Theism and Atheism in the Work of W. C. Smith: A Buddhist Case Study

Abstract

Buddhists often call themselves nontheist. Western scholars and religious thinkers often call Buddhists nontheists or atheists. However, the eminent theologian and historian of religion W. C. Smith argues that Buddhists, in fact, have faith in God. His most sustained development of this argument is in the second chapter of his Faith and Belief, entitled The Buddhist Instance: Faith as Atheist? (Smith 1979). A critique of Smith's position will help clarify some of the issues involved in a discussion of the interrelations between God, Nothing, and the Ultimate. Smith begins his chapter with this characterization: The only true atheist is he who loves no one and whom no one loves; who does not care for truth, sees no beauty, strives for no justice; who knows no courage and no joy, finds no meaning, and has lost all hope (20).2 Of course the early Buddhists, to whom he restricts his discussion,3 were not atheists in this sense (21). One wonders if any human being could be atheistic in that sense. Rather, Smith says that the atheism of early Buddhists involved an explicit rejection of the theocentric view (21). Certainly the Buddha taught that God or the devas (gods) had neither soteriological nor cosmological roles (21; 190, n. 4). As Smith notes, this nontheism was confusing if not offensive to Westerners when they first encountered Buddhists. In fact, the first reaction was to deny that the Buddhist movement was a religious one, which on functionalist grounds alone can be refuted (21). Latterly, Western scholars have put forward the Buddhist concepts of nirvana (the mysterious goal of the Buddhist path) and dharma4 (the fundamental moral law of human existence) as parallels to the Western notion of divinity or God (23-30). Smith argues that the key issue is not whether or not some Buddhist beliefs are close to Western theistic beliefs (25). Smith has stated in other works that beliefs are not primary; faith is. Thus, he argues here that the early Buddhist system, rather than centering on beliefs, is one that leads individuals to faith and hence to seeing for themselves the Truth that Buddha discovered.