Theism Without Religion: Why Non-Sectarian Theism is Not Very Costly

Recently, substacker Bentham’s Bulldog published a post entitled ‘Why I am not a Christian’, in which he explains his reasons for skepticism about Christianity despite being a theist who is sympathetic towards it. A particularly interesting comment that caused much discussion was as follows:

“Big picture, it’s noteworthy that you 1) Are a theist 2) Think Christianity is the most plausible religion and 3) Think Christianity is false. This seems to imply that you think none of the popular world religions are true. In my opinion, this is quite a strong claim as a theist since it implies that God is very hidden - sufficiently hidden that no large group of people have correctly figured out who he is. That is, the God who is responsible for fine-tuning, psycho-physical harmony etc has no interest in saying Hello to the conscious creatures that he made. I think it’s more likely that God would be revealing than not revealing, conditional on theism, and this should be weighed up against any claim that God is real but no religion is true.”

I am very interested in this comment, and in the rest of this post I will examine it. My claim will be that the ‘strong commitment’ of being a non-sectarian theist is, in fact, a) not very epistemically costly and b) something that comes with many advantages. There is, however, a sense in which one does bear a burden, but I am skeptical it is a significant one.

Let me begin with the question of one’s commitment to God as being hidden. There are many senses in which one might believe this, only some of which are incompatible with one being uncommitted to any particular religion. I will examine two. First, suppose that God being hidden means that he has not in any manner or fashion been in contact with humanity, or had any sort of relationship with humans. This is a sense of being hidden that the non-sectarian theist need not endorse. For, even if God has not revealed himself through any particular religion, he may very well be in a relationship with a great many people. Perhaps, for instance, God is indeed in a personal, spiritual relationship with many people even though the claims of any particular religion do not represent him accurately. Perhaps a relationship with God does not look like how many people expect it to be: that is, it does not involve affirmation of any particular doctrinal creed or even the belief that there is a God, but instead an orientation towards a certain kind of life: whether that be a moral life or a spiritual life. God may be intimately involved in the lives and hearts of many people and at the same time Christianity and all other religions may be mostly untrue. Therefore, in this sense of God being ‘hidden’, a non-sectarian theist need not endorse such hiddenness: they could easily remain agnostic between the thesis that God is entirely hidden, or between the myriad of ways he could be non-hidden and yet not accurately represented through any religious tradition. Notice, then, that God may well have ‘revealed’ Himself in a great variety of senses without Christianity (or any other specific religion) being true.

A second sense of hiddenness—and this appears to be the interpretation the commenter above must make for their claim to follow—is simply that no major religious tradition has largely accurate doctrine and creeds in their system built around theism. God is then hidden in the sense that, as the commenter put it, no specific, large group has come to form a correct system of beliefs around His existence. Note, however, that the claim that God would create religion as revealed through a specific tradition is one that is antecedently quite committal. It cannot be justified merely by appealing to the good of a relationship with God or some sort of contact between God and humans in general. This is because it involves many highly specific commitments about who God is and what He would do: such as appearing to a group of people at a very specific time to engage in selective revelation in ways that can often seem baffling, the inspiring of very specific texts, the establishment of particular dogmas, and so on. And, indeed, there seem to be at least several foundational moral principles that speak against such arbitrary intervention. Moral egalitarianism is generally considered to be foundational in modern ethics in the sense that we do not let arbitrary differences between people reflect their access to tremendous goods. This gives us some reason to suspect that any kind of arbitrary, selective revelation should not happen if there is a God who is perfectly just and loving. My conclusion is, then, that insofar as the sectarian theist must affirm that God is hidden in the second sense under consideration is much less epistemically risky than it appears: indeed, it is the affirmation of this claim that is most specific and requires a whole host of controversial issues that lead to thorny problems for theism.

The above point relates to the next part of my claim about non-sectarian theism: it significantly dampens the force of several arguments against theism. I will consider just two: the argument from religious diversity, and the argument from flawed religions.

One version of the argument from religious diversity, in rough sketches, can be put as follows: there are a great many tremendously significant goods that sectarian theists claim obtains from one committing to the right sort of religious belief. These include matters such as salvation, greater knowledge of our ultimate end and purpose, greater access to relationship with God and happiness, greater knowledge of the appropriate response to the divine, and so on. However, if the goods of knowing God exists are so significant, we have good reason to believe they should outweigh the goods associated with God being hidden in the sense that only people in an arbitrary time, place and culture have access to them. The importance of correct belief for attaining many goods then appears to be in tension with two facts: the widespread religious diversity we observe, and the reality that many genuinely rational seekers fail to acquire such belief despite their best efforts. My point is that believing that belief in the ‘right tradition’ is significant is in evidential tension with the fact of tremendous religious diversity that is not only cultural but built into our very evolutionary core, which largely disposes us towards a general belief in the supernatural that does not necessarily align with theism, let alone any one religion. There are many other related arguments: another, for instance, from Timothy Perrine, suggests that if Christianity is true, we ought to expect that we have an innate faculty towards theism in particular, which we do not. This is not the medium to discuss the varied and rich literature on these sorts of arguments. The point I want to make is this: for the non-sectarian theist, many versions of this problem do not arise at all. They do not arise because the non-sectarian theist does not believe that any religious tradition accurately represents God and is therefore essential for significant goods or makes some grandiose claim about our religious faculties or reality, and so there is nothing especially significant about religious diversity. They may still face trouble with God’s hiddenness in another sense: but they have at least avoided several thorny issues that plague the sectarian theist.

The second argument I mentioned is that from flawed religions. The thought behind this sort of argument can be stated in many ways, but I will highlight three general observations: a) religious books tend to be a very mixed bag, containing both morally insightful and morally horrendous information, and inaccurate, ahistorical information in addition to historical information b) religions do not stand out as universal moral exemplars or forces for good: they are associated with moral triumph and misdeed, much like other human institutions and c) religious transformation does not strongly lead to a more ethical life, just as distransformation does not strongly lead to a less ethical life. The thought about these facts is that if God has revealed himself through one very specific religion, given that He is the well of perfection and of supreme moral character, one would expect that His institution would impressively stand out. Again, one can say very much about this argument, and I will have to rest a partial case for it in one simple example. Imagine that an alien species were to come to earth that was wholly unacquainted with our culture but had general moral and scientific sense. Suppose we then provided them with the great books and history of our world, including that of philosophy, religion, science, and so on. Would these aliens conclude that any one religion or holy book obviously and easily stood out as of an enormously higher standard, such that no reasonable person could claim it was a merely human product? I claim they would not, and they would agree that the claim that a given religion is a human invention is one they would regard as a belief one can rationally hold. Of course, a sectarian theist might try to provide reasons why religion does not stand out as especially impressive despite the fact that it accurately reveals him. Whatever they say, however, it is clear for the non-sectarian theist, this issue does not arise in the first place. Their beliefs stand in no evidential tension with the data, since they have no commitment to any religion being true and therefore likely to best reflect a perfect being to begin with.

We have now seen that there are at least two arguments that take on many forms and can be levied against sectarian theism that the non-sectarian either does not face, or faces a more muted version of. Note that even if there are potential explanations of these two facts for the sectarian theist—something I am skeptical of but will not defend here—these explanations will very likely not be complete or certainly correct. They will require a set of auxiliary assumptions that certainly will not have an epistemic probability of 1, which all but guarantees the sectarian theist will have an evidential hit to their theory that the non-sectarian theist does not take.

Nevertheless, there is still an issue for the non-sectarian theist. This is the issue of how probable it is, prior to considering the evidence that counts for non-sectarian theism, that sectarian theism would be true to begin with. For if one believes that given that theism is true, it is likely that God would reveal himself in human affairs, then it may be that we ought to have a high prior on sectarian theism before considering the evidence. I believe this is the sort of motivation in many commenters' minds when they talk about the idea that God would be ‘revealing’, or, as Aron Wall added, God would want to provide a ‘means of salvation’ to humans. How promising is this route for arguing that there are strong epistemic commitments to non-sectarian theism?

I should first note that this question is closely related to the first one we examined about what the non-sectarian theist needs to say about God being hidden. This can be seen clearly by examining the reasons one might give for why God would be ‘revealing’. For instance, perhaps the best reason one can provide for why God is revealing is to put Himself in a relationship with persons. As we have seen, however, the non-sectarian theist can not only accept this motivation: they can argue that moral considerations, and ultimately the facts about the extent to which God has revealed himself supports their position about how God would reveal himself over the position of sectarian theism. There are other arguments one might offer. Two that come to mind: first, perhaps God would want to put Himself in contact with humans to reveal moral truths or lessons to them, perhaps precisely to provide salvation to them. Again, it is not clear that this requires a particular religious tradition. For instance, perhaps God does this by progressively revealing moral truths to humanity as a whole, or by guiding all those to a relationship with Him precisely by them seeking the good generally. I also doubt that there is a very good argument that, antecedently, this is a highly likely given theism: even if it were likely that God should put us in such as abhorrent condition so as to need moral lessons (something I doubt can be given a good justification), it seems much more controversial to say that that the solution is that which Christianity tells us it is, for instance. It may seem obvious this is so from the Christian perspective, but what we require is an argument that is compelling independent of the truth of that perspective. This point applies doubly so for the second argument I can think of: which is a direct sort of argument that something like the incarnation of God as described by the Christian tradition is the sort of thing that is likely on theism. This would indeed motivate sectarian theism of even the Christian sort for the sake of establishing one’s priors, but deriving that claim from theism independent of the truth of Christianity is, I believe, highly formidable. As much as any Christian may already have the intuition that God needed to become embodied in human form in ancient Rome to save us from our condition, I think many non Christians reasonably have the intuition that there is something enormously arbitrary and strange about a specific sort of intervention for that purpose and in that way, but not for the myriad of other reasons God might have intervened in history, or become incarnate.

My aim in this piece was to show that the idea that non-sectarian theists shoulder a strong epistemic burden is mistaken. I believe sectarian theists tend to severely overestimate the ease with which one can derive from theism a prediction that God would establish a particular religious tradition, especially given the peculiar ways religious traditions have tended to come about in human societies. When one examines what exactly non-sectarian theists must say and what they need not say about hiddenness, what emerges is that it is sectarian theists who are committed to a highly specific and tendentious claim about theism, whereas non-sectarian theists can hold to—or stay agnostic between—a wide variety of claims about the sense in which God is hidden. In fact, their options appear to accord much more with the evidence than the claims of sectarian theists. One ‘in-between’ option worth mentioning: perhaps some perennialist claim about theism is true, in which case all religions in some sense reveal truths about God. The advantages and disadvantages of this view are well-known, but it is a view one could take, or even be agnostic about, as a non-sectarian theist without accepting more specific doctrinal claims about a particular religious tradition.

Since I do believe non-sectarian theism is in many ways a more modest, plausible view than sectarian theism, I am somewhat surprised that it is so rarely endorsed. I say ‘somewhat’ only because I think what non-sectarian theism can claim in modesty, it loses in all the most important reasons people actually believe in God. I do not think people are religious or believe in God—in the vast majority of cases—because of some epistemic judgment about the landscape of evidential considerations we have just reviewed. Religion plays an essential communal role in the human experience: one of our strongest, innately oriented desires is to have strong ties with others that enhance our sense of belonging and put us in tribes that instill us with traditions. Sectarian theism is precisely the vessel that provides this sort of role for people: and so few people outside those who embrace theism for entirely philosophical, theoretical reasons will likely ever endorse non-sectarian theism. Whether one can tie the strong commitment to sectarian theism that people hold for these reasons into a strong theoretical case for its truth is an important question. What I think is more clear, however, is that the epistemic burden of non-sectarian theism is rather light, and claims about its strong commitments are generally overstated.