Int J Philos ReligDOI 10.1007/s11153-014-9454-5

BOOK REVIEW

J. L. Schellenberg: Evolutionary ReligionOxford University Press, New York, 2013, 174 pp., $35.00 (cloth)

William J. Meyer

Received: 8 April 2014 / Accepted: 10 April 2014© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Rarely have I begun a book with such keen enthusiasm only later to cool to adeep but respectful ambivalence. In this clearly written and thoughtful monograph,Canadian analytic philosopher J. L. Schellenberg spurs readers to think about reli-gion in evolutionary terms analogous to how Darwin and others have taught us tothink about nature. As I will outline, I think he has mixed success in this engagingendeavor.

Schellenberg’s valuable insight, and the source of my initial enthusiasm, is hisemphasis on the full spectrum of what he calls “deep time” (pp. 1–7). Evolutionarythinking has rightly taught us to take the long view, but it is difficult for us to fullygrasp the immensity of what this means. “Evolutionary time,” he notes, “is of an extentalmost beyond fathoming—that’s why scientists call it ‘deep.”’ Quoting Stephen JayGould, he continues: “‘[A]n abstract, intellectual understanding of deep time comeseasily enough—I know how many zeroes to place after 10 when I mean billions [ofyears]. Getting it into the gut [however] is another matter”’ (p. 3). What I take Gouldto imply here is that it is hard enough conceptually to comprehend the vastness ofevolutionary time let alone existentially grasp (“into the gut”) its implications aboutthe meaning and nature of existence. I will come back to these existential implicationslater. In the meantime, Schellenberg observes that modern science has tended to thinkabout deep time only in terms of the distant past, but the implication is that thereis also a deep future, which means that human evolution to this point, including itscultural and religious expressions, is merely in its micro-infancy. Thus, religion andhuman sensibility are indeed primitive but not because they are intrinsically so butrather because they are still in their infantile stage. “What developments in religiously-relevant thought and feeling,” asks Schellenberg, “might Earth see in so much [distant

W. J. Meyer (B)Maryville College, 502 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway, Maryville, TN 37804-5907, USAe-mail: bill.meyer@maryvillecollege.edu

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future] time”—such as in another “billion years” (p. 3)? As indicated here, he seeksto convince readers to think of religion in dynamic evolutionary terms rather than asforever wedded to mythological or traditional formulations from the past. It is thisevolutionary hope, and perhaps optimism, that lies at the heart of his project. Thesource of this hope stems from what he calls “Darwin’s Door”—referring to thoseoccasional passages in which Darwin anticipates that natural selection “‘will tend toprogress toward perfection”’ (pp. 22–23). Along this line, Schellenberg writes: “Aswe internalize the deep future it’s with the realization that there’s just an incredibleamount of time left for amazingly complex intellectual developments utterly contraryto present views to be achieved, even if progress is incremental or interrupted . . .

[For] it’s going to . . . take a lot longer for human intelligence to get anywhere reallyinteresting than we had thought” (p. 47).

Meanwhile, in the interim, he proposes a mix of present religious skepticism com-bined with imaginative new formulations of religious intuitions. To unpack this com-bination, he begins by affirming what he calls “total evidence,” which is an ideareminiscent of C.S. Peirce’s consensus theory of validation, namely, that what wemean by calling a claim true is what an ideal community of inquiry would agree toin the ultimate long run. For his part, Schellenberg states that “total evidence” refersto “everything in the world, whether accessible to us or not, that bears on whethersome proposition is true . . . For if a claim is true, then the total evidence supports it,”including that evidence that will emerge in the deep future (p. 45). Thus, future formsof religion may indeed turn out to be true, even if present formulations are not. Givenour present location in time, however, Schellenberg contends that those committed totruth must admit that contemporary evidence indicates that current “religious belief isrationally unsustainable for twenty-first-century members of H. sapiens. According tothis critique, religious belief is just inappropriate to where we’re located temporally”(p. 72). But if religious belief is presently inappropriate, he holds, religious imaginationis not. That is, unlike belief, imagination carries much less epistemological baggage;it offers an opportunity for affective response to the world without strong cognitiveclaims. An “imaginative faith,” he declares, “is not a matter of pretense or ‘makebelieve,’ which implies thinking the relevant proposition false, but rather a response touncertainty, [offering] the possibility of religious emotions without religious belief”(p. 102). So instead of religion making and rationally defending public truth claims,metaphysical or otherwise, Schellenberg advocates a more humble and mostly private“imaginative faith,” one that conjoins cognitive skepticism with an imaginative andaffective openness to the spiritual aspect of existence. In analytic terms, he describesit thusly:

[Y]ou don’t believe the relevant proposition (call it p) but (1) you nonethelessthink it would be good for p to be true . . . and (2) you take p to be epistemicallypossible, holding that it can’t reasonably be disbelieved either . . . (3) you deliber-ately represent or picture the world to yourself through the power of imaginationas including the truth of p. Moreover, (4) you form the intention to be mentallyguided by this picture on an ongoing basis when relevant things come up, thatis, to think accordingly and as a matter of [personal] policy; and (5) you followthrough on this policy (pp. 102–03).

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In essence, it’s a personal imaginative “as-if” philosophy: one seeks to live as if p weretrue but one does not publicly claim or challenge others with the truth of p. From here,Schellenberg completes the book by outlining the content of this imaginative faith.

Developing a set of typological alternatives, he argues that traditional religions tendto claim too much about the ultimate character of reality and thus are too “thick” (p. 96).Instead, he proposes a more modest or “thin” conception, which he calls “ultimism,”which is “a more general idea than theism, though entailed by it” (p. 99). Ultimacy,Schellenberg claims, has a “triply-ultimate” character: It is “metaphysically” ultimateinsofar as “its existence is a fact distinct from any natural fact and in some way a morefundamental fact about reality than any natural fact.” It is “axiologically” ultimateinsofar as “its intrinsic value—its splendour, its excellence—exceeds that of anythingfound in nature alone.” And it is “soteriologically” ultimate insofar as being rightlyrelated to it makes “for more well-being, fulfillment, wholeness, and the like for crea-tures than can naturally be attained” (p. 94). So the proper combination, he maintains,is “thin-strong”: one affirms the three-fold character of ultimacy (strong) without giv-ing too many details (thin) (pp. 96–97). Hence, “ultimism” is the proposition thatthere is “such a triply-ultimate reality” without claiming too much more about it; it isproposition (p) “providing an object for [a fitting] evolutionary faith” in our presenttemporal context (p. 99).

Drawing on William James’ “The Will to Believe,” which he thinks would havebeen better called the right to imagine, Schellenberg suggests that such a non-believingimaginative faith in ultimism offers pragmatic benefits, such as fostering a “zest forliving” and an existential willingness to risk, at this immature stage of development,being open to the potential emergence of total evidence, which may eventually validatethat ultimism is true. In Schellenberg’s words, “At this early stage of the game, somelightness of heart and willingness to look beyond the [current] available evidencemust therefore be intellectually preferable to the heaviness and severe caution of thosewho order us to wait for stronger evidence—evidence that may just for that reasonnever come—before giving ourselves to imaginative faith” (pp. 150–53). In his closingEpilogue, he speculates that such an imaginative faith in ultimism may offer a newalternative, in the form of a Hegelian synthesis, that overcomes the conflict betweentraditional theism (thesis) and modern naturalism (antithesis) (p. 158).

My ambivalence toward Schellenberg’s project runs along multiple fronts, but Iwill focus on only two here. First, on the one hand, he is certainly right to affirm thepossibility of and the need for religion to evolve. One of the galling tendencies ofreligion’s detractors is that they describe religion as primitive but instead of callingfor more mature forms of religion, they insist that religion is forever primitive andthus summarily dismiss it. Schellenberg rightly calls their bluff and does so on evo-lutionary grounds. Yet, on the other hand, the call for religion to evolve is not newand Schellenberg’s endeavor would have been strengthened had he drawn on someof these prior efforts. For instance, Alfred N. Whitehead argued nearly a century agoin Science and the Modern World that religion must evolve in the face of changein order for its claims and insights to be taken seriously. More importantly, White-head directly challenged and offered alternatives both to traditional forms of theismand to the materialistic and mechanistic assumptions that fuel modern naturalism. Incontrast, Schellenberg’s conception of ultimism often sounds like traditional theism

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thinly disguised, such as when he describes ultimacy as “unsurpassable in both realityand value” (p. 142). Does he mean unsurpassable in all respects, even by ultimacyitself? If so, he implies some notion of maximal or most perfect being, which is notan evolved form of religion but merely traditional theism. In contrast, Whitehead andespecially Charles Hartshorne envision ultimacy to be ever evolving in some respects,thus surpassing itself in value and reality as it relates internally to the world, integrat-ing all new creativity into the one everlasting divine life. Schellenberg avoids suchphilosophical heavy lifting, waiting and hoping instead for some future generation tofigure it out. Likewise, it is noteworthy how little he challenges the underlying mate-rialistic and mechanistic assumptions that drive much of modern science, which areprecisely the assumptions that lead Dawkins and others to reject religion or ultimismin wholesale fashion. The closest Schellenberg comes to such a challenge is when hesays: “[I]f ultimism is true, then there is a reality transcendent of the natural worldand the scientifically law-abiding world of nature isn’t all there is. If it’s true, thenmetaphysical naturalism—which claims that there is no such transcendent reality—isfalse” (pp. 106–07). But even here one detects an underlying form of traditional theismin which nature is conceded to be determined by mechanistic laws but such a worldis transcended by an ultimate reality that exists wholly beyond nature. In contrast,Whitehead challenges the dominance of mechanistic determinism with a philosophyof organism: instead of viewing nature as a machine wholly determined by an unend-ing series of prior causes, he views reality as an evolving organism, one that includesnovelty, creativity, value, and freedom.

Second, Schellenberg is again right to affirm the possibility of some gains in reli-gious and human understanding but, at the same time, there seems to be a strongcurrent of naive idealism fueling his progressive hopes. For instance, he writes: “Lim-ited, vulnerable human beings also already have, at a pretty fundamental level, suchdispositions as impulsive acquisitiveness and anxiety. The dampening of such dispo-sitions and their replacement over time by such things as long-term thinking and self-control, modest contentment, and serenity are further goals set before us by ultimism”(p. 109). One can only imagine what someone like Reinhold Niebuhr would sayabout this optimistic hope that humans will evolve out of their existential anxiety intosocial harmony and cooperation. In essence, Schellenberg’s vision appears to lack theresources to recognize both the tragic dimension of life and to affirm life’s genuinevalue or ultimate meaning. Where he goes astray, I judge, is in how he interprets theexistential significance of deep time. For Schellenberg, the notion of a deep future pro-vides an endless opportunity for natural selection and cultural evolution to bring abouta perfected version of the human condition, including religion. He briefly considersthe possibility of the eventual extinction of life on earth, such as by an asteroid or bythe sun burning out, but he dismisses such concerns as exaggerated. Unlike Darwin,who later recognized that such possibilities or indeed inevitabilities point to the tragicside of life, Schellenberg declares that “when scientists turn their gaze to the reallydeep future, they often sound quite optimistic” (p. 31). For Schellenberg, it seems,the ultimate significance of life depends on its ongoing improvement: meaning pre-supposes progress. In contrast, William James in his insightful lecture “PhilosophicalConceptions and Practical Results,” compares theism and naturalism prospectively interms of what each existentially implies about the ultimate value of the evolutionary

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process. Building on but going beyond James, I would suggest that the pragmatic dif-ference between them is that theism properly conceived implies that whatever evolvesand perishes in the course of deep time makes some everlasting difference to ultimacywhereas naturalism implies that all that evolves is eventually lost in the cosmic recessesof deep time—for when life becomes extinct, there is no organic metaphysical wholeto which the perishing life contributes or is related. Furthermore, if one conceives ofultimacy as internally related to the world, and, thus, in ever-evolving process, then thesignificance of life is not dependent on its own eventual progress or perfection, whichmay or may not come, but rather on its distinct contribution to the unending divinelife: meaning presupposes contribution, not progress. Hence, with this conception inplace, one can affirm both the ultimate significance of life and its tragic dimension;one need not grasp at the elusive hope of eventual perfection as the basis of meaningin the present or future.

In spite of these shortcomings, Schellenberg’s book offers a stimulating contributionto the conversation about evolution, religion, and the human condition; in sum, thisslender and thought-provoking volume is well worth the read.

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