‘It would be a mistake to believe that science will bring us to understand what reality is.’ Photo: Book cover of The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An essay on the hidden role of religious belief in theories by Roy Clouser
The Myth of Religious Neutrality by Roy Clouser
Author: Roy Clouser. Review by Jim Newmark
I have been a Christian for more than forty years. Until about three years ago I attended an Anglican church but I now believe that I simply did not understand my own faith. I am indebted to Roy Clouser and his book, which explains, in a way that I could understand, the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd.
The intricacies of Dooyeweerd’s arguments, fascinating and compelling as they are, are not important here. The relevance for me is in Clouser’s convincing definition of a religious belief (where ‘divine’ means having the status of not depending on anything else) and Dooyeweerd’s dismantling of reductionism.
The ‘Myth’ of Clouser’s title is the mistaken confidence that any individual can opt out of a religious belief. Under Clouser’s definition many, if not most, of the population of the western world are materialist in their belief that physical materials do not, ultimately, depend on anything else. The second half of the definition – how a person relates to this belief – is where the claimed ‘neutrality’ of the professed ‘non-religious’ person of his title comes in. Clouser demolishes this claim, indicating that in essence these are pagan beliefs (that is, believing that something created is divine).
Reductive assumptions have worked for science as we commonly understand it. But it would be a mistake to believe that it will bring all of us to understand what reality is. The reverse has actually been the case. Reductive theories have resulted in a loss of confidence about whether what we actually see around us is what really exists. Is that a tree, or is it a mass of electromagnetic waves or particles, or brain waves, or logical principals, or whatever? All this can bring nihilism.
The Old Testament was written before theory-making. This means that the use of the Bible as a scientific text is doomed to misunderstanding. For instance, it is nonsense to take the honorific ages of the patriarchs as literal chronological years; or assume that the ancients had a complex three-tiered cosmology when it is really a common-sense description of what people saw around them: sky above, earth below, sea and well-water beneath. Secondly, what is self-evident to the authors of Genesis remains self-evident to us – a tree is a tree to the deepest level of Creation. Everyday experience of intuition and common sense, repeated many times by every inhabitant of this Earth, should take priority over esoteric theories that we barely understand. The search for an ultimate prime mover other than God by any human method, rather than revelation, is doomed to failure. There is a carrot and a stick to this. The carrot is I need no special skills for this knowledge of reality to be accessible to me. The stick is that to believe anything other than this is to risk a glance from a jealous God!
