When I was in the college classroom introducing religious worldviews to my students (being a city college, some of the students were middle-age), I used an analogy to help them consider how a religious or spiritual worldview might differ from one that is purely secular, say, of a humanist or existentialist kind, or simply one, not necessarily coherent as a whole (perhaps in part not even intelligible) and thus more like a bricolage, assembled from this or that source, more or less intentionally, but still functioning like an ideology or worldview for most purposes in the lifeworld of the student (unlike science, religions, so to speak, can and often do proffer a ‘theory of everything’). I would ask them to consider how a physicist might describe their desks (a description that may vary a bit depending on the particular field of physics) in comparison to how they might describe them. The student would say things like, the desk is ‘hard’ to the touch, it ‘solid,’ it is this or that color, made up of parts, including metal and wood, inert, and so on.
Needless to say, and depending on how our physicist understands the nature of matter (at the very least, the desk consists of different sorts of particles dancing around, that is, anything but inert), the description of the desk by a physicist will be radically different from this everyday description that relies on our senses and basic (‘folk’) knowledge (i.e., which is dependent on a number of fairly standard concepts and categories) of what are sometimes referred to a “middle-” or “medium-sized” objects in the natural and social worlds. In any case, what we have here are two rather different accounts of the same object, two pictures, if you will. Many philosophers today, at least those who are not “scientistic” or traffic in the imperialism of science (or even one science, physics), would say that neither picture represents the one true description, that each is true, as we say, in its own way, according to the conceptual parameters of vocabulary and discourse which have been created for specific and discrete purposes and functions, one in the language of physics, the other the vernacular language of everyday life. We can have, in principle, pluralistic descriptions of the same “objects,” each being relatively true (and assuming neither aspires to ‘absolute’ truth). Insofar as theories and pictures change and evolve in the natural and social sciences, the physicist of the future may describe our desk somewhat differently from the physicist of today, while our student of the future will more or less likely say the same things about our desk (unless the material and design of desks itself changes). That may not be relevant for the analogy unless it somehow speaks to questions of custom, tradition, and norms.
Thus a religious or spiritual person and our non-religious person understands and views the same world in different ways, arguably not quite as different as the respective descriptions of our desk, although religious mysticism (one that is a significant part of more than a few religious worldviews, east and west) should be viewed as an exception, serving as a better fit or at least more akin in fact to our model of radically different descriptions. I don’t want to belabor the analogy, which was used merely to soften the students up in the sense that those who were quite ignorant, skeptical, or simply dismissive of religions altogether might as a consequence come to be a bit less judgmental or less dispositionally hostile to religious “pictures.” I also invoked numerous examples of religious art around the world as part of this attempt to soften if not alter their beliefs and attitudes on this score. I was of course not trying to convert anyone to any one religious worldview, but attempting in my awkward way to get them to be open-minded, a quality one would think should come naturally to our young charges, but given child-rearing and pedagogical practices, and the nature of our society more generally, that often does not appear to be the case. What I am doing is not dissimilar, at least in spirit, from what James Kellenberger attempts in his book, The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (University of California Press, 1985). While my analogy is quite simple and straightforward, Kellenberger’s strategy is more sophisticated, including an attempt to be less polemical when it comes to adjudicating and assessing treatments of knowledge generally and rationality or reason in particular within religious worldviews. Kellenberger discusses the two main approaches to the “cognitivity” of religion among both insiders and outsiders (or emic and etic approaches) which we will introduce with the following list:
(i) rationalist perspective v. anti-rationalist perspective
(ii) knowledge perspective v. anti-knowledge perspective
(iii) knowledge perspective v. faith perspective
(iv) cognitivist belief perspective v. non-cognitive belief perspective
(v) intellectual perspective v. inwardness perspective
Kellenberger is not happy with these crude and somewhat reductionist dichotomies so he proffers two predominant perspectives at work in the question of the cognitivity of religion: (I) one oriented negatively toward knowledge and the cognitive, the First Perspective, and (II) one oriented positively toward knowledge and the cognitive, the Second Perspective. I can only sketch a few facets of his treatment, but they should suffice by way of acquiring a strong sense of the differences between these two perspectives or orientations to the cognitivity question. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (and the so-called Neo-Wittgensteinians), in importantly different ways, exemplify the First Perspective, while the likes of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas argue that rationality or reason is inherently good and thus not necessarily at odds with religious belief (I suspect Pascal is betwixt and between these two perspectives owing to his unique approach to religious belief and faith, an approach crystallized in his locution, ‘reasons of the heart’). To be sure, Kellenberger provides us with instances of philosophers and theologians who fall into one or other perspective depending on the specific topic being addressed.
Kellenberger concludes that “both perspectives are attractive, [for] both appeal with good reason to aspects of religious sensitivity [and sensibility]. Consequently it is not surprising that some philosophers, like Robert Herbert and John Hick [and, I would add, Ninian Smart], tend toward one perspective on some issues and toward the other perspective on other issues. And it is not surprising that some philosophers, like Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, show an ambivalent tendency toward both perspectives on certain single issues.”
Kellenberger argues that whether or not we are religious adherents, “believers or non-believers,” we can see clearly that the two approaches are no less “antithetical” and “pull in different directions,” perspectives that in some measure at least, I think, are captured by and played out in the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians refer to as the ‘Old’ Testament, and thus superseded by the ‘New’ Testament). Kellenberger suspects this state of affairs leaves us dissatisfied, and thus it is natural for us to seek some sort of resolution, a via media or a “third perspective” that transcends while subsuming much of what remains salient or indispensable in the first two orientations. Before going further I should note that Kellenberger is discussing our topic primarily on the basis of presumed knowledge and familiarity with Abrahamic religions, especially Judaism and Christianity (Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, are mentioned rarely and only the latter is cited as being of some relevance to his treatment), although I am convinced his model would require little modification by way of rendering it cross-culturally applicable if not robust and I gather from scattered comments throughout the text that Kellenberger would welcome such an extension, that is, not only of the First and Second Perspectives, but a “third perspective” as well.
Kellenberger elaborates a “Third Perspective” regarding the cognitivity of religion rather than settle on a via media (it seems unlikely that this would satisfy either party) to resolve or simply attempt to weaken the conspicuous differences between the two predominant perspectives or orientations. He frankly admits that the focus of his “third perspective” will be on “its Judeo-Christian manifestations” (in keeping with the earlier elaboration of the first two perspectives), although he does not believe “that it is limited to that heritage.” In the words of Kellenberger, the “third perspective”
“… is embodied in the reflections of certain though not all mystics, in the sensibilities of the authors of various devotional works, and pre-eminently in the Psalms. … [I]n the Judeo-Christian tradition the home of the Third Perspective is in the Psalms and secondarily, in certain mystical and devotional works. At least this is true so far as written religious expression is concerned. One could also say that the home of the Third Perspective is found in the lives, the sensibilities, and the self-understanding of many individual believers.”
Suffice to say that had I been teaching graduate students about the cross-cultural examination of worldviews, rather than community college students who confessed to knowing very little about religions, including those in which some of them had in fact been raised, and thus assuming they had already taken undergraduate courses in the study of such worldviews, I would have used Kellenberger’s model rather than my simple if not awkward analogy by way of giving them a taste of what is unique in the comparative study of worldview pluralism wherein religious worldviews are distinguished in several important respect from non-religious or secular worldviews.
Part II will begin to fill out some of the details of what Kellenberger means by this Third Perspective of the model of cognitivity in religious worldviews.
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