The popular understanding of religion needs to be evolved. The commonly accepted definition doesn’t take into account how we have come to understand ourselves and our cosmos. The current understanding of religion contextualizes itself in, and restricts itself to, a supernatural cosmology that prohibits a more comprehensive and scientific understanding 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 through which they 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 the purpose of my life?” This question is a consequence of our being self-conscious. We all respond to the question in our own unique way as informed by genetics, familial and cultural environment, personal experience, education, and a multitude of other factors. Our spirituality is a description of how each of us makes 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 at the very start of the emergence of human self-consciousness, in close association with the development of language and human culture. As it still does, religion reflected the way we humans sought to understand the world around us and our relationship to it. At first, our understanding was extremely limited. 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 nascent understanding of causality.
A primary characteristic of religion is its ability to provide human life with some form of benefit. This is particularly clear in the case of our early human ancestors, who found themselves living in an unpredictable and often dangerous environment. They sought control over the mysterious forces to which they were subject everywhere and at all times of their lives. Instinctively, they recognized the importance of maintaining close social bonds with their immediate and extended family because it was much more effective to deal with life as a group than to try to do it on one's own.
It’s understandable that when these early people tried to comprehend what was going on 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 in the hope of influencing them and mitigating their actions. These attempts to communicate through sounds and gestures became ritual. The use of ritual produced a sense of the sacred. Some members of the clan became recognized for their seeming skill in dealing with these powerful others, and they too gained a sacred aura. Each clan developed their own religious beliefs, the rituals that expressed them, and the leaders who interpreted them through ritual, visions, and the telling of sacred stories.
For our earliest ancestors, the world of things seen, and things unseen, was a unity. The visible and the invisible were intertwined with, and cognitively inseparable from, each other. The dual worlds of the physical and the spiritual, of the natural and the supernatural, did not yet exist in the human mind.
Religious behavior provided these early people with meaning, a collective identity and 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 great and often conflicting differences between cultures in terms of 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 there were 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. Represented by Thales of Miletus, these thinkers questioned the accepted fact that all truth is revealed to us from the divine gods. 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 methods of rational thinking 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 clear for many scholars to ignore. They began to assemble a new and increasingly rational understanding of the cosmos. Over the centuries, these two methods of understanding have separated into incompatible and separate cosmologies, although it is still 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 has 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 inculcate, share, and maintain the meaning of human life, community, and culture that is essential for our 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 has a valid and vital contribution to make to the ongoing search for the truth about ourselves, our understanding of our cosmos, and the meaning we draw from them. But to be a part of that conversation, theologians need to extend the definition of religion to be understood as a culturally universal behavior that is not confined to the realm of supernatural beliefs. We need to understand religion as being concerned with meaning rather than gods. Meaning can be supernatural for some people and completely natural for others. Theologians must acknowledge that God is a human ideation produced by our vital search for essential and transcendent meaning, and subject to critical thought and evaluation. We must rise to a perspective transcendent to the gods we have created and served. We must free ourselves from irrational supernatural thinking and re-conceptualize ourselves as grounded in evolving scientific cosmology. Furthermore, we must take on the daunting task of re-mythologizing our knowledge. It is urgent that we get to work developing rich new symbols, narratives, and liturgies to be able to facilitate the collective work of making durable meaning in systematic harmony with the contemporary scientific worldview.
WHP