. I will speak of “ultimacy models” rather than “God models” because I am most interested in ultimate reality and think that God is a valuable but potentially parochial name for it. Of course, sometimes God is treated merely as a component of ultimate reality, as in Alfred North Whitehead’s thought, rather than synonymous with it. And in some traditions, reflection on ultimate reality is regarded as secondary, and as a distraction from pursuing the ultimate paths that lead to liberation; this is true of some forms of Buddhism.

  2. See, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (London: John Chapman, 1854) and The Essence of Religion: God the Image of Man; Man’s Dependence on Nature the Last and Only Source of Religion (New York: A. K. Butts, 1873); Karl Marx, Marx on Religion, John Raines, ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933). Sigmund Freud offers several takes on unconscious psychic structures relevant to the psychological origins of religion, including Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1930), The Future of an Illusion (New York: The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1928), and Moses and Monotheism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939).

  3. An excellent survey is Patrick McNamara, Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, 3 vols. (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2006). The three volumes are titled Evolution, Genes, and the Religious Brain; The Neurology of Religious Experience; and The Psychology of Religious Experience.

  4. Augustine, Confessions (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

  5. This is a version of the widespread critique of unverifiable “just-so” stories to explain selection of traits in evolutionary biology. The most famous example is probably Charles Darwin’s fanciful narrative of how a species of bears hunting insects while swimming could evolve through natural selection into a whale-like mammal; see On The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859): 184.

  6. For example, see Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

  7. See Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991).

  8. A classic magician’s expose is James Randi, Flim-Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and other Delusions (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1982).

  9. A good survey of some of the issues in behavioral law and economics surrounding cognitive error is the symposium on Homo Economicus, Homo Myopicus, and the Law and Economics of Consumer Choice in The University of Chicago Law Review 73/1 (Winter 2006). For example, Jeffrey J. Rachlinksi, “Cogntive Errors, Individual Differences, and Paternalism” from that symposium (207–229) focuses on whether and how the legal system should make paternalistic allowance for cognitive error.

  10. A classic work on the psychology of buying is Frank Nicosia, Consumer Decision Processes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966). Also see Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).

  11. On different cultural styles of cognition, there is a host of evidence; for example, see R. E. Nisbett, K. Peng, I. Choi, and A. Norenzayan, “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic versus Analytic Cognition,” Psychological Review 108/2 (Apr 2001): 291–310. Work on the cross-cultural recurrence of basic forms of cognitive error is less common. A. Tobena, I. Marks, and R. Dar, “Advantages of Adaptive Bias and Prejudice: An Exploration of their Neurocognitive Templates,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 23/7 (Nov 1999): 1047–1058 provides a theoretical account of the possible evolutionary advantages of certain forms of cognitive error, building on empirical cross-cultural evidence for cognitive bias.

  12. For an integrated evolutionary perspective on cognitive error, see Martie G. Haselton and D. Nettle, “The Paranoid Optimist: An Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10/1 (2006): 47–66.

  13. See, for example, Stuart A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  14. For a classic introduction to evolutionary psychology, see Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). One of the best discussions on evolutionary psychology and religion is in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27/6 (Dec 2004): 713–770, which focuses on Scott Atran’s “Religion's Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion” (713–30).

  15. Among the most recent examples of this excitement, see Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking, 2006); and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

  16. For an example of the view that true religious beliefs are adaptive, see William Ramsey, “Naturalism Defended,” in James Beilby, ed., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002): 15–29. For an example of the view that false religious beliefs are adaptive, see Michael Bulbilia, “Nature’s Medicine: Religiosity as an Adaptation for Health and Cooperation,” in McNamara, ed., Where God and Science Meet, vol. I: 87–121.

  17. For a key discussion on cognitive universals and culture, see the discussion on the topic in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21/4 (Aug 1998): 547–609, which focuses on an article by Scott Atran on “Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars” (547–69).

  18. The key experiments include those reported in J. L. Barrett and M. A. Nyhof, “Spreading Non-natural Concepts: The Role of Intuitive Conceptual Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 1 (2001): 69–100. In relation to religion, one of the key works is P. Boyer and C. Ramble, “Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts,” Cognitive Science 25 (2001): 535–64.

  19. A leading work on the role of hypnotizability and dissociation in the origins of religion is James McClenon, Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).

  20. For a compact summary of the case, see Lee A. Kirkpatrick, “Religion is not an Adaptation,” in McNamara, ed., Where God and Science Meet, vol. I: 159–79.

  21. See Ivan Strenski, “The Only Kind of Comparison Worth Doing: History, Epistemology, and the ‘Strong Program’ of Comparative Study,” in Thomas Athanasius Indinopulos, Brian C. Wilson, and James Constantine Hanges, eds., Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils?; Numen History of Religion Series (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006): 271–92.

  22. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1900); Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Edward Burnett Tyler, Primitive Cultures: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1873–1874); Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954); Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930); and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

  23. See Aristotle, Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1991).

  24. Śañkara (mid-8th century CE) set an example of expounding the Upanishads while taking account of opposing schools, including Buddhism, Jainism, Samkhya, and Vaisheshika. See especially his commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, which were formative for much subsequent Indian philosophy, including in its comparative aspects.

  25. See, for example, Kitaro Nishida, A Study of Good (Tokyo: Print Bureau of the Japanese Government, 1960); Hajime Tanabe, Philosophy of Metamoetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

  26. For a good example of this sort of comparative inquiry in action, see the three volumes of the Comparative Religious Ideas Project: Robert Cummings Neville, ed., The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth (Albany; State University of New York Press, 2000). For an account of the method of that project in comparison with other methods in comparative religions, see Wesley J. Wildman, “Comparing Religious Ideas: There’s Method in the Mob’s Madness,” in Thomas Athanasius Indinopulos, Brian C. Wilson, and James Constantine Hanges, eds., Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils?; Numen History of Religion Series (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006).

  27. See Wesley J. Wildman, “Comparative Natural Theology,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 27/2&3 (May/Sep, 2006): 173–190. For a heuristic sketch of this method at work in relation to God Models, see Wesley J. Wildman, “Ground-of-Being Theologies,” in Philip Clayton, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  28. See an example of this sort of stalemate sketched in Wesley J. Wildman, “From Law and Chance in Nature to Ultimate Reality,” in Fraser Watts, ed. Creation, Law, and Probability (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007).

  29. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

  30. For a typically lively philosophical review of the book, which does not hesitate to show how paper-thin the argument is, see Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum,” Books and Culture: A Christian Review 13/2 (March/April, 2007): 21ff.

  31. For example, see Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  32. See Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

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Wildman, W.J. Behind, Between, and Beyond Anthropomorphic Models of Ultimate Reality. Philosophia 35, 407–425 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9060-1

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