The short essay, Is Religion a Crutch, first appeared in August 2007. The essay and the sermon that inspired it, in retrospect, were significant milestones on a journey that eventually led in January 2010 to an intensive study and practice of Judaism. That study and practice in turn is now focused on a disputation (patterned on a lawsuit/indictment of sorts) depicted in the Book of Job. I have found a delightful and highly intelligent companion and guide in William Safire's, The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics.
An engaging aspect of Judaism (at least in some variations) involves constant re-thinking of the relationship of man and divinity, variously imagined as wrestling with an angel (Jacob); the woman who laughed at Hashem for promising her a child and heir in her eighties (Sarah); Abraham negotiating for the salvation of a few good souls before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; or Tevye chastising Hashem for the burdens of his life in Fiddler on the Roof.
The Book of Job clearly ranks among the most perplexing and disturbing stories of the Bible along with Abraham's near sacrifice of his only son. How can these intentional acts be reconciled with the concepts of justice, kindness, mercy and omnipotence? What are we to make of the frequent genocidal acts of the Israelite conquest of Canaan? For that matter, was it really necessary to wipe out humanity in the Great Flood? Weren't the Ten Plagues and the inundation of Pharoah's pursuing army a trifle over the top? Why put the tempting fruit in the garden in the first place?
The Book of Job serves as a sort of summation of these arguments against the existence of a just order in the universe through the intentionally inflicted suffering, at the hands of the Satan but with divine go-ahead, of the most righteous among men. Essentially, the Satan (the original Devil's Advocate) asks for a test of the purity of Job's faith and worship by posing the question: how do we know whether Job is righteous for the obvious material rewards that he has been blessed with, the usual herds of camels, goats, oxen and sheep, a loving and beautiful wife, and a host of children all above average? In the story, God accepts the wager and lets the Satan go to work, inflicting emotional distress on the innocent Job (but horrific pain, suffering and death) on all of his children in addition to wiping out all his livestock and material possessions. Job, of course, remains ignorant of the wager, but nevertheless remains steadfast in his faith and worship. Further afflictions are then visited on Job himself, leading to his wife's suggestion that he curse God and die rather than put up with this raw deal. Again, he declines, but does curse the day he was born and serves up an indictment against the divine injustice of things, an implicit rebuke of the Almighty.
Job then gets cold comfort from three friends. The first, Eliphaz, the Temanite, pleads the case that Job's suffering is part of a cosmic general retribution for something that may be akin to inherent human imperfection. In the King James version:
4:7-8 Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off? Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.
Eliphaz also takes Job to task for hubris he sees in Job's curse of his birth:
4:17 Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?
As Safire points out, this and other passages must be read as suffused with irony since it has been stipulated (as facts may be at trial) in the wager with the Satan that Job was pure as the driven snow. Job repeatedly protests his innocence, an innocence to which God, the Satan and the reader are privy, but not Job's interlocutors.
Then comes Bilbad, the Shuhite, restating, sharpening and focusing the argument of Eliphaz makes it personal, but lays the blame on Job's children:
8:3-7 Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice? If thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression; If thou wouldest seek unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to the Almighty; If thou wert pure and upright; surey now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of they righteousness prosperous. Thogh thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase.
Again, as parties to the wager, we cannot reconcile Bilbad's account with the stipulated facts. We know Job's refutation to be well founded.
The comes Zophar, the Naamathite, further honing the accusation and laying blame to make it personal to Job:
11:2-6 Should not the multitude of words be answered? and should a man full of talk be justified? Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed? For hast thous said, My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in thine eyes. But oh that God would speak, and open his lips against thee; And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are double to that which is! Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.
Bluntly put, Job is told to shut up and stop whining. He is too small and finite to understand God's purpose and surely deserves what he is getting. Again, we know it ain't so, at least as to deserving what he is getting.
Enter from nowhere a fourth voice, not a friend, the young whippersnapper Elihu, with an indictment against lawyers that I do not take personally. This translation comes from the New English Bible, much closer to the original Hebrew meaning:
36:15-19: Those who suffer he rescues through suffering and teaches them by the discipline of affliction. Beware, if you are tempted to exchange hardship for comfort, for unlimited plenty spread before you, and a generous table; if you eat your fill of a rich man's fare when you are occupied with the business of the law, do not be led astray by lavish gifts of wine and do not let bribery warp your judgment. Will that wealth of yours, however great, avail you, or all the resources of your high position?
No pain, no gain. A pretty hard sell knowing what has been stipulated.
Then comes a scene which probably inspired a parallel encounter in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. This from the King James version:
38:1-4 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man: for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
This and more intimidating intimations of mortality go on for another chapter or so, but no clear and direct answer to Job's complaint of injustice comes forth from the whirlwind. When called to respond, Job (like Dorothy) says meekly as it appears in the Jewish Publication Society Hebrew-English Tanakh:
40: 4-5 See, I am of small worth; what can I answer You? I clap my my hand to my mouth. I have spoken once, and will not reply; Twice, and will do so no more.
More metaphorical thunder and lightning ensue, as if the abject apology for complaining about manifest injustice were not enough, and Job says:
42: 2-6 I know that You can do everything, That nothing you propose is impossible for You. ho is this who obscures counsel without knowledge? Indeed, I spoke without understanding Of things beyon me, which I did not know. Hear now, and I will speak; I will ask, and You will inform me. I had heard You with my ears, But now I see You with my eyes; Therefor, I recant and relent, Being but dust and ashes.
Job does, indeed, shut up and stop whining, as advised in a gradation of ways by his three friends and the young interloper Elihu. An epilogue follows, neatly tying up the loose ends in an entirely unsatisfactory way by restoring Job's camels, sheep, goats and oxen (lions and tigers and bears, oh my) though nothing further is said about the preceding slaughter.
In the Wizard of Oz, we have the dog Toto to thank for pulling back the curtain to reveal the machinery that resides in the whirlwind. Dorothy then confronts the almighty Oz in a fashion that sets him back on his heels. The protagonists are rewarded for their suffering in an imaginative award ceremony that puts them in touch with their inner resources.
I will not attempt here and now a theory of the Book of Job that will can compete with that devised in the Wizard of Oz or by that word wizard Safire. After all, Job was from the land of Uz, a jurisdiction where other laws may apply. But I would like to agree with Safire that the Book of Job, through the sly use of irony, does fulfill a Toto-like purpose. We are left to ponder the big questions of good and evil and how to reconcile a belief and worship of a power that appears to be, in Woody Allen's memorable phrase, a chronic underachiever when it comes to fulfilling his promises to righteous people. In that sense, the Book of Job is a powerful and poetic precursor to the Socratic dialogues, in particular Plato's Republic. The ultimate challenge of Job is the call to wrestle with Providence, and to figure out what that means.
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IS RELIGION A CRUTCH?
Part bravado, part taunt, uttered in contempt, "religion is a crutch" in the mouth and mind of the speaker, reduces faith to a desperate illusion. In the brave new world sans religious faith, the clear-eyed skeptic (in his own eyes) ascends to heroic (dare we say demigod like) status by fearlessly embracing a godless accidental universe that, like individual lives, ends abruptly and without purpose. Two prominent spokesmen for this well-traveled point of view are Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion and A Devil's Chaplin, among other tracts, and Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
One can almost hear between the lines, that rousing poem learned many decades ago in middle school:
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstances
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of change
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the year
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Were this a story along the lines of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a faint order of sulfur would be in the air. But, I think, the better parallel comes from Greek myth or tragedy and, instead, we should be able to smell the wax burning from the wings of Icarus.
I do not contend with Professors Dawkins and Dennett. In fact, I concede that religion is a crutch. In turn, I ask the esteemed Professors to concede that science is a crutch. I also ask them to concede that science and certain aspects of religion, equally, are faculties of mind that are necessarily and undeniably the result of natural selection either on genes or memes.
Now let's define some terms -- "religion", "science" and "crutch". With some humility, let's start with "crutch". In partial deference to the Oxford Don, the The New Oxford American Dictionary will serve as my authority on this point, though the concepts of "religion" and "science" may require more elaboration. I had considered the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, but it has a little too much information for present purposes. Two definitions appear: "1. long stick with a crosspiece at the top, used as a support under the armpit by a lame person [in sing.] figurative a thing used for support or reassurance; They use the Internet as a crutch or support for their loneliness. 2. archaic another term for CROTCH (of the body or garment.) I think we can safely rule out the second definition and the literal meaning of the first definition as pertinent to the discussion. I believe that Professors Dawkins and Dennett would agree.
Note the use of the term "used" in the definition. Although the dictionary physically describes a crutch, the figurative usage depends entirely on a metaphorical analogy to the use of a crutch. In other words, a crutch is a type of tool designed for a specific use. Humans themselves sometimes describe themselves as homo habilis, the animal that makes and uses tools, crutches included. Tools essentially make up for the many biological deficiencies that humans, described by Aristotle as featherless upright bipeds, have when compared to, for example, cheetahs when running, Australian shepherds for herding sheep (or humans for that matter) and falcons for flying, which brings us back, for the nonce, to Icarus.
Now to the tougher terms. Religion, according to our dictionary of preference, is either/and/or "1. the belief in a god or gods who made the world and who can control what happens in it: I never discuss politics or religion with them.; 2. one of the systems of worship that is based on this belief: the Christian/Hindu/Muslim religion." This definition probably works fairly well for Dawkins and Dennett in view of their primary agenda: the defeat of attacks on the concept of evolution by means natural selection from certain organized religious groups who in turn feel quite threatened by, in their view, the Dawkins and Dennett assertion that science trumps their theology, or worse, constitutes an act of theocide.
Much of the ink has been spilt, in recent times, on the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to natural selection as the mechanism for evolution in American secondary classrooms. A readable and excellent summary of that conflict can be found in Kenneth R. Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. More about Miller's attempted synthesis in a later essay.
With its focus on "god or gods" and the creative agency attributed thereto, this definition of religion excludes, among others, practitioners of Taoism as well as Buddhism and, a fairly hefty segment of the world's population. Dawkins and Dennett, though they focus primarily on the creation aspect of some religions, do in fact appear to have a more ambitious agenda of removing from the realm of reality any basis for a moral way of life grounded in any kind of rational foundation. Such systems, they seem to imply, cannot co-exist with a rational science. "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." River Out of Eden at 14.
This brings us, then, to a definition of science. Oxford tells us that science is 1. the study of and knowledge about the physical world and natural laws; or 2. one of the subjects into which science can be divided, e.g. biology, physics and chemistry. To this we should add, I think without objection from either Dawkins or Dennett, that true science generally results from a method that requires the formulation of a hypothesis based on the observation of facts that can then be verified or falsified by testing the hypothesis in a clinical or natural experiment capable of replication. I take this to be a simplified statement of the scientific method as stated in Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations.
Earlier in this essay, I called upon Dawkins and Dennett to concede that science is a crutch just as I conceded that religion is a crutch. Now I must explain why both concessions are necessary. A crutch, you will recall, in the literal sense is a useful tool fabricated by a human for the purpose of compensation for one of humankind's many biological deficiencies, namely a susceptibility to lameness that four or more legged animals seem able to cope with admirably by employing one of their redundant appendages. In the figurative sense, a crutch is a thing used for support or reassurance.
Perhaps you think I have given up the game by first conceding that religion is a crutch in both the literal and figurative senses. The truth of the matter, every religion that I can think of begins with the premise, undeniably true, that all men are limited and finite with an imperfect understanding of a vast and apparently unlimited universe in space and time (or space-time). Given the human condition, a crutch of some sort would seem to be necessary and desirable to cope with, well, the infinite and the place of man in that infinity. Why else go on?
But you might say, crutches are the devices of men. Are you then saying that religions are also invented by men? Did man invent God? And if you say that, don't you concede that all religions are, in fact, illusions, having no basis in reality?
Frankly, I am unaware of any religion that is not associated in a one-to-one mapping with humans. No evidence indicates the existence of religion prior to the emergence of humans; no other species engages in practices that we would accept as evidence of religion. The jury is still out, of course, as to whether such conditions may be found, eventually, either in the geological record or on other planets in other solar systems.
The same can be said of science, and more to the point, the scientific method. Clearly, and undeniably, science and the scientific method are crutches (useful tools) associated in a one-to-one mapping with humans. No evidence indicates the existence of science prior to the emergence of humans; no other species engages in practices that we would accept as evidence of science. The jury is still out, of course, as to whether such conditions may be found, eventually, either in the geological record or on other planets in other solar systems.
We might also add that science, or at least the scientific method, is a relative latecomer to the human toolbox, say within the last 400 years or so. Given the evidence of religion in human societies almost as soon as there were human societies and the nearly universal presence of religions in all relatively long-lived societies would seem to suggest that religion, or at least certain aspects of religion, have either adaptive value in the survival and perpetuation of the species (be fruitful and multiply), or at the very least, place no negative burden on the carrier of the God gene or God meme as the case may be. It may be too early to tell whether the same can be said of science, especially in view of the fact that science has produced various means to achieve the annihilation not only of the species, but also the planet.
Some interesting work has been done to identify the so-called God gene, defined as a propensity in the bearer toward spirituality. See, e.g. Dean Hamer's The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes. Suffice it to say that this research poses a very difficult problem for those who would argue, on the basis of natural selection as the mechanism driving evolution, that religion is an illusion while science is not. The ability to do and understand formal science is something reserved to a relatively small percentage of the species. The ability to practice and appreciate religion, in one form or another, appears to be nearly universal. I take this truth to be self-evident as a necessary implication of evolutionary theory: the creation endowed all people with certain inalienable cognitive functions, a primary one being spirituality.
More on this in the next essay.
POSTSCRIPT
The title of this essay was inspired by a sermon delivered last Passover by Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg of Beth T'filoh Synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland, where my father-in-law has been a member for most of nearly nine decades. The ideas expressed, however, grew out of a discussion among my son, my wife's godson, my father-in-law and me at my father-in-law's home when an Orioles game was rained out a few years ago. The discussion went well into the evening and continued among father, son and godson on the trip back to Washington from Baltimore. I leave it to the reader to decide whether Book I of The Republic of Plato was also a source of inspiration.
