The popular understanding of religion needs to evolve. The commonly accepted definition doesn’t consider how we have come to understand ourselves and our cosmos. The current understanding of religion contextualizes and restricts it to supernatural cosmology, prohibiting a more comprehensive and scientific knowledge of the subject.
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Even among scholars, there is little agreement on the definition or scope of religion. I define it as a universal human social behavior through which people work together to sacralize the values and symbols they hold in common. Religion is the principal means by which human communities and cultures collectively make sense of their lives and inculcate, build, maintain, and share meaning.
I define religion as a socially shared spirituality. Spirituality is a personal, socially constructed, cognitive, and emotional response to the existential question, “What is my life's purpose?” This question is a consequence of our being self-conscious. Genetics, familial and cultural environment, personal experience, education, and a variety of other factors influence how we respond to the question. Our spirituality describes how we make sense of the ongoing experience of being alive in the world as we perceive it. Religion is done in the same way but with much greater power because it employs a network of the collective knowledge, experience, and thinking of an entire community over time.
Religious activity began with the emergence of human self-consciousness, closely associated with language and human cultural development. As it still does, religion reflects how humans seek to understand the world around us and our relationship to it. At first, our understanding was minimal. We had only simple language, no writing to record what we learned, and little in the way of collective information to help us understand our experience. Our reactions to what we experienced were more emotional than cognitive. At that point, it was natural for us to perceive everything that happened as magical because the origin of everything was unknown to us, and we had only a developing understanding of causality.
A primary characteristic of religion is its ability to provide human life with meaning. This is particularly clear in the case of our early human ancestors, who lived in an unpredictable and often dangerous environment. They sought control over the mysterious forces to which they were subject everywhere and at all times. Instinctively, they recognized the importance of maintaining close social bonds with their immediate and extended family because dealing with life as a group was much more effective than trying to do it on one's own.
It’s understandable that when these early people tried to comprehend what was happening around them, they attributed the cause of their experience to powerful, magical others like themselves that they could not see. They sought communication with these others to influence them and mitigate their actions. These attempts to communicate through sounds and gestures became rituals. The use of ritual produced a sense of the sacred. Some clan members became recognized for their seeming skill in dealing with these powerful others, and they, too, gained a sacred aura. Each clan developed its own religious beliefs, the rituals that expressed them, and the leaders who interpreted them through rituals, visions, and the telling of sacred narratives.
For our earliest ancestors, the world of things seen and unseen was one. The visible and the invisible were intertwined with and cognitively inseparable from each other. The dual worlds of the physical and the spiritual, natural and supernatural, did not yet exist in the human mind.
Religious behavior gave these early people meaning, collective identity, and a reason for being. Meaning encouraged the development of language and social connection.
In evolutionary terms, religion provided the framework for cultures to creatively process and incorporate information about the world while maintaining social cohesion and emotional security. While there were tremendous and often conflicting differences between cultures regarding how they conceptualized themselves and the world around them, they were subject to the same evolutionary processes. They also shared belief in the supernatural and magical nature of reality, however they may have conceptualized it. Humans lived in a magical world of gods, and there were at least as many of them as those who believed in them.
In the West, this basic structure held solid until the 6th century BCE, when thinkers in Greece caused a tiny crack to appear in the foundation of reality. These thinkers, represented by Thales of Miletus, contested the widely held belief that the divine gods reveal all truth to us. They dared to claim the human power of investigative rationality to test the truths of and about the gods. This little crack grew slowly and steadily as rational thinking methods evolved in various cultures.
About 1000 CE, the great Islamic thinker Ibn al-Haytham developed what many view as the earliest form of the modern scientific method. Some 500 years later, during that period we call the Enlightenment, the irrationality and lack of empirical evidence for supernatural cosmology became too apparent for many scholars to ignore. They began to assemble a new and increasingly rational understanding of the cosmos. Over the centuries, these two learning methods have separated into incompatible and separate cosmologies, although it is common for people to mingle them unconsciously and irrationally.
Historically, to be religious is to be someone who has bound themselves to something meaningful through vocational vows of commitment. A meaning can be supernatural for some people and completely natural for others. Today, the idea of truth sourced in powers and stories from beyond nature is dissonant with the scientific cosmological reality that human reasoning and scientific investigation have revealed. Although many people still find much comfort in believing in supernatural powers, ancient stories, and traditions, those who embrace the cosmology of modern science find it increasingly difficult to make meaning of them.
We theologians have a large body of knowledge and experience with meaning. Theology deals with how human beings teach, share, and maintain the sense of human life, community, and culture essential for survival. Unfortunately, because we theologians have been reluctant to deal with the difference between meaning itself and the symbols and myths that contain and convey it, we have remained trapped in the prescientific cosmology of the supernatural. The result is that theologians are being excluded from much of the scholarly, intellectual, and scientific discourse that is rationally working to understand who and what we are and the nature of the cosmos in which we find ourselves.
Theology is valid and vital to the ongoing search for the truth about ourselves, our understanding of our cosmos, and the meaning we draw from them. However, to be a part of that conversation, theologians need to extend the definition of religion to be understood as a culturally universal behavior not confined to supernatural beliefs. We need to understand religion as being concerned with meaning rather than gods. This can be supernatural for some people and completely natural for others. Theologians must acknowledge that God is a product of our vital search for transcendent meaning and is open to critical thought and evaluation. We must rise to a perspective transcendent of the gods we have created and served. We must free ourselves from irrational supernatural thinking and re-conceptualize ourselves as grounded in an evolving scientific cosmology. Furthermore, we must take on the daunting task of re-mythologizing our knowledge. We must develop rich new symbols, narratives, and liturgies to facilitate the collective work of making durable meaning in systematic harmony with the contemporary scientific worldview.
WHP