Nature Is Enough

Loyal Rue

Description

Nature is enough: enough to allow us to find meaning in life and to answer our religious sensibilities. This is the position of religious naturalists, who deny the existence of a deity and a supernatural realm. In this book, Loyal Rue answers critics by describing how religious naturalism can provide a satisfying vision of the meaning of human existence.

The work begins with a discussion of how to evaluate the meaning of life itself, referencing a range of thought from ancient Greek philosophy to the Abrahamic traditions to the Enlightenment to contemporary process and postmodern philosophies. Ultimately proposing meaning as an emergent property of living organisms, Rue writes that a meaningful life comes through happiness and virtue. Spiritual qualities that combine evolutionary cosmology and biocentric morality are described: reverence, gratitude, awe, humility, relatedness, compassion, and hope. Rue looks at why religious naturalism is not currently more of a movement, but nevertheless predicts that it will become the prevailing religious sensibility.
Preface

1. Introduction: What Is a Human Being For?

Part I. The Meaning of Life

2. The Reality of Meaning

Meaning in the World
Meaning in the Mind
The Illusion of Meaning

3. The Emergence of Meaning

What Is Emergence?
Revisiting the Options
Interlude: A Model of Emergence
The Miracle of Meaning

Part II. RELIGIOUS NATURALISM

4. Religion Naturalized, Nature Sanctified

Bringing Religion Down to Earth
The Heart of Naturalism
Taking Nature to Heart
Is Nature Enough?
The Promise of Religious Naturalism

5. Confessions of a Religious Naturalist

God and Creation
Sin and Grace
Evil and Suffering
Death and Salvation
Faith, Hope, and Love

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la religion
• Ethics in religion
• Philosophy of religion
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438438016
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Nature Is Enough
Religious Naturalism and the Meaning of Life
Loyal Rue

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rue, Loyal D.
Nature is enough : religious naturalism and the meaning of life / Loyal Rue.
      p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3799-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nature—Religious aspects. 2. Naturalism—Religious aspects. I. Title.
BL65.N35R84 2011
211'.8—dc22
2011003136
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Philemon Sturges ( bon vivant )

Preface
This book results from a conflation of two abandoned projects: one about religious naturalism and the other about the meaning of life.
For several years I have identified myself as a religious naturalist without having any clear conception of what religious naturalism actually amounts to. I had long since abandoned the metaphysics of supernaturalism, but still retained what I recognized to be religious sensibilities. So I must have been, by default, a religious naturalist. I knew of several others who had taken up the label but, like me, none of them had elaborated its major themes in a systematic way. Eventually I took in mind to edit a book under the title Is Nature Enough? The idea was to enlist several well-known thinkers to weigh in on both sides of the question. My hope was that the positive responses to the question would provide the initial statements from which an articulate movement might begin to flourish. So I assembled a wish list of flashy thinkers that I knew would make substantial contributions. At the top of the list was (of course) Stephen Hawking. I then sent Hawking a carefully worded invitation to contribute an article in response to the question. I wasn't exactly mortified when he graciously declined my invitation, but I was sufficiently discouraged to give up on the project. Then, a few months after I had abandoned the book project, my friend and fellow religious naturalist, Michael Cavanaugh, informed me that he was organizing a conference around the question. One of the presenters at the conference was theologian John Haught, who responded negatively to the question, and who has since published a book under the title Is Nature Enough? 1 I mention this because the present book is in some measure a response to Haught's objections to religious naturalism.
The other abandoned project concerned the meaning of life. I had taken a scholarly interest in this topic partly because it was beginning to show up as a standard feature in introductory philosophy textbooks, but also because it is one of very few topics that has attracted the attention of a broad range of philosophers and theologians. So I decided to offer a seminar on the topic as a way of forcing myself to undertake a thorough review of the material. I had initially settled on the idea of writing something on the meaning of life, but in the process of working through the literature I concluded that it was pretty decent stuff, and that I had nothing clever or interesting to add to it. So that appeared to be the end of that.
Having abandoned both religious naturalism and the meaning of life, I turned to the next item on my list of things to look into: emergence theory . The topic of emergence had attracted the attention of some interesting and important thinkers, and was no longer merely a sophisticated way of saying “Then presto! ; that happened.” The contemporary concept of emergence is embedded in chaos and complexity theory—very edgy and speculative stuff, but full of exciting potential. In the process of working through the literature on emergence theory it came to me that here was a resource for framing questions about the meaning of life in a new way. And it also struck me that emergence theory provided the right kind of footing for articulating a contemporary vision of religious naturalism.
The present book is an attempt to unearth these abandoned projects and to bring them together under the thesis that if religious naturalism deserves to be taken at all seriously it must have a satisfying answer to the question of meaningful human existence. If it does, then it might be fairly claimed that nature is enough.
The ambitions of this book are modest, and the plan is uncomplicated. The introductory chapter takes a bearing on the question of the meaning of life and then sets down three conditions that must be met for a human life to be considered genuinely meaningful. One of these conditions—the teleological criterion—raises what is perhaps the most bothersome issue for any serious quest to apprehend the meaning of life: Is the meaning of life—the goal, the purpose, the point of life—an objective thing that might be discovered, or is it merely an invention that humans construct for their own personal or political convenience? In other words, is the meaning of life a reality or an illusion? I take the view that we are left with four distinct options for thinking about the reality of meaning, and these options are explored in the two chapters comprising Part One. Part Two then tries to show how a naturalistic perspective on the meaning of life might contribute to a contemporary vision of the religious life. Here it will be asked whether a naturalist might possibly be religious and, if so, what that might actually look like.
1
Introduction
What Is a Human Being For?

Questioning the Question
For several years I have made a practice of subjecting my introductory philosophy students to a pop quiz on the first day of class. The assignment is to write an essay in response to a simple question: “What is a human being for?” This is obviously a variation on the more familiar question, “What is the meaning of life?” But the form of the question is sufficiently odd to leave students in a state of bewilderment. They know perfectly well what chairs and cups and backpacks are for, but it has never occurred to them that human beings might be for anything in a similar way. An odd question, perhaps, but eventually the students manage to compose themselves with varied and predictable results. A human being is for:

Learning and solving problems
Preserving and beautifying the earth
Serving God
Loving and being loved
Whatever they choose to be for
Realizing their potential
Survival and reproduction
Feeding decomposers
Etc.
I engage students in this exercise because it gives them a whiff of the sort of questions that might come up in philosophy, and also because it gives me a whiff of the values and attitudes I will encounter during the course of the semester. Yet it must be admitted that asking students to answer this question on the first day of class is a particularly unphilosophical thing to do. This is because the first step in philosophy is always to scrutinize questions, not to answer them. Indeed, one of my own college professors used to insist that philosophy has no business answering questions at all, but should confine itself to rendering critiques of questions.

Is the Question Answerable?
Before we can hope to make any progress on the question about life's meaning we must determine whether the question itself is problematic. Many questions are. Some questions are problematic because they are unanswerable, either because they are incoherent or because we lack sufficient means to answer them. For example, take the old standard from theology: Can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? This question was designed to demonstrate that God cannot possibly be omnipotent. If we say that God can create such a stone, then it follows that there is one thing God is powerless to do: namely, to lift the stone. But if we admit that God cannot create the stone, then ipso facto God is not omnipotent. Any answer to the question implies that God is not all-powerful. On the surface this question has the appearance of legitimacy, but in fact the question is incoherent because it creates a logical monstrosity: a stone too heavy to be lifted by a being presumed capable of lifting any stone at all amounts to a logically impossible stone.
Some philosophers have maintained that the meaning of life question is incoherent in a similar way, not because it creates a logical monstrosity but because it creates a grammatical one. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, believed that human life is the context of meaning—the setting wherein things take on meaning—and cannot therefore be a candidate for meaning itself. 1 By this reasoning, to inquire about the meaning of life is absurd in the way that voting for the voting booth would be. Wittgenstein's suggestion that our question is illegitimate rests on the claim that it is a recursive question of the sort, “What is the meaning of this question?” But is it? It is not obvious that “What is the meaning of life?” constitutes the same kind of grammatical monstrosity as “What is the meaning of this question?” Does the fact that entities and events in life can have meaning imply that it makes no sense to ask whether a life itself can have meaning? It's hard to see why. It seems perfectly sensible to ask, “What is the color of the box containing red things?” If there is no logical or grammatical monstrosity in that question, then it seems logically and grammatically permissible to inquire about the meaning of life.
It appears, t