Challenging the New Atheism: Pragmatic Confrontations in the Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

This contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion turns out to be, as the last chapters unfold, an explication and defense of Josiah Royce's religious philosophy. If confrontations between pragmatism and atheism were this book's subject, Shepherd disguises a clash as a clever collaboration. Philosophy supplies their common ground. His hopes for philosophy of religion, revealed in the final chapter, situate philosophy in a supervisory role over religion. That position is presumed as the first chapter unfolds, which is nominally about New Atheism's tangles, but it is actually about the disciplinary tussle over defining religion. How religion should be understood, and what service to humanity may religion perform, are matters for philosophy's rational adjudication. On that, pragmatism and atheism have heartily agreed. Atheism ably points out religion behaving unreasonably, and pragmatism can point to reasonably religious conduct. Middle chapters about nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalizations of theology illustrate that twinned critique. An affiliation, or even an alliance, between pragmatism and atheism appears inevitable. However, this all turns out to just be stage setting. By the book's end, the reader is led to understand that only Josiah Royce's theistic absolutism of The Problem of Christianity can comprehend religion's reasonable purpose and destiny.Efforts to situate Royce's methodological approach towards religion occupy this book's early chapters. Philosophy of religion should be more like religious studies than theological systematizing. Neither dogma nor theology, according to Shepherd, shall enthrall and command a globe of diverse religious communities. Dogma's subservience promotes sectarian strife, while theology's parochial categories cannot respect ill-fitting forms of religion. Scorning “spiritualism” as well for its individualism, Shepherd expects community, and devoutly loyal community, to deliver human goods for universal human needs. Whatever the gods may want falls beneath philosophical consideration. Shepherd gradually builds a case for religion achieving its fulfillment in communalism. All religions shall be held accountable to ethical standards of philosophy's design, for societal integration and planetary harmony. This is truly a humanist and modernist vision, which would plausibly account for that opportunity beckoning in pragmatist and atheist collaboration.Shepherd actually has no agenda for compelling pragmatism to directly confront atheism. Pragmatism couldn't have much to do with New Atheism; it was already implicated with Old Atheism, that secularizing humanism ready-made for accommodating science and democracy. On a singular point, whether religions are vital to the new world order, atheists and pragmatists could take divergent stands. Yet it must not be imagined that atheism and pragmatism, two intellectual movements of significant potency since the mid-1800s, do not overlap. Many pragmatists have been (effectively, if not avowedly) nonbelievers or unaffiliated with any religion, while religious and secular humanism trace many principles back to pragmatist theses about nature, intelligence, ethics, and society. If New Atheism, represented by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, must sound so out of tune with pragmatism, their unabashed ignorance of philosophy and ethical humanism is the explanation, rather than anything about pragmatism.Shepherd has an affinity with religiosity, sounding as friendly with religion as the pragmatists discussed in his book. There is nothing doctrinaire anywhere in view. Shepherd's line-up of pragmatist thinkers—Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Josiah Royce—cannot be classified as conformist or conservative. No church membership or denominational allegiance was strong enough to distort their philosophies. Peirce's deity is more stoically panentheistic than Christian; James defended the will to believe in ethical transformation, not eternal salvation; Dewey naturalized God as morally cooperative nature; Follett's acquaintance with Quakers and Unitarians appears incidental; and Royce was happily nonconformist about his mostly invisible community centered on an idealized Jesus. An intellectualist and progressivist regard for religiosity's future, as a later phase of Protestantism's reconstruction of religion for evolving into compassionate socialism, seems to be a safe generalization about their joint aspirations.Shepherd's exegeses of classical pragmatists, and his own plans for a pragmatist philosophy of ethical religion, occupy later chapters. Initial chapters point out glaring academic and philosophical weaknesses of New Atheism, only to admit how New Atheist critiques of dogmatic and theology-laden religion mostly hit their deserving targets. Like so much of that genre for “contra New Atheism” literature, New Atheism in Shepherd's hands is to be castigated not for critiquing religion, but for repeating in a bluntly disrespectful manner precisely what liberalizing theology has been patiently professing for two centuries. New Atheism at most offers indictments against bad religion, or bad people cloaked in religion, but never lands a blow against good religion. Foolishly discarding good religion cannot be a good thing for good people. Safely liberalized and democratized religion must raise up a counter-protest against this upstart atheism, upholding its worthy immunity from anti-clerical and anti-supernatural screeds. Shepherd's excursions through various responses to New Atheism amount to the familiar and unsurprising view that good religion is (by definition) philosophically and ethically reasonable, so New Atheism unreasonably denigrates all religion.Underpowered responses to atheism trouble Shepherd far more than New Atheism's overgeneralizations. The second chapter's survey of analytic philosophy of religion illustrates his key concerns. If atheism (old or new) is mistaken, in what sense could religion still simultaneously be meaningful and knowledgeable? When A. J. Ayer applies positivism to dismiss both theism and anti-theism as meaningless misuses of propositional language, or when Alvin Plantinga applies foundationalist epistemology to insulate his religious faith from any disconfirmation, they have effectively sidelined philosophy from evaluating religion's functionality or rationality. Owen Flanagan's naturalistic compromise, allowing belief in religious belief to yield comforting meaning, simply excuses philosophy from asking religion to know anything about reality. Wesley Wildman's empirical inquiries into religious experience similarly require an additional interpretative dimension, ensuring that religiosity connects the religious with the cosmos, rather than just other humans. The chapter concludes with Shepherd's proposal that pragmatists offer the needed interpretive framework for religiosity's meaningful knowledge.Chapters 3 and 4 marshal a variety of liberal religious voices from Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher to Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and John Caputo. Subtracting theological constructions one after another, postmodernism at last points to religion's surpassing of both essentialism and skepticism. Functionalism remains, where continental philosophy concludes and pragmatism had long ago begun. Philosophy in the hands of pragmatism, according to Shepherd at the outset of chapter 5, can recast religion's role in society as right, righteous, and irreplaceable. Isolating a conceptualized category for “religion” is hopeless; identifying a concretized purpose is productive. That purpose is “integration” in a broad sense of “(1) its orientation toward an ‘unseen’ widest order; (2) its arising out of a specific kind of conflict: namely, the problem of salvation; (3) its involving an act of Grace; and (4) its necessarily interpretive, symbolic character” (167, italics in original).Shepherd then outlines main views of religion and society offered by Peirce, James, Dewey, Follett, and finally Royce. Only Royce, it turns out, fulfills all four functional criteria for integrative religion. Royce's “absolute voluntarism” in the Beloved Community, organized around “the reality of a universal agent, capable of intention, interpretation, and insight” (186) is metaphysically cosmic and salvific to a sufficient degree. So, we are now to understand, religion was really, really all about a personal supernatural God all along. Shepherd does admit that Royce's religious philosophy is “more than pragmatist” (187). The fulfilment of that multi-century theological retreat from an unreasonable God we can't understand turns out to be a God trying to understand us.If an author were to try to bury an intriguing defense of Royce underneath debates among modern and postmodern philosophies of religion, while thrusting that topic behind the showy façade of New Atheism controversies, it would be difficult to do better than this book. All the same, Royce's religious philosophy deserves an exegetical and philosophical comparison with major figures since Kant. Shepherd's convoluted exhibition is a welcome and useful effort in that direction.