Abstract
Ronald Dworkin (D), who died in February 2013, was a very respected writer in jurisprudence. Religion without God is a short, posthumously published book based on lectures he gave in Basle in 2011. Throughout his career he held that judgements stating what was good/right or bad/wrong could be true or false rather than simply the expression of what court or lawgiver decided. ‘Do not steal,’ being a command is neither true nor false; but ‘Theft is wrong’ purports to be true. In the pure positivist tradition from Protagoras through William of Occam it is ‘true’ only if it is asserted by an authority entitled to command, which for Occam was God and for modern radical positivists, the legislature. Theft is wrong only because the command ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is given by one entitled to command those to whom the command is addressed. According to D, the proposition, ‘theft is wrong,’ may be, and in fact is, true.
From that background, Dworkin introduces the idea of religion without God. He acknowledges that ‘historically, and for most people still, a religion means a belief in some sort of god’ (p. 108). In the USA, at first, the right to freedom of religion was understood to mean the freedom to choose one rather than another religion; later the US Supreme Court extended that right to include the right to practise no religion. How, then, is conscientious objection to be taken if claimed on ‘religious’ grounds? The Court ‘properly interpreted a statute … to include an atheist with the same convictions’ (p. 114). The right to religious freedom is now interpreted to refer to important convictions; and so it is better to adopt ‘a concept of religion that is deeper than theism’ (p. 109).
Religion without God is an effort to develop and clarify that idea. Not unreasonably, many will hesitate to use the word ‘religion’ in that way but it is, I think, worth pursuing; for he is trying to identify an intellectual and felt context shared between religious theists and religious atheists: ‘expanding the territory of religion improves clarity by making plain the importance of what is shared across that territory’ (p. 5). Two values that he takes ‘as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life [are] life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty’ (p. 11). One’s life is ‘an achievement complete in itself, with its own value in the art of living it displays…. We face death believing we have made something good in response to the greatest challenge a mortal faces…. That is a religious conviction if anything is’ (pp. 158–59). He knows but does not stress that none of us has done only good, but as the Christian prayer says, we have done much that we ought not to have done and much that we ought to have done we have left undone; still, that realization, which comes not alone as we face death but at various times throughout our lives, is not confined to theists.
For D the religious dimension extends to the intellectual life: ‘To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend … this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness’ (p. 3 quoting Einstein). That knowledge and feeling is shared by religious atheists and theists; their account of the experience differs. For the former what manifests itself is the unknown that in science we strive to know; for the latter it is the unknown that we call ‘God.’ D—and this is the theme and value of his book—concentrates on what is shared. For the non-religious atheist, ‘the naturalist’ as D calls him, ‘Only those parts of the universe that produce pleasure in our sight can be, for him, beautiful’ (p. 48). D is convinced of the ultimate value of what is but does not identify that value with God or with any intimation of eternal union with God; ‘to have achieved something good is the only kind of immortality we can imagine or have any business wanting’ (p. 159). For him the beauty and value of what is—the universe including our good acts within it—are beautiful and valuable independent of our understanding. The universe is not beautiful and valuable because we find it so: ‘The religious attitude accepts the full, independent reality of value. It accepts the objective truth of two central judgments about value…. that human life has objective meaning or importance … [and] … that “nature”—the universe as a whole in all its parts is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime; something of intrinsic value and wonder’ (p. 10).
D was an atheist but the book is not, nor is it meant to be, an argument to support atheism or to refute theism. He does not pretend to put forward an argument to show that God does not exist. He examines no argument that tries to show that He does. What concerns him are what once were called the Transcendentals—the One, True, Good, and (sometimes) the Beautiful. What he opposes is the view that what exists is simply a valueless fact—and that ultimately the universe including ourselves is without beauty or value. For him, the religious attitude ‘insists on the full independence of value’ (p. 12). The universe is valuable independently of my thinking it to be.
Theologians, except perhaps those who think of Tillich as D does (pp. 34–37) will find his discussion of Leibniz and his treatment of the question as to why the universe is (pp. 77–82) unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, they ought not dismiss the book, for in Ireland nowadays there are, crudely, three kinds of atheist: the indifferent to whom God does not matter; the antagonistic for whom God and religion are evils to be extirpated; and religious atheists. Religion without God describes religious atheism and is an eirenic invitation to theists to appreciate it.