Teaching at Gtown: The Problem of God

I’ve had several people ask for the book lists of the classes I’m teaching at Georgetown. So I figured, why not just put it all up on the blog?

This semester I’m teaching a class that is required of all Georgetown undergrads. It’s called “The Problem of God,” and when I first heard about it I was immediately intrigued. What a provocative name for a class, and I also was pretty quickly able to grasp what it was and why they had it as a requirement. I found my religion classes at BYU to be enlightening for the most part, but I would say the ones that helped me the most to get my mind blown were my Philosophy of Religion class taught by David Paulsen and my World Religions class taught by Roger Keller. When Professor Keller said “Every Mormon should be forced to take philosophy of religion, because we don’t even know the questions to which we have the answers,” I knew immediately what he was talking about precisely because I had taken the Philosophy of Religion class.

So I knew why Georgetown as a Catholic university, would require such a course. Quite frankly, a college education without knowing some of the basics of world religions or religion in general would be lacking. Yet how to teach such a course? There are no easy answers, certainly not ones that can be discovered and thought through in a mere semester. Hence, “The Problem of God.”

Religious Experience
In my class we begin by reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. The transcript of his 1901 Gifford Lectures, in the Varieties James explores the very many different facets of religious experiences. He wants to get at the root of religion, which he defines as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” He’s not interested in religion as a group activity, or a system, or a set of laws, or rituals, or anything else. He does his best (and does a dang good job) to collect myriad experiences to try to get to the very heart of religion—the actual experience with the divine.

After having discussed so many different experiences from many different backgrounds he then tries to make some sense of it all. What are we to conclude from the fact that Hindu’s, Mormons, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, and indeed people of all religions (or none!) have these experiences?

He concludes two things that I think are important. First, that we cannot be theologically specific from these experiences. Any attempt to draw hard and fast conclusions creates what he terms “over-beliefs,” beliefs not warranted by the data. His personal over-belief is that all these experiences together prove that there is a divine realm.

Second, that having the disparate religions that we do is an unequivocal good thing. “No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield to a point, another must stand firm . . . If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the totally human consciousness of the divine would suffer.”

Comparative Religions
In the next unit in the class we read chapters from Stephen Prothero’s God is Not One as well as An Anthology of World Scriptures edited by Robert E. Van Voorst. This unit is basically an abbreviated version of what you would find in any World Religions course. We only spend about two days on each of the major world religions, Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Daoism.

All Religions Are the Same
John Hick’s An Interpretation of Religion is the most philosophically rigorous argument that all religions are actually the same. In this he applies the phenomenal/noumenal distinction first discussed by Kant. Basically, we do not have access to things in themselves (the noumena). Whatever we experience of others, the things we touch, see, smell, etc. are all filtered through our experience. And that filter imbues things with more individual meaning and patterns and things than we normally think.

In short, when/if we do have a religious experience, we experience it through the lens of the tradition we were raised in. That’s why Hindu’s have experiences with becoming one with Brahman, or seeing an avatar of Vishnu, Christians may see an angel, or the Virgin Mary, etc. The Real (Hick’s term for the divine, God, etc.) presents itself to us, and we put our own meanings on it. So the differences between religions are really more cultural constructs than actual differences. Hence, all religions are actually the same.

All Religions Are Not the Same
Returning to Prothero, for this unit of the course we actually go back and read his introduction and conclusion, wherein he argues that Hick and others like him are doing a great injustice to the world’s religions in saying that they are all the same. Prothero thinks that those who make the argument ignore large chunks of the data that disagree with them, water the world religions down to something that doesn’t actually resemble what they are, and in short makes a mockery of the wonderful variety of religions and religious systems that mankind currently takes part in. We also read the chapter on the New Atheism, which is becoming more and more popular with such bestselling works as Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, and others. New Atheists are definitely a rising force to be reckoned with, and a treatment of religion in the world today would be ill advised to ignore them. So we don’t.

Conclusions
At this point we’ve covered individual experiences, talked about the major systems of religion, argued that they are the same, and that they are not the same. In the end, I tell my students, there are no easy answers to the questions that religion poses to us and our lives, if there are any answers at all.

I will conclude with this quote, which has been misattributed to Marcus Aurelius, yet reflects the closest thing to a real answer I think we can get at in this life unequivocally:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.