Religion, Crutches, and Glasses

"These people use religion as a crutch," so declared a nonreligious talk-show host in Miami years ago. This was his usual response to a discussion in which a religious caller quoted the Bible. His objection was that these callers couldn't use their minds because they derived their views from a book, the Bible. It really wasn't true that people couldn't use their minds; it's just that they regarded statements from the Bible as authoritative without further evidence, while the host did not. With some examination it would have turned out that the host also made assumptions that certain propositions were true with no evidence. It often happens that people assume things are true and give little thought to these assumptions unless challenged.

An example: Euclidian geometry assumes the truth of the proposition that given line a, and point b outside that line, within the plane determined by line a, and point b there is one and only one line that contains point b and is parallel to line a. That seems to be obviously true, but it cannot be proven. As a matter of fact, there are systems of geometry that assume either that there are multiple parallel lines or no parallel lines, and some of them are more useful in physics that standard Euclidian geometry. What does that have to do with religion? It simply illustrates that both religious and nonreligious people work with unprovable propositions. Using unproven assumptions in and of itself does not indicate that religious people don't use their minds and more than it indicates nonreligious people don't use their minds.

The expression "Religion is a crutch" is used in another sense, however. It is a pejorative meaning that people can't face the hard "facts of life" and turn to religion as a way of getting through hard times. The metaphor of a crutch is problematic to start with because it assumes there is something wrong with a crutch. Sprain an ankle some time and you discover that a crutch is a necessity if you're going to get around. Of course a person could always do without the crutch and crawl or go nowhere, but it seems to me that a crutch can be an essential.

I simply reject the metaphor in the first place. It is far too limiting. Let's talk about religion as a pair of glasses instead and see where it gets us. The purpose of glasses is to correct vision so that one can see what's actually there. I pick up a phone book and I think there are names and phone numbers in the book, but I can tell for certain without my glasses. I would hold that religion works like a pair of glasses. It allows a person to see what's really there.

It often happens that people don't realize they need glasses. They just assume the world is a little fuzzy. It's only when they actually try on a proper set of glasses that they see what they have been missing. That's the way it works with the Christian religion in my view. You have to actually try it to see the difference.

When I was growing up there were a few people who adamantly opposed their children wearing glasses insisting that it would make their eyes weaker. There's no evidence for that, but as I have suggested people assume all sorts of things without evidence. So there are people who reject religion because it is a way of weakening people. That's what calling religion "a crutch" means. Friedrich Nietzsche called Christianity a "slave religion" because he thought it made people weak and subservient. Maybe so, but Nietzsche 's own views provided the philosophical underpinnings for the Nazis. Given the havoc wrecked by the Nazi's, I'd much rather that people embrace Christianity.

The objection could be raised, of course, that glasses are only a necessity for people who have some defect in their vision. So, religion would only correct the view of persons with a defect. Since many people do not wear glasses one could argue by a rather weak analogy that many people do not need religion. Given the fact that most people do indeed require glasses to correct their vision as they develop presbyopia in latter life, it could be argued that most people do indeed need religion. The truth is that the metaphor of glasses (a crutches) is rather limited in what it can tell us about the need for religion. However, we could squeeze one more observation from it.

In L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz all persons entering the Emerald City are required to have green eyeglasses locked over their eyes. Ostensively, the glasses are to protect the visitor from being blinded by the brilliance and glory of the Emerald City. In reality, it is the glasses that produce the illusion of a city made from green marble studded with emeralds. The Emerald City is a fraud. Many people regard religion as a fraud that disguises reality by preventing the truth from being perceived. But it is not only religion that can do this. Every ideology creates a particular way of seeing things, and sometimes that way of seeing is a delusion. We can see that play out in the political arena again and again. The current debacle of the War in Iraq is at least partly the result of an ideological reading of intelligence reports that accepted every bit of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction no matter how weak that evidence was, and rejected any evidence to the contrary no matter how strong it was.

The truth is that we never see things as they are. We see everything through a lense that we have created through a variety of experiences.

The philosopher David Hume argued in the seventeenth century that cause and effect could never be proven. We observe that event b always follows after event a, and event b never occurs unless event a occurs first. So we say that a causes b. This is poor logic (technically the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, after which therefore because of which). All we can really say is that in the past b has always followed a. We can never say that in the future b will always follow a. We talk about cause and effect out of habit rather than logical necessity.

Science is much more cautious than the average person in discussing phenomena. It talks in probabilities rather than absolutes. Even all the wonderful Newtonian laws that people learn in high school physics turn out to work only within certain limitations. The rules change when things move fast enough or are massive enough.

Let me stick with science for a moment. Nothing seems clearer than that certain objects have particular colors. Emeralds are green, after all. But they aren't green. The molecules of emeralds have no color whatsoever. Even a large emerald has no color if it is kept in a completely dark room. Light has to shine on it for it to appear colored. Furthermore, if we would look at the emerald in a red light rather than a white light, it would appear black because it wouldn't be able to reflect any green light into our eyes.

What I intended to do in the preceding paragraphs is shake the certainty of a few elements that many nonreligious persons use to construct their way of viewing the world. As a matter of fact, many within the Christian community make use of the same rules of logic and scientific interpretation that nonreligious persons use. It is fascinating to read the works of Thomas Aquinas as he sets out to determine what can be known by reason alone, what can be known by reason or revelation, and what can be known by revelation alone. No one could accuse him of not using his mind.

A helpful term to employ is worldview. Religions are worldviews, ways of seeing what is. But there are nonreligious worlviews also. Marxism is the best known of these. These nonreligious worldviews have all the functions of a religion–they have a system of beliefs, determine social order and morals, produce organizations, and employ rituals. Anyone who saw the May Day displays in the old U.S.S.R. knows what a nonreligious ritual looks like. We might distinguish between these worldviews by describing religions as transcendent worldviews and nonreligious ones as nontranscendent world views. Transcendence is here understood as an order beyond ordinary reality. Nontranscendent worldviews deny that there is a transcendent reality. Is one type of worldview more reasonable than another? Despite the claims of nonreligious persons to the contrary, I don't think so. Both transcendent and nontranscendent worldviews require a "leap of faith." The proofs for the existence of God all have faults in them, but so do the proofs against the existence of God. Look at the problem of finding design in nature. Those who believe that there is a transcendent creator are able to find design. Those who do not find no design. Essentially it seems to me that we are stuck in the same logical standoff that has existed since the mid eighteenth-century.

I do think we can ask whether different worldviews produce different results. And I think we could ask whether a person prefers one result over the other, but we might be surprised that not everyone prefers the same result. I never cease to be amazed at the venom spewed by some Americans against the tolerance and openness of American culture that is a product of the prevailing worldview of American and Western European Society.

Boy, this turned out to be a heavier discussion than I had planned. It's the college lecturer in me coming out. Well, while I think the study of religion is a useful thing, I am also an advocate for its practice, in particular the way offered by Jesus.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.
Wayne