Mark Wood Review of


The Future of Religion. Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo. Edited by Santiago Zabala. Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 91.
Published in Volume 28, 2008

-------- In The Future of Religion, Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo provide contrasting and often complementary reflections on the future of religion after the end of metaphysics. They join a growing number of contemporary theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics who recognize that we are presently undergoing what may well prove to be the most significant turning point in the history of religious experience, a movement beyond the separatism resulting from absolutist and exclusionary religious claims. In addition to post-Enlightenment critiques of religion, the constitutional separation of church and state, and retreat of religion resulting from, in Darwin’s words, “the gradual illumination of men’s minds” by advances in science, globalization’s world transforming integration of individuals from diverse religious backgrounds into communities of shared interest and concern is further weakening the confidence with which any particular religious tradition may claim to possess absolute truth and, even more, fostering trans-religious conversation and the formation of a post-metaphysical spiritual culture.
-------- The future of religion, writes Vattimo in Vero e falso Universalismo crtistiano, lies not in “seeking the triumph of one faith over the others.”  Rather we must “rediscover—after the ‘metaphysical’ age of absolutisms and of the identity between truth and authority—the possibility of a post-modern religious experience in which the relation with the divine is no longer corrupted by fear, violence, and superstition” (26). We know all to well the horrific costs of failing to accomplish this goal, and today the union of religious absolutisms and weapons of mass destruction make our failure potentially catastrophic.
In his introduction, “A Religion without Theists or Atheists,” Zabala notes that Rorty and Vattimo present a way of thinking beyond the onto-theological tradition that “consists of weakening and dissolving the ancient European concept of ‘Being’ and the very idea of ‘ontological status.’ This new, weak way of thought not only opens up alternative directions, it also recovers tradition: the relationship between the believer and God is not conceived as power-laden but as a gentler relationship, in which God hands over all his power to man” (3). In the “Age of Interpretation” neither science, nor philosophy, nor religion enjoys epistemological or ontological authority over the other. The resulting “Gadamerian culture of dialogue,” which understands that “all positions are equally valid’ because ‘of the lack of confidence in truth’ constitutes,” says Zabala, “the greatest success obtained by the deconstruction of metaphysics” (11). After metaphysics, “postmodern man, no longer needful of the extreme, magical reassurance supplied by the idea of God, accepts the probably that history is not on his side at all and that there is no power capable of guaranteeing him the happiness he seeks” (ibid.). Living without metaphysical foundations means affirming our ontological historicity, epistemological insecurity, and existential finitude. Rather than “search for truth,” says Zabala, we now “seek solidarity, charity, and irony” (17-18).
-------- In “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” Rorty articulates the historical movement to post-metaphysical thinking as one in which “philosophy professors began to stop asking “bad questions—questions like ‘What really exists?’ ‘What are the scope and limits of human knowledge?’ and ‘How does language hook up with reality?’” and began to focus on questions regarding how we can best practice solidarity, charity, and love (29). Rorty’s description of our situation leads him to confess that his earlier self-identification as an atheist was philosophically mistaken. To deny the existence of God assumes one has evidence in support of this claim. But evidence against is equally empirically unavailable as is evidence for the existence of God.  President Bush, Rorty adds, is at least right about this much when he says that “‘atheism is a faith’ because it is ‘subject to neither confirmation nor refutation by means of argument or evidence’” (33). The shift from atheism and anti-clericalism is a shift from a metaphysical to a political stance, signifying Rorty’s commitment to challenging antidemocratic structures of power which legitimate their existence by claiming they have been ordained by a transcendental authority.
-------- Rorty praises Vattimo’s anti-metaphysical interpretation of Christianity precisely because it places full responsibility for the human condition on the shoulders of human beings. As Vattimo clarifies in his chapter, “The Age of Interpretation,” secularism is the authentic realization of the Christian message. No longer concerned with discovering the truth or maintaining power, the essence of Christianity is, as Feuerbach contended, love.
-------- Vattimo argues that “Christianity introduces into the world the principle of interiority, on the basis of which ‘objective’ reality gradually loses its preponderant weight” and that in doing it introduces a movement that eventually results in hermeneutics—the hearing and interpreting of messages—and the secularization of society (46-47). The Incarnation humanizes the truth, dissolving “the preemptory claims of ‘reality,’” leading to what Vattimo calls “an extreme denial of the ‘reality principle’” (50). The truth that shall make us free “is not the objective truth of science or even that of theology” but “the truth of love, of charity” (50-51).
-------- As noted by Zabala and Rorty, a “non-objective-metaphysical conception of truth” provides critical leverage against absolutist claims, whether secular or theological, scientific or religious, that legitimate oppressive social relations on the ground of purportedly natural realities (e.g. the “denial of the priesthood to women ... by reference to women’s ‘natural’ vocation”). It is certainly the case that as “long as the Church remains trapped in the web of its ‘natural metaphysics’ and its literalism (God is ‘father,’ and not mother, for example? [sic]), it will never be able to dialogue freely and fraternally, not just with other Christian confessions but above all with other major world religions” (49). Vattimo’s point, I would add, applies equally to all religions that found their varied and frequently incompatible truth claims on natural metaphysics and literalism. Abandoning natural metaphysics and scriptural literalism is vital to facilitating ecumenical conversation and forging a global spiritual cultural that is genuinely and generously post-metaphysical.
-------- In the concluding chapter, Vattimo, Rorty, and Zabala abandon more academic discourse for a down-to-earth discussion of the possibilities for universalizing “the worship of God as love” or love as God and the development of a form of religiosity that is “nonmetaphysical” and “nonmissionary,” committed not to the conversion of anyone to the one, true religion but only to the historically situated, ontologically insecure, and existentially challenging democratic practices of charity, solidarity, and love (56, 66). Universalization of the democratic practices of charity, solidarity, and love are, however, delimited by the fact that, as Rorty notes, “democracy only works if you spread the wealth around—if you eliminate the gap between the rich and the poor,” and, Vattimo adds, “spreading wealth around as a condition for democracy is like expanding knowledge or education as a condition for hermeneutics” (73, 74). Unfortunately, the gap between rich and poor and inadequate or non-existent public educational impede the universalization of a Gadamerian culture of conversation, an ateological Geist, construction of a “global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law, communication would be domination-free, class and case would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.” Moreover, Rorty confesses, he has “no idea how such a society could come about” (40).
            I would, however, suggest that Rorty and Vattimo point in the right direction with regard to discerning how such a society can be brought about when they suggest the changes we need to make are not only philosophical and theological but also social, political, and economic. It is here, however, that I want also to suggest that their salubrious critique of scientism and the search for objective truth undercuts work that might otherwise provide insights into how we might best proceed to build such a society.
To say that “it does not matter what things are in themselves, [that] it is more important what they mean for us or what we do with them and so on,” as does Vattimo, and that reality “is just the result of the historical dialogue among people,” not only belies a species of idealist anthropocentrism in which reality is reduced to what human beings say it is, it also undermines the assumption that reality is more than what we say it is and that we can through democratic investigation discover something regarding the nature of reality—for example, the forces responsible for creating the gap between rich and poor. A robust reality principle which assumes human beings are inseparable from and dependent on a world that exceeds them, the knowledge of which is vital to our survival, provides counter-philosophical leverage to the idealist, anthropocentric, and hubristic tendencies lurking within the “linguistic turn.”
The critique of scientific objectivism or metaphysical-naturalism provides leverage against the fetish of science or scientism. At the same time, however, we should avoid conflating scientism with scientific theory and practice, throwing the work of scientific research out with the bathwater of scientific idolatry.  I would go further and suggest that science embodies, imperfectly of course, the kind of modest, self-critical, and democratic conversation championed by Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala. Moreover, as it turns out, recent discoveries and theories in biology, ecology, physics, and cosmology, among other fields, empirically confirm and conceptually converge with postmodern critiques essentialism, hierarchy, and permanence—as well as, it should be noted, the radically subversive Buddhist concept of co-dependent origination.
            We are most likely to create a religion of charity, solidarity, and love if we support, as each of these thinkers do, first, the continuing secularization of knowledge resulting from work being done in the social and natural sciences. This knowledge makes invaluable contributions to the formation of a post-metaphysical religious culture that is neither corrupted by nor perpetuates fear, violence, and superstition. As Rorty indicates, “science gives us the means to carry out better cooperative social projects than before”—that is, when religious metaphysics enjoyed epistemological as well as socio-political hegemony.
            Second, we are more likely to forge a post-metaphysical religious culture if, as Rorty and Vattimo suggest, we understand the social, political, and economic conditions that encourage, if not compel, human beings around the world to embrace and defend full-blown metaphysical religious claims and strive to create social, political, and economic institutions that are guided by the democratic principles of charity, solidarity, and love. In the era of unbridled transnational capitalism, what is needed, as Rorty suggests, among other changes, is “a global authority that could put global capitalism in the service of democracy” (75).
            Amazon reviewer David E. McClean writes that the “upshot of Rorty's antifoundationalism and of Vattimo's hermeneutics is that charity (love) is what modernity [or post-modernity] must aim for” and yet, he asks, “is all of this discussion about antifoundationalism and hermeneutics, of Gadamer and Nietzsche, really necessary to get us to a conclusion that saints and prophets and martyrs have been reaching for thousands of years without such intellectual convolutions?” My own response to this question is both yes and no. Yes inasmuch as Rorty and Vattimo’s are speaking primarily to an academic audience. No inasmuch as what is also needed is to build discursive bridges between religious and non-religious communities.
-------- Rorty remarks that “one can be tone-deaf when it comes to religion just as one can be oblivious to the charms of music” (30). Staying with this metaphor, I would suggest that Zabala, Rorty, and Vattimo enrich our appreciation for postmodernism’s atonal rhythms and melodies but remain by and large “tone-deaf” when it comes to the religiosity of the vast majority of persons around the world who are deeply moved by the “extreme, magical reassurance supplied by the idea of God.” While “the future of religion will depend on a position that is ‘beyond atheism and theism,’” creating such a future depends on creating if not a fusion of horizons then a friendly bridges between the metaphysically and post-metaphysically religious (e.g. by developing a style of writing accessible to more than highly-trained academic philosophers and theologians), and on mobilizing support for constructing truly democratic institutions that nurture a sustainable global spiritual culture of conversation, charity, solidarity, and love. In doing these things lies not only the future of religion but also our survival on planet Earth.