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The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable
The United States is one of the most highly educated societies on earth, and also one of the most religious. In The God Problem, Robert Wuthnow examines how middle class Americans juggle the seemingly paradoxical relationship between faith and reason.
Based on exceptionally rich and candid interviews with approximately two hundred people from various faiths, this book dispels the most common explanations: that Americans are adept at keeping religion and intellect separate, or that they are a nation of “joiners." Instead, Wuthnow argues, we do this—not by coming up with rational proofs for the existence of God—but by adopting subtle usages of language that keep us from making unreasonable claims about God. In an illuminating narrative that reveals the complex negotiations many undertake in order to be religious in the modern world, Wuthnow probes the ways of talking that occur in prayers, in discussions about God, in views of heaven, in understandings of natural catastrophes and personal tragedies, and in attempts to reconcile faith with science.
Based on exceptionally rich and candid interviews with approximately two hundred people from various faiths, this book dispels the most common explanations: that Americans are adept at keeping religion and intellect separate, or that they are a nation of “joiners." Instead, Wuthnow argues, we do this—not by coming up with rational proofs for the existence of God—but by adopting subtle usages of language that keep us from making unreasonable claims about God. In an illuminating narrative that reveals the complex negotiations many undertake in order to be religious in the modern world, Wuthnow probes the ways of talking that occur in prayers, in discussions about God, in views of heaven, in understandings of natural catastrophes and personal tragedies, and in attempts to reconcile faith with science.
- GenresSociologyPhilosophy
350 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2012
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July 23, 2015
Is there a “God Problem?” To hear the speeches or to read certain anti-theists or philosophers who assume that their version of logical positivism is correct, there definitely is. When such thinkers speak of people of faith as “ignoring the facts,” they have a basic lacuna with regard to their own system because they forget how relative our systems of epistemology have become in the post-modern age. Those who oppose people of faith assume (rather arrogantly) that people of faith do not have their reasons for attempting to reconcile science and faith, that their idea of prayer is akin to the superstition of a lucky horseshoe (p. 9), or they are “uninformed” with regard to facts (p. 10).
The God Problem is a sociological exploration of what people really believe about God, often in the words of Wuthnow’s interviewees. He begins with the words of those who believe that religion is, in John Dewey’s philosophy, an alternate loyalty that threatens citizenship (p. 15) and that religion is potentially destructive (p. 15). Then, comes back to the idea that believers are “uninformed” or “ignorant” and exposes the fallacy, observing that only 11% of college-educated individuals in the United States of America do not believe in God in some way and, lest one think that said belief in God is about an amorphous, inconceivable force rather than a “personal” God, Wuthnow cites a poll indicating that 38% of college-educated people in the survey ask God for help every day (p. 22). But neither Wuthnow nor his interviewees are satisfied with belief by itself. Rather, Wuthnow defines belief (on behalf of himself and his interviewees) as a lever “…that moves almost everything else in life.” (p. 34)
The chapter on prayer, “Talking to God,” is based on an interesting assertion that prayer is “…behavior to which we ascribe meaning. It is meaningful because we think about it—puzzle over it, interpret it, find reasons for doing it, and make guesses about what it does to us or for us.” (p. 51) Wuthnow then interviews people from all theological perspectives about how they actually pray, what they actually say in their communication with God, as opposed to what their denominations say. Some of these are very problematic with regard to the orthodoxy people espouse. In spite of teaching about God’s transcendence, many of the interviewees actually said that “…God would finish answering one prayer before helping somebody else, despite believing that God could do many things at once.” (p. 61) Many of the interviews used a psychological schema, not daring to ask God for a mechanical intervention, but “…to give them an idea of what they can do to strengthen themselves.” (p. 63)
It’s even uncomfortable to read Wuthnow describe what he called “contingency referents” which tie God’s actions to human action or circumstances (p. 69). Those who tend to put “if” in every prayer or claim that they didn’t get the answer they sought because they didn’t pray fervently enough would be those who subscribe to this schema of prayer. “Contingency referents are especially evident in the conditions petitioners say they themselves must fulfill in order for God to answer their prayers. They have to be patient, in the right frame of mind, quiet, obedient, sincere.” (p. 71) It is clear that many of the interviewees were more focused on what they were and could do rather than who God might be and what God might do.
However, I found Wuthnow’s insights on prayer as ritual and ritual as part of understanding domain juxtaposition to be very insightful. Domain juxtaposition is particularly important for the spiritual person because the idea of a transcendent God and a spiritual human implies the possibilities for overlap between infinity and finitude, perfection and imperfection, power and weakness, etc. As the human being “maps” out her/his understanding of God’s position vis-à-vis her/his position, the weakness or imperfection of the human underscores the power and perfection of the deity. The deity’s strength is shown in contrast with the weakness of the petitioner and, as a result, the person becomes stronger and the awareness of the deity becomes even stronger (p. 77). So, after a brief excursus into some anthropological studies (across several cultures), Wuthnow asserts the probability that when humans offer prayers which delineate human limitations, they are implicitly expressing the lack of limitation with regard to the divine, a lack of limitation that mere humanity cannot comprehend except in the abstract (p. 78).
I disagreed with Wuthnow’s idea of code switching, the idea that shifting rapidly back and forth between spiritual terminology and psychological expressions was invalid and somehow dishonest. For example, I like the idea of the Catholic nurse who describes her idea of prayer as being more than words, but a spirit of openness or sense of awareness (p. 82).
The chapter on “Big Scary Catastrophes” was essentially a sociological survey of the problem of evil. Wuthnow doesn’t come up with any clear-cut answers, but recognizes that the best (or, at least, most rational) solutions seem to have something to do with God’s self-limitation (p. 132) and, often, human causality (pp. 110, 129). The most useful concept in this chapter was the acknowledgement that bad things allow for collateral beneficence (pp. 140, 147).
The chapter on the “afterlife” begins with a comment that a “heaven full of believers” would be one person’s idea of hell (p. 154). But after this humorous opening, Wuthnow devastates the conventional argument that heaven is mere wish-fulfillment as consolation for suffering or perceived deficiency in this life. If this were so, we would expect people’s belief in heaven to increase with age. To the contrary, a national survey in 2006 showed: 70% of those in their twenties, 74% in their thirties, 76% in their forties, 75% in their fifties, 71% in their sixties, and 60% for those in their seventies and eighties (p. 158).
Unfortunately, the “supply side” objection to heaven is harder to refute. This economic theory suggests that, because people who are more invested in religious organizations (aka “churches”) and it is to the institutional advantage to inculcate assurances about heaven, one would expect that there would be a definite correlation between church attendance and belief in heaven (p. 162). Since the top three nations in church attendance (Philippines, Chile, and the U.S.A.) are also the top three believers in heaven (p. 163), this seems to check out. A further corollary of the “supply side” idea is that religious organizations “compete” for this type of “investment” / ”commitment.” There is even a quotation from a rabbi in Chicago who had started teaching about life after death, saying, “My people hear about it all the time from your people. So now they expect to hear it from me.” (p. 164)
Yet, there is an anomaly. The same statistics show that while only 9% of the United Kingdom’s population goes to church, 57% believe in heaven (p. 164). Add Norway, Iceland, Finland, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia to the mix and you have other populations where belief in heaven significantly exceeds being “invested” in the religious organizations (p. 165).
After indicating that speaking of matters like heaven requires a cultural lexicon, Wuthnow says something very important. He states, “Belief implies a lack of certainty.” (p. 175) It carries more weight than opinion because the individual will have thought about it and considered the evidence, but it is still something for which the individual only has reasonable certitude. In that sense, belief in God or even belief in heaven makes sense even from a rational standpoint. Several times in this chapter, the author describes the responses of interviewees as the tension that stems from “…using the known to imagine the unknown and believing that the unknown in this case cannot be described this way.” (p. 193) That seems very helpful in terms of the wide disparity in terms of descriptions of heaven from the interviewees.
In “Jesus Sets You Free,” Wuthnow cautions about the tension between spiritual freedom (language about spiritual transformation as well as implications for everyday life) and cultural freedom where there are meanings that really don’t have much (or any) bearing on spiritual freedom (p. 214). He points out that, because there can be rational decisions that bring enlightening or transformation to a person, reasonable believers have to be careful not to overstate the effect of spiritual transformation without carefully “hearing” what others are suggesting (p. 215). For example, a skeptic like Richard Dawkins would hear a person testifying about being freed instantly from an addiction after praying to receive Christ as an expression of belief in “magic.” (p. 217) Yet, a person who said that they went to a 12-step program and gradually started to experience the freedom spoken of in the Bible would be considered rational (p. 217). “Freedom in Christ” needs to be interpreted because the idea of freedom is discussed in contexts other than religion (p. 222).
One listing of matters from which believers are freed would include feelings. Reasonable people affirm that Jesus has set them free from: fear and insecurity (p. 224), as well as the destructive actions we call sin (p. 223). “Accounts of gaining freedom from unwanted feelings through Jesus emphasize personal choice. It is significant that they do because, on the surface, the assertion that ‘Jesus sets you free’ implies that the person involved is merely a passive object in the process.” (p. 225) This is counter-intuitive to what one might expect and signals a healthy walk of faith in the interviewees who so responded. “The other point of emphasis in making it seem reasonable that Jesus frees people is the idea that this freedom comes as part of a process involving effort, rather than happening instantly or automatically.” (pp. 228-9)
After a few pages warning about the danger of conflating the ideals of freedom in U.S. culture with those ideas concerning spiritual freedom (p. 241), the next major subject becomes the so-called conflict between faith and science. After citing those who believe that religious belief sets back science for generations (p. 249) and those separatists who believe that each approach must stay in different domains, the book seems to side with “both-and” advocates who agree with Stephen Jay Gould that “…science tells us what the universe is made of while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value.” (p. 250) The author suggests, nevertheless, “Science and religion come into conflict because neither stays neatly in its respective sphere.” (p. 255)
I like the recognition that the advancement of science, to some degree, curtailed the influence of the three dominant institutions in earlier times (clergy, nobility, and burgesses—p. 256) as a way of understanding why the spheres of science and religion collide today. He rightly points to “boundary work” where both perspectives encroach on the other with malicious intent to delegitimize the other (p. 258). This results in what Paul Ricoeur called “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a very helpful phrase for understanding how one’s opposition might refer to concealed self-interest (Note: Ricoeur was referring to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud asserting that religion was concealing political and economic interests in their day, but it also applies to science’s self-interest in perpetuating research grants and institutions.) and self-aggrandizement (p. 261). I particularly liked the Abraham Heschel quotation cited on p. 263: “Hubris, the tragic sin of our time, is the conviction that there exist only laws of nature and technology.”
The chapter on conclusions observes that “reasons” are what scholars of culture call “accounts” and “accounts” are essentially narratives of how one arrives at one’s decision (p. 293). Wuthnow assures his readers, “People continue activities for which they have good reasons and abandon activities for which they do not. Having good reasons to believe in God suggests that this belief will continue, whereas having no reasons may be a harbinger of flagging commitment.” (p. 294) Those “accounts” rest in that constant tension between claims that cannot be completely verified and the tacit epistemology of everyday life (which is practical and naturalistic (p. 296). The key to reasonableness, then, is what Wuthnow calls “discursive management” or using schema and devices that, consciously or unconsciously, communicate uncertainty (p. 301). No reasonable person should be too certain and what cannot be verified beyond subjective knowledge.
The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable is an interesting work of social observation. It doesn’t offer the experimental insights for which I’d hoped when I selected the work, but it offers useful qualitative studies and a few citations from quantitative studies. I received some benefit from reading the volume, but it didn’t offer as many new insights as I had hoped.
The God Problem is a sociological exploration of what people really believe about God, often in the words of Wuthnow’s interviewees. He begins with the words of those who believe that religion is, in John Dewey’s philosophy, an alternate loyalty that threatens citizenship (p. 15) and that religion is potentially destructive (p. 15). Then, comes back to the idea that believers are “uninformed” or “ignorant” and exposes the fallacy, observing that only 11% of college-educated individuals in the United States of America do not believe in God in some way and, lest one think that said belief in God is about an amorphous, inconceivable force rather than a “personal” God, Wuthnow cites a poll indicating that 38% of college-educated people in the survey ask God for help every day (p. 22). But neither Wuthnow nor his interviewees are satisfied with belief by itself. Rather, Wuthnow defines belief (on behalf of himself and his interviewees) as a lever “…that moves almost everything else in life.” (p. 34)
The chapter on prayer, “Talking to God,” is based on an interesting assertion that prayer is “…behavior to which we ascribe meaning. It is meaningful because we think about it—puzzle over it, interpret it, find reasons for doing it, and make guesses about what it does to us or for us.” (p. 51) Wuthnow then interviews people from all theological perspectives about how they actually pray, what they actually say in their communication with God, as opposed to what their denominations say. Some of these are very problematic with regard to the orthodoxy people espouse. In spite of teaching about God’s transcendence, many of the interviewees actually said that “…God would finish answering one prayer before helping somebody else, despite believing that God could do many things at once.” (p. 61) Many of the interviews used a psychological schema, not daring to ask God for a mechanical intervention, but “…to give them an idea of what they can do to strengthen themselves.” (p. 63)
It’s even uncomfortable to read Wuthnow describe what he called “contingency referents” which tie God’s actions to human action or circumstances (p. 69). Those who tend to put “if” in every prayer or claim that they didn’t get the answer they sought because they didn’t pray fervently enough would be those who subscribe to this schema of prayer. “Contingency referents are especially evident in the conditions petitioners say they themselves must fulfill in order for God to answer their prayers. They have to be patient, in the right frame of mind, quiet, obedient, sincere.” (p. 71) It is clear that many of the interviewees were more focused on what they were and could do rather than who God might be and what God might do.
However, I found Wuthnow’s insights on prayer as ritual and ritual as part of understanding domain juxtaposition to be very insightful. Domain juxtaposition is particularly important for the spiritual person because the idea of a transcendent God and a spiritual human implies the possibilities for overlap between infinity and finitude, perfection and imperfection, power and weakness, etc. As the human being “maps” out her/his understanding of God’s position vis-à-vis her/his position, the weakness or imperfection of the human underscores the power and perfection of the deity. The deity’s strength is shown in contrast with the weakness of the petitioner and, as a result, the person becomes stronger and the awareness of the deity becomes even stronger (p. 77). So, after a brief excursus into some anthropological studies (across several cultures), Wuthnow asserts the probability that when humans offer prayers which delineate human limitations, they are implicitly expressing the lack of limitation with regard to the divine, a lack of limitation that mere humanity cannot comprehend except in the abstract (p. 78).
I disagreed with Wuthnow’s idea of code switching, the idea that shifting rapidly back and forth between spiritual terminology and psychological expressions was invalid and somehow dishonest. For example, I like the idea of the Catholic nurse who describes her idea of prayer as being more than words, but a spirit of openness or sense of awareness (p. 82).
The chapter on “Big Scary Catastrophes” was essentially a sociological survey of the problem of evil. Wuthnow doesn’t come up with any clear-cut answers, but recognizes that the best (or, at least, most rational) solutions seem to have something to do with God’s self-limitation (p. 132) and, often, human causality (pp. 110, 129). The most useful concept in this chapter was the acknowledgement that bad things allow for collateral beneficence (pp. 140, 147).
The chapter on the “afterlife” begins with a comment that a “heaven full of believers” would be one person’s idea of hell (p. 154). But after this humorous opening, Wuthnow devastates the conventional argument that heaven is mere wish-fulfillment as consolation for suffering or perceived deficiency in this life. If this were so, we would expect people’s belief in heaven to increase with age. To the contrary, a national survey in 2006 showed: 70% of those in their twenties, 74% in their thirties, 76% in their forties, 75% in their fifties, 71% in their sixties, and 60% for those in their seventies and eighties (p. 158).
Unfortunately, the “supply side” objection to heaven is harder to refute. This economic theory suggests that, because people who are more invested in religious organizations (aka “churches”) and it is to the institutional advantage to inculcate assurances about heaven, one would expect that there would be a definite correlation between church attendance and belief in heaven (p. 162). Since the top three nations in church attendance (Philippines, Chile, and the U.S.A.) are also the top three believers in heaven (p. 163), this seems to check out. A further corollary of the “supply side” idea is that religious organizations “compete” for this type of “investment” / ”commitment.” There is even a quotation from a rabbi in Chicago who had started teaching about life after death, saying, “My people hear about it all the time from your people. So now they expect to hear it from me.” (p. 164)
Yet, there is an anomaly. The same statistics show that while only 9% of the United Kingdom’s population goes to church, 57% believe in heaven (p. 164). Add Norway, Iceland, Finland, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia to the mix and you have other populations where belief in heaven significantly exceeds being “invested” in the religious organizations (p. 165).
After indicating that speaking of matters like heaven requires a cultural lexicon, Wuthnow says something very important. He states, “Belief implies a lack of certainty.” (p. 175) It carries more weight than opinion because the individual will have thought about it and considered the evidence, but it is still something for which the individual only has reasonable certitude. In that sense, belief in God or even belief in heaven makes sense even from a rational standpoint. Several times in this chapter, the author describes the responses of interviewees as the tension that stems from “…using the known to imagine the unknown and believing that the unknown in this case cannot be described this way.” (p. 193) That seems very helpful in terms of the wide disparity in terms of descriptions of heaven from the interviewees.
In “Jesus Sets You Free,” Wuthnow cautions about the tension between spiritual freedom (language about spiritual transformation as well as implications for everyday life) and cultural freedom where there are meanings that really don’t have much (or any) bearing on spiritual freedom (p. 214). He points out that, because there can be rational decisions that bring enlightening or transformation to a person, reasonable believers have to be careful not to overstate the effect of spiritual transformation without carefully “hearing” what others are suggesting (p. 215). For example, a skeptic like Richard Dawkins would hear a person testifying about being freed instantly from an addiction after praying to receive Christ as an expression of belief in “magic.” (p. 217) Yet, a person who said that they went to a 12-step program and gradually started to experience the freedom spoken of in the Bible would be considered rational (p. 217). “Freedom in Christ” needs to be interpreted because the idea of freedom is discussed in contexts other than religion (p. 222).
One listing of matters from which believers are freed would include feelings. Reasonable people affirm that Jesus has set them free from: fear and insecurity (p. 224), as well as the destructive actions we call sin (p. 223). “Accounts of gaining freedom from unwanted feelings through Jesus emphasize personal choice. It is significant that they do because, on the surface, the assertion that ‘Jesus sets you free’ implies that the person involved is merely a passive object in the process.” (p. 225) This is counter-intuitive to what one might expect and signals a healthy walk of faith in the interviewees who so responded. “The other point of emphasis in making it seem reasonable that Jesus frees people is the idea that this freedom comes as part of a process involving effort, rather than happening instantly or automatically.” (pp. 228-9)
After a few pages warning about the danger of conflating the ideals of freedom in U.S. culture with those ideas concerning spiritual freedom (p. 241), the next major subject becomes the so-called conflict between faith and science. After citing those who believe that religious belief sets back science for generations (p. 249) and those separatists who believe that each approach must stay in different domains, the book seems to side with “both-and” advocates who agree with Stephen Jay Gould that “…science tells us what the universe is made of while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value.” (p. 250) The author suggests, nevertheless, “Science and religion come into conflict because neither stays neatly in its respective sphere.” (p. 255)
I like the recognition that the advancement of science, to some degree, curtailed the influence of the three dominant institutions in earlier times (clergy, nobility, and burgesses—p. 256) as a way of understanding why the spheres of science and religion collide today. He rightly points to “boundary work” where both perspectives encroach on the other with malicious intent to delegitimize the other (p. 258). This results in what Paul Ricoeur called “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a very helpful phrase for understanding how one’s opposition might refer to concealed self-interest (Note: Ricoeur was referring to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud asserting that religion was concealing political and economic interests in their day, but it also applies to science’s self-interest in perpetuating research grants and institutions.) and self-aggrandizement (p. 261). I particularly liked the Abraham Heschel quotation cited on p. 263: “Hubris, the tragic sin of our time, is the conviction that there exist only laws of nature and technology.”
The chapter on conclusions observes that “reasons” are what scholars of culture call “accounts” and “accounts” are essentially narratives of how one arrives at one’s decision (p. 293). Wuthnow assures his readers, “People continue activities for which they have good reasons and abandon activities for which they do not. Having good reasons to believe in God suggests that this belief will continue, whereas having no reasons may be a harbinger of flagging commitment.” (p. 294) Those “accounts” rest in that constant tension between claims that cannot be completely verified and the tacit epistemology of everyday life (which is practical and naturalistic (p. 296). The key to reasonableness, then, is what Wuthnow calls “discursive management” or using schema and devices that, consciously or unconsciously, communicate uncertainty (p. 301). No reasonable person should be too certain and what cannot be verified beyond subjective knowledge.
The God Problem: Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable is an interesting work of social observation. It doesn’t offer the experimental insights for which I’d hoped when I selected the work, but it offers useful qualitative studies and a few citations from quantitative studies. I received some benefit from reading the volume, but it didn’t offer as many new insights as I had hoped.
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