… the secular is not merely the indifferent site of human flourishing imagined by the prevailing liberal order. It is a metaphysical construct that defines our “social imaginary,” offering a total interpretation of reality that systematically excludes the apprehension of God from our operative notions of being, nature, knowledge, and truth. . . . “The secular” is not an argument against the rationality of belief. It is a comprehensive conception of reality devoid of God. This conception of reality dominates the modern world, and thus influences all of us . . . not at the level of argument, but as an axiomatic, unconscious, and therefore unquestioned assumption permeating our apprehension of everything. (Michael Hanby, “The Church of the Secular West”, p 24, First Things #345, August-September 2024)
I think that this passage well expresses the frustration of persons of faith in today’s intellectual world. Whereas in the days of Descartes, and even in those of Kant, the idea of God, however interrogated, was not questioned in itself. Today, believers face an intellectual community many or most of whose members simply consider God, and articles of faith in general, as unworthy of serious consideration, on the example of Creationists who affirm that the Darwinian conception of evolution is fallacious and that creation can only be understood as the product of a self-conscious creator. Such people can only be seen as misunderstanding the very principles of empirical science: once one proposes a transcendental will as an “explanation,” one has simply abandoned the realm of scientific discourse.
Attempting to affirm religious values in a world that simply has no place for faith comes to seem an impossible task. Yet, as I have tried to show in proposing a minimal hypothesis for the origin of the human scene, I consider Roy Rappaport’s intuition that religion and language are born in the same moment as certainly correct: we cannot conceive the origin of language and of all it implies without at the same time conceiving what Rappaport called the origin of religion, which is more rigorously stated as the origin of the sacred. The first sign must be understood as the product of the renunciation of appropriation, not as the result of an “inhibition,” but of a conscious decision, an act of conscience in response to a sense of external interdiction that acts upon the humans within the scene on which it occurs, and by which we define the sacred. Accordingly, when in Genesis God commands Adam not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, although all-powerful, he does not enforce his commandment (i.e., as an “inhibition”), but transmits it to Adam as an obligation to obey, leaving as always possible his failure to carry it out, while nonetheless recognizing it as his sacred duty. Or to put this more succinctly: at the moment of human origin, the sacred and the significant are the same.
If we retain this minimal characterization of the sacred, it becomes possible to avoid the evacuation of God that the above-quoted passage describes. No doubt “the sacred” is a much more flexible category than “God,” but what cannot be denied is that throughout history, the sacred has been associated with diverse real and conceptual entities, yet has never simply been absent from any human community of whatever dimension, even our own. An atheist who refuses to recognize an incarnate god however defined cannot deny the presence of the sacred in any human culture as the originary basis of its ethic, since it was experienced as an alien will before it could conceivably be associated with a nameable persona. We can theorize that the sacred embodies the collective will of the community as minimally defined by the scene on which it is experienced, but a “collective will” is a theoretical construct of the kind elaborated by philosophers who are reflecting on the phenomenon that in the first place is simply experienced as an external force that we feel obliged to accept, even if we do not honor this obligation. And those most hostile to religious ideas of any kind tend to treat as sacred the convictions of their conscience which, however aberrant, share the same imperative force.
Needless to say, offering this anthropological guarantee of the sacred is not the equivalent of making a profession of faith in a given religion. But what it does is to make clear that the sacred is at the foundation of the human community and cannot be understood as a mere fiction created by this community. The sense of interdiction/obligation inherent in the sacred and in our “conscience” that is aware of its command cannot be understood as the result of a decision by either an individual or the community of individuals present at the scene, but as a collective consequence of each individual’s desire to avoid conflict. This is not to say that we can claim that this conscience appears in all members of the group at the same time, merely that once this scene becomes the model for future scenes as a ritual of distribution, the sacred is shared unanimously, with whatever degree of self-consciousness suffices to bring about a common suspension of gestures of appropriation and their conversion into signs designating the desired object. We may say that only when this symmetry has become universally accepted can we speak of the birth of the human community.
Needless to say, this originary scene is the beginning of a long history branching into many different distributional and other practices. But we can affirm that at the origin, cultural stability can only be attained through the establishment of a universally accepted procedure that may be called a ritual since it involves coordination among all members of the community, such that obeying the command of the sacred permits the successful distribution of the potentially rivalry-inducing item(s) at the center of the group’s common concern. This is the prehistoric point of departure for ritual in general, and the participants’ common consciousness/conscience of the sacred is the inspiration for the religious beliefs that allow them to share their memories of a given ritual, which can then become subjects of discourse leading to supplementary religious conceptions and practices.
Thus “the secular” that rejects all religious behavior, while justified in the context of the laboratory, is by no means incompatible with the acknowledgement of the sacred in everyday life, nor are one’s beliefs and religious practices, however irrelevant to empirical science, devoid of utility to the human community that profits from the laboratory’s discoveries.
With this anthropological context as our point of departure, it is then possible to understand the ensemble of our religious practices from a non-fideistic perspective that at the same time does not deny their validity by obliging them to meet the test of the scientific laboratory. The separation first theorized by Descartes (see Chronicle 815) between the agora and the laboratory should not be taken to imply that the latter’s criteria must or even can be imposed on the totality of human thought processes. Declaring faith-based thought, or theology, “illegitimate” is itself only legitimate in contexts where laboratory criteria are applicable.
For we should not forget that the origin of language and “thinking” derive not from an obligation to subject all aspects of human life to the scientific method, but from our need to overcome the dangers aroused by the intensified mimetic rivalry that is the inevitable consequence of our ancestors’ increasing intelligence. The bottom line of human thought, as of all human activities, is the preservation and flourishing of our species. No doubt the claim of the faithful that their faith provides a superior guarantee of human flourishing than a way of thinking that actively denies that faith, that is, atheism as a belief-system rather than a mere attitude, cannot be said to have been demonstrated by the role of religion in history, but it certainly cannot be said to have been disproved. Faith and non-fideistic thought need only come into conflict if one of the two seeks to impose its perspective on the other.
There is no point in my attempting to propose practical solutions for, e.g., the question of public prayer. The point of this as of all the Chronicles is to define an anthropological perspective, that is, one that recognizes above all the human need for self-preservation under the circumstances that provoked the emergence of humanity in the first place, that is, the need for a “conscience” in which the sacredness of the need to preserve the human community is affirmed.
And the proof that the introduction of the principles of GA is not in conflict with this overall criterion is simply that, as anthropology has always done, it recognizes that its place is not to impose on religious or cultural practices of any kind the criteria of the scientific laboratory. The fact that when we watch a play or a movie we do not impose such criteria is taken for granted; but the same incompatibility exists in the practice of religion. No doubt religion is not a “fiction”; its different forms all affirm the reality of their object(s) of faith, indeed to the point of insisting that this is a higher reality than that of worldly objects. But once again, this is not a thesis that can be refuted by reference to scientific method. No doubt the tension between religious and scientific truth is felt more strongly in our era than it was by Descartes and most of his successors. But with the exception of religious movements that insist that religious affirmations are not simply “higher” than worldly ones but exist in the same domain and can therefore be used to contradict them, there is no need for these two forms of assertion to come into conflict.
Indeed, claiming that “God does not exist” is not truly a well-formed statement; the “existence” of God is not subject to the criteria of the laboratory. In the agora, where Socrates was condemned for having violated the religious duties of Athens, his acceptance of the hemlock should be seen not as an ironic or scornful gesture, but as a sign of his acceptance that in the last resort, and independently of the ultimate value of his philosophical ideas for the polis, the human community that it defines has the right to decide what activities are compatible with it. While at the same time, Plato’s subsequent (and permitted) activity affirms that in the Academy, in the margin of the agora, philosophizing would indeed find its place within Athenian society. The fact that this is the true point of departure for what we can call classical philosophy implies that his master’s death functioned as a quasi-religious revelation, that is, as something of broader social impact than the cogito .
No doubt discussion on this level does not begin to answer the practical questions of how to conduct a dialogue between anthropology and theology, or even whether such a dialogue can reach any useful conclusions. But given that faith, like language, is an anthropological phenomenon, rejecting it as “illegitimate” is hardly appropriate scientific behavior. Just as the contents of our conscience cannot be demonstrated to be true in the way that we can prove a mathematical theorem, neither can assertions within religious traditions. But we must remember that ultimately, all useful human activities must be conducive to the same results: the thriving of the human community however defined.
As for the question posed by, on the one hand, the apparent decline of religious practice in the West, and on the other, religion’s encouragement of resentment and its expression through barbaric violence in “postcolonial” contexts, these phenomena reflect the simple fact that, to put it in Judeo-Christian terms, the human world is not Paradise. The point of GA is not to promulgate a set of rules by which humanity can be assured of living in peace; but its overall purpose of seeking to understand the human is to aid us in judging the best course to preserve our species and the persons who compose it. To this end, the originary hypothesis as the model of all human behavior exemplifies the presence at the foundation of humanity of the sacred as the imperative deferral of violence.