J. Ash Bowie’s web site, Swimming the Sacred River, is greatly concerned with “religious naturalism”, which he defines as:

a movement that offers a reverent orientation towards the natural world (which includes humans and human culture) that is in harmony with reason and our unfolding understanding of the universe as informed by the sciences. It denies the necessity of the super-natural, including personal deities, non-corporeal intelligences, meta-terrestrial dimensions, or occult/New Age forces.

The rationale behind religious naturalism seems to revolve around an old and tired cliche that occultists in particular seem very prone to spouting, namely, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” On a page of his called The Three Pillars, Bowie argues that:

Religion arguably exists in order to address certain human needs, such as assuaging existential anxiety, maintaining a sense of purpose and agency, developing an understanding of the workings of the world, and feeling connected to others. At another level, it is possible to surmise that people often desire what can be called a religious experience, here defined as a profound and meaningful shift in perspective involving an embodied sensation and a resultant interpretation that is explicitly religious in nature. Stated more simply, religion can potentially provide a sense of meaningful profundity, a sense of deep significance and/or transcendence from normal states of being, involving a connection with, experience of, or insight into a perspective of reality that is normally outside of everyday awareness.

In other words, the prompting behind religious naturalism is that there is “something in” religion, something which would be valuable to humanity if only the self-evidently absurd supernatural beliefs could be purged from it.

The primary purpose of this entry is to reject this idea, and to show that what is needed is not a naturalistic religion, but a naturalistic alternative to religion. The secondary purpose is to show that this kind of attitude arises in the first place from a phenomenon we shall introduce and call “religious thinking”.

Before proceeding we should make it clear that the purpose of this entry is not to criticise religious naturalism per se, although we certainly shall do that. The purpose is also certainly not to criticise J. Ash Bowie, although again we shall indeed criticise many of his ideas. The purpose is to criticise religion, and to show that the deleterious effects of religion are not simply limited to supernatural beliefs, but are inherent to the entire religious mindset, whether supernatural or naturalistic. Religious naturalism is, in theory, the ideal subject against to make such a point, because it purports to present a religion free from supernatural belief, leaving only the religious structure which we intend to criticise visible. However, it does only have this advantage in theory, and we must understand why it only has this advantage in theory before we continue.

Is “religious naturalism” anything at all?

On his page About Sacred River, Bowie claims that:

Humans have an intrinsic need for things like purpose, connection, order, and a sense of how the universe works. We also depend on society to help guide our behavior and provide a set of values and beliefs. These things have long been the purview of religion.

“Religious naturalism” thus seeks to provide these “things like purpose, connection, order and a sense of how the universe works” in order to satisfy the “intrinsic need” he believes humans have for religion within a naturalistic framework that does not require any supernatural beliefs.

The problem, as almost any religious naturalist will agree, is that religious naturalism simply does not do this, at least not yet. On his Religious Naturalism page, Bowie states that:

Those who offer commentary on religious naturalism largely agree that the movement has a long way to go in terms of developing an established set of spiritual practices or traditions.

The overview of religious naturalism at religiousnaturalism.org states that:

Religious Naturalism hopes to help create a consilience of viewpoints along the lines above, that are accessible to anyone in the world from any culture [emphasis added]

This, too, acknowledges that such a “consilience of viewpoints” has not yet been created. Indeed, religiousnaturalism.org seems to go out of its way to repeatedly point out that “religious naturalists” may have markedly different opinions on the subject matter, but that nevertheless they are committed to “scholarly and tolerant discourse within our Big Tent [which] makes for an interesting and energizing domicile – a domicile with amiable social aspects to it” so at least they’re having fun. But it certainly does seem to be the case that not only is there no agreement on what religious naturalism actually is, but there’s also not much disagreement either, since nobody really wants to come out and say what they think it is.

The FAQ at religiousnaturalism.org gives the following answer to the question “what viewpoints do most Religious Naturalists have in common?”:

Some common features of the worldviews of various Religious Naturalists include respect for science; religious emotions; morality; concern about the ecosystem; denunciation of racism, sexism, and tribalism; responsibility to the future, intellectual integration (consilience), and a regard for divergent viewpoints.

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn:

• “respect for science” – one would certainly think this a requirement for anyone calling themselves a “naturalist”, but there is certainly nothing “religious” about a respect for science. If we are looking for characteristics which define “religious naturalists” and which distinguish them from non-religious naturalists, clearly a “respect for science” is not one of those characteristics.
• “religious emotions” – we’re faced first with the issue of determining what these “religious emotions” actually are, since the FAQ does not spell them out. The overview already referred to talks of “an essence, a grandeur and a magnificence in Nature, in which we take great joy. We are awed by its vastness and complexity. We revere these qualities but do not worship them.” Barry Boggs claims that “natural feelings of awe, wonder, and even, gratitude…have long been associated with religions,” and Walter Mandell claims that “wonder, awe, love of existence, agape, compassion, empathy etc.” are all “emotions that are often termed ‘religious'” Right off the bat, we can quickly rule out “joy”, “wonder”, “love of existence”, “compassion”, “empathy” and “gratitude” as being emotions to which religion has any claim whatsoever to. Claiming that these emotions are “religious” because they “have long been associated with religions” is no different from claiming that architecture is a religious practice because buildings have long been associated with religions too. Religions may want to misappropriate such emotions in order to talk up the benefits of religion, but they certainly have no legitimate business doing that. These emotions are not “religious emotions” at all, but regular old human emotions. We can similarly strike out “awe”, and remark that while “awe” may sometimes incline people towards religion, it certainly is not a “religious emotion” itself; it does not arise from religion. This leaves us only with “reverence”, which can be defined as “a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe.” Here we have to suspect the religious naturalists of being slightly disingenuous; the natural world may well be appreciated, wondered at, and held in awe, but “respected”? The natural world is not a “thing” that actually does anything of it’s own volition, and hence cannot really be said to be worthy of “respect”. Reverence is indeed the only genuinely religious emotion – when applied to the natural world, at least – that these religious naturalists list, and it appears to be a genuinely religious emotion because it really cannot be separated from supernatural belief. If there really is no creator, no divine architect, and no groundskeeper of the universe, then it seems absolutely meaningless to “revere” the natural world as we might revere Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5, and we suspect any such tendency as arising from a desire to assert naturalistic explanations on the one hand, but to want to continue to act and feel as if there were a creator on the other. If this emotion is not appropriate to apply to the natural world, and all the other listed emotions are just plain old human emotions which religion may want to falsely claim as its own, then “religious emotions” appears not to be a characteristic which can distinguish religious naturalists from regular naturalists, either.
• “morality” – clearly it is not necessary to be religious to be moral (for the benefit of regular readers, for the purposes of this entry we’re putting aside our common argument that “moral” really has no discernible meaning for the sake of convenience). Euthyphro’s dilemma offers a convincing argument that not only does religion not contribute to morality, but that it fundamentally cannot, since a divine source of morality can only be random and arbitrary, which is no morality at all.
• “concern about the ecosystem” – another common viewpoint which has nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
• “denunciation of racism, sexism, and tribalism” – yet another common viewpoint which has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. In actual practice, both sexism and tribalism appear to be integral components of religion.
• “responsibility to the future” – a common viewpoint which, while having little if any discernible meaning, also has nothing to do with religion. Those Christians who believe in the imminent arrival of the “end times”, for instance, have a positive disregard for such a notion, and welcome the end of the world.
• “intellectual integration” – also unrelated to religion.
• “a regard for divergent viewpoints” – clearly also unrelated to religion.

Thus, of all the “common viewpoints” that religiousnaturalism.org ascribes to religious naturalism, none of them appear to be even remotely connected with religion. There appears to be a common theme of political correctness, environmental activism, and insipid tolerance, but nothing “religious”. It does not seem unreasonable to demand that if “religious naturalism” is to be argued to have a sensible meaning, that its proponents must justify why they are deserving of the title “religious”, and this list most certainly does not satisfy that demand. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins gently criticises celebrated religious naturalist Ursula Goodenough, by saying “she goes so far as to call herself a ‘Religious Naturalist’. Yet a careful reading of her book shows that she is really as staunch an atheist as I am.”

Thus, while in theory religious naturalism is a prime field for a criticism of religion without having to continually discredit supernatural beliefs, in actual practice it fails in that respect because there appears to be nothing religious about it. In short, a reasonable person might be driven to conclude that religious naturalism does not, in fact, exist. This is probably the most significant criticism that can be leveled against religious naturalism, particularly when we come to examine some of the claims its proponents make for it.

A loss of faith?

As we have already seen, Bowie claims that:

Humans have an intrinsic need for things like purpose, connection, order, and a sense of how the universe works. We also depend on society to help guide our behavior and provide a set of values and beliefs. These things have long been the purview of religion.

The implication, clearly, is that religious naturalism is intended to provide such things. But we have also seen that, at least at the moment, it does not do so. Religious naturalists also take great pride in addressing the kind of “your life must be so empty and meaningless without God” criticism often given by theists by remarking that a naturalistic life can indeed contain much joy and meaning.

This leaves us needing to ask a very obvious question. If religious naturalists accept that they lead joyful and meaningful lives without supernatural beliefs, and if they accept – which they all appear to do – that religious naturalism does not yet provide the basis for such joy and meaning, then on what grounds does a religious naturalist claim that “humans have an intrinsic need for things like purpose, connection, order, and a sense of how the universe works”? In his post on “The Four Virtues”, for instance, Bowie states that:

In a more distant future, it is my deepest hope that these Virtues can eventually be written into stories, both personal and mythological. It is one thing to discuss virtue as a theory and another to share what it really means to live a virtuous life. I am also hopeful that we will be able to develop programs to help people define for themselves what the Four Virtues mean and how they might be manifested in their lives in meaningful and fulfilling ways

the implication clearly being that people do not currently “manifest” these “Four Virtues” in “meaningful and fulfilling ways”. And if they do not, and they already have meaningful and fulfilling lives, why on earth would anyone assume that they need to?

It seems that religious naturalism, in this sense, is a solution in search of a problem. Religious naturalists like Bowie want to argue that “religion” is necessary to provide “meaning” and “fulfillment”, yet they also want to claim that their lives already contain “meaning” and “fulfillment” which clearly has not been provided by religious naturalism, that has not been provided by the kind of “stories, both personal and mythological” which Bowie claims to be desirable in promoting such meaning and fulfillment. It seems cognitively dissonant to on the one hand claim that religion provides a means of providing these things, but at the same time claim that people already possess them; it seems cognitively dissonant to claim that a form of “religious naturalism” is necessary to obtain the same benefits that people like Bowie currently enjoy, but then to claim that religious naturalism is not currently able to provide them. Clearly, if people are already enjoying those benefits, they must be getting them from somewhere, and obviously not from religious naturalism. If this is the case, precisely what need is “religious naturalism” supposed to fill? If religious naturalism is such a nascent project devoid of spiritual practices, myths, stories and grand narratives, what legitimate grounds does anyone have for claiming that such a religion is necessary for enjoying benefits which are clearly already enjoyed? One hopes that there is no implication that such a religion is only necessary for those unenlightened plebs who are not bright enough to write blog posts on the topic.

One aspect of what we are going to introduce as “religious thinking”, then, is the belief – and, make no mistake, it is a belief – that religion is necessary. Religious naturalists and others are quick to respond to theists that they don’t need “God” in order to have fulfilling and meaningful lives, but they seem to take for granted the fact that we do need some form of religion. This is not an assumption which should go unchallenged, particularly when we observe that there is plenty of evidence against it. Not only are there plenty of atheists in the world who live perfectly fulfilling and meaningful lives without the kind of “stories, both personal and mythological” which Bowie seems to think are necessary, but the religious naturalists themselves claim to live fulfilling and meaningful lives without that kind of thing, if only because they all seem to accept that religious naturalism does not yet possess such things. This is a particularly striking observation when religious naturalists seem to claim such a great deal of “respect for science”. One wonders why they seem resistant to looking at the evidence against their own religious claims.

In a post called Faith and our Emergent Universe, Bowie remarks that:

It must be admitted, we lose something by a lack of faith in supernatural beings that are concerned with humans. We lack the dream of a blissful life spent with loved ones for all eternity. We lack the hope that comes from praying for a celestial Hand to take away pain and injustice. We lack the pleasure of thinking we are at the center of things, that we are somehow important in the grand scheme, or that a supreme destiny awaits us. We lack the comfort of believing that Someone is looking out for us. We lack the certitude and righteousness that comes from having moral behavior codified in scripture.

Although it almost certainly was not intended in such a way, this comment is almost offensive in its preachiness, even more so when we reflect that it is offered by one atheist to others. Atheists rightly criticise and even ridicule the absurd supernatural beliefs held by theists, and rightly so, and for Bowie to then turn around and try to convince us that we “lose something” by abandoning such foolishness, and that we should actively look for something to “replace” it, is bordering on the outrageous. And, although we have yet to define our term, this rather bizarre notion clearly has its roots in “religious thinking”.

Let’s take a moment to thoroughly debunk this ridiculous idea, line by line, and see exactly what we are supposed to be “losing”, here. The first is the idea of “faith in supernatural beings that are concerned with humans”. There is maybe no more sure way to douse any feelings of wonder, majesty, and openness than to assume that the universe was made, and continues to exist, for our benefit. As Carl Sagan put it in Pale Blue Dot:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”

Even in terms of generating what might traditionally be called “religious feeling”, there are surely few better ways of doing so than to look up at the night sky and reflect upon all the innumerable stars and galaxies, many of them probably harbouring life of their own. Such an exercise drives home the insignificance of the entire human race; how much more so the insignificance of any one individual! Yet this realisation of insignificance is not depressing, but liberating; to be a part, however small, of such a huge and diverse universe, the grandeur of all it so much more emphasised by our own tininess. What better way to transform one’s view of the universe into something so immeasurably smaller and more paltry than to entertain the idea that there is a creator of it all who is specifically “concerned with humans”? We don’t “lose” something when we abandon this absurd idea; on the contrary, we gain the vastness of the universe, for all its magnificent grandeur and impersonalness. This equally applies to the idea that “we lack the pleasure of thinking we are at the center of things, that we are somehow important in the grand scheme, or that a supreme destiny awaits us.”

Then we have “the dream of a blissful life spent with loved ones for all eternity.” What’s the point of it all? has already deftly disposed of the idea that eternal life would be anything other than an appalling and interminable torment from which there could be no possibility at all of escape, and we need not repeat that argument here. As for that “life spent with loved ones for all eternity” being “blissful”, in the United States “Thanksgiving Dinner” is often seen as symbolic of an evening of misery spent grudgingly and dutifully with objectionable and argumentative relatives. Imagine an eternity of that! A universe with no escape from the horrors of eternal life would be is certainly not something we should feel “loss” over not having.

Next, we come to “the hope that comes from praying for a celestial Hand to take away pain and injustice…We lack the comfort of believing that Someone is looking out for us”. The obvious and uninteresting rejoinder to this is the observation that any such “hope” should reasonably be dwarfed by the outrage and anger felt at the existence of a “celestial Hand” who apparently has the ability to “take away pain and injustice”, but nevertheless deliberately refuses to do so as a matter of principle. It is an outrage to common sense and basic human decency to suggest it is a “loss” to abandon the belief that one should grovel ingratiatingly at the feet of some supernatural power, reverently thanking him for the pain so consistently doled out, and then thanking him even more reverently for those small moments where he deems it proper in his infinite grace to temporarily relieve that pain. Of all the absurd notions that Bowie deems it a “loss” for us to discard, this is the most repellent and nauseating of them all.

Finally, we have “We lack the certitude and righteousness that comes from having moral behavior codified in scripture.” One hopes that he is not referring to Biblical scripture, of which Dawkins says:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us school from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.

One would think that at least the millions of women, homosexuals, children, non-Christians, burned “witches” and a multitude of other groups would have been a lot more glad than Bowie to be rid of the “certitude and righteousness that comes from having moral behavior codified in scripture”, not to mention all the miserable individuals who torment themselves by believing in such moral codifications and then failing in their ability to live up to them, no matter how they try.

Thus, all of these points whose abandonment Bowie asserts to be a “loss” are really seen to be abominations that should have been disposed of millenia ago. It will, at this juncture, be necessary to dispose of a common counterargument. In the case of eternal life, for instance, it is only a horror once one sits down and actually thinks of what it must be like. If one does not think about this, if one deliberately refrains from thinking about it, and merely accepts as a matter of faith one’s preacher’s assertions that it would be “blissful”, then it may be possible to derive “hope” from it in this life. But at what cost? One cannot sensibly argue that it would be a “loss” to abandon a hope in faith healing on the grounds that one would no longer have that hope; the benefits of receiving actual medical care would also need to be taken into account. It is simply absurd and meaningless to talk of the “loss” from abandoning “the certitude and righteousness that comes from having moral behavior codified in scripture” without also considering the loss of the absolute horror which such a belief brings into the world.

Furthermore, there is something very wrong in proclaiming the benefits of a false “hope” in eternal life, for instance, when such hope can only come from believing transparent lies. This kind of “hope” prevents one, for instance, from realising that eternal life would be a horror, and removing the fear of death through a realisation that mortality is actually something to be valued rather than cursed. It may well be a “comfort” for someone to entertain a belief in an eternal afterlife to lessen a fear of death, but it would be a much greater comfort to get rid of that fear of death entirely by understanding that it is by far the better alternative, and this latter type of “comfort”has the added and significant advantage of being true.

The “hope” and “comfort” which comes from believing religious lies is the fruit of intellectual dishonesty. It may well be argued that the “loss” of such “hope” and “comfort” would be dwarfed by the benefits gained from simple intellectual honesty in the matter, regardless of whether or not that “hope” and “comfort” can be replaced. When we consider the deleterious effects that such intellectual dishonesty inflicts on the world, and when we consider the greater benefits that facing up to the facts actually does bring, then it is frankly an insult to human dignity for Bowie to assert that we “lose something” by abandoning such “faith”. The initially noble sounding aims of “religious naturalism” are brought into serious question when we realise that the stated aim of that philosophy is not to abandon such “faith” as this, but to replace it with something else. In other words, religious naturalism begins with the unquestioned assumption that this type of “faith” is inherently good, if only it could be purged of supernatural belief. But, as we have seen, this may well be seriously at odds with the facts. In part as a result of this observation do we remark that it is a naturalistic alternative to religion which should be sought, and not a naturalistic replacement for religion.

Religious thinking

Naturally, the kind of “faith” religious naturalists would want to replace the types of faith we discussed above would be claimed to be a kind which does not exhibit the kind of negative consequences we have seen with the specific examples we looked at. While it may not make sense to talk about the “loss” of “the certitude and righteousness that comes from having moral behavior codified in scripture” without considering the deleterious side-effects that such “certitude and righteousness” brings with it, it may, they might argue, make sense to talk about that if we could replace it with a similar “certitude and righteousness” which does not have such side-effects.

To examine this idea, it now becomes necessary to spell out the concept of “religious thinking” that we promised earlier. In Word games and mythtical truth, we examined the mystical statement that “all is one”, and showed how this is not a factual statement at all, but a mere expression of perspective. In one sense, it is “equally true” to say that “there is a single apple” and to say that “there is a collection of millions of atoms and a lot of empty space which we merely perceive as an apple.” They are “equally true” because there really is no contradiction between them; the first statement does not make any assertion that the apple is “singular” in some kind of metaphysical sense, and the second statement does not make any assertion that the “parts” are any more “real” than the whole. In other words, the metaphysical assertions of singularity, or lack of it, which appear to be inherent in those statements are not factual assertions at all; they are merely presentations of perspective.

Many mystics, on the other hand, wish to take a statement such as “all is one” and assert it to be true, to assert that the perception of “duality” is simply a mistake, or an illusion. But, since we have seen that the appearance of singularity, or lack of it, is not a factual assertion at all, but a question of perspective, then we can see that the statement “all is one” is not a factual assertion, and is not a true statement. We could define “mystical thinking”, therefore, as the tendency to ascribe “truth” to statements which are simply not capable of being true. Thus, when we hear of mystics claiming that “truth is ‘supra-rational'”, we can see that they are really not dealing with “truth” at all, but with mere perspective. The mistake of the mystic is to assume he’s found “truth” when all he’s really found is a perspective that he likes better, when all he’s really found is an amusing word game.

In a similar way, we can look at “religious naturalism” and insist that in order to be worthy of the name “religious”, it has to be more than simple naturalism. We can define “naturalism” as both “the view of the world that takes account only of natural elements and forces, excluding the supernatural or spiritual”, and “the belief that all phenomena are covered by laws of science and that all teleological explanations are therefore without value”. We can consider naturalism as a way of looking at and understanding the world from fact, from observation of what can be empirically determined to be true.

It will be reasonable for us to insist, therefore, that if religious naturalism is to be deserving of the title “religious”, then it must offer something beyond fact. It cannot just be the acceptance of naturalistic world view, because then it would be merely naturalism, and not religious naturalism. To be religious, it has to offer something in addition to naturalism.

Returning to the FAQ on religiousnaturalism.org, we see that:

Interpretive religious responses also address the big questions asked by humans such as : Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? Where did everything come from? Does the universe/my life have a purpose? How do I think about death?

It is reasonable to insist that anything described as “religious” must, at a minimum, make some kind of attempt to address these “big questions”. In his essay Nothing Matters, English philosopher R.M. Hare describes his response to a Swiss teenager who, while staying at his house, discovered existential nihilism and descended into depression after becoming convinced of the argument that “nothing matters”:

My friend had not understood that the function of the word “matters” is to express concern; he had thought that mattering was something (some activity or process) that things did, rather like chattering; as if the sentence “My wife matters to me” were similar in logical function to the sentence “My wife chatters to me”. If one thinks that, one may begin to wonder what this activity is, called mattering; and one may begin to observe the world closely (aided perhaps by the clear cold descriptions of a novel like that of Camus) to see if one can catch anything doing something that can be called mattering; and when we can observe nothing going on which seems to correspond to this name, it is easy for the novelist to persuade us after all that nothing matters. To which the answer is, “‘Matters’ isn’t that sort of word; it isn’t intended to describe something that things do, but to express our concern about what they do; so of course we can’t observe things mattering; but that doesn’t mean that they don’t matter”…My Swiss friend was not a hypocrite. His trouble was that, through philosophical naivete, he took for a real moral problem what was not a moral problem at all, but a philosophical one – a problem to be solved, not by an agonising struggle with his soul, but by an attempt to understand what he was saying.

The source of this teenager’s concern was therefore a conceptual mistake, from a notion that “mattering” was something objects did, instead of “mattering” being an expression of concern. In the same way, we might wonder whether some more of these “big questions” that religious naturalism is trying to address are not similarly “conceptual mistakes”.

One of the most obvious candidates is that of “purpose”; “does my life have a purpose?” the FAQ to religiousnaturalism.org asks. Let us suppose for a moment that the universe and all the people within it were indeed created by a divine being, and that that divine being has a “plan” for us all. Does that solve our question? Do we now – presuming we can correctly identify that “divine plan” – happily conclude that our lives now do indeed have a “purpose”?

The answer, naturally, is a resounding “no”. The fact that a divine creator may have a plan for us no more imbues our lives with “purpose” than does the fact that our parents may have a plan for us to become star athletes while young. It no more imbues our lives with “purpose” than beef farms and leather jacket factories imbue the lives of cows with “purpose”. The fact that someone or something else may have a plan for us just cannot create “purpose” within our own lives. Just as “mattering” is not something that objects do, so “purpose” is something that fundamentally cannot and does not arise from the circumstances of our birth or of our existence. Any notion of “purpose” simply cannot be solved by investigating, even successfully, either the natural or supernatural origins of the universe, because such origins are fundamentally incapable of imbuing our lives with “purpose”. The idea that such explanations – or such “grand narratives” about the world in which we live – can imbue our lives with purpose is thus exactly the same kind of “conceptual error” as Hare’s Swiss teenager was making. Instead, “purpose” arises simply as a result of whatever tasks we apply ourselves to within our lives; our lives themselves cannot be said to have a “purpose”. This is not the same thing as saying that our lives don’t have purpose; rather, our lives are simply not something about which we can sensibly talk of “purpose” either way. The question “do our lives have purpose?” is about as meaningful as the question “do red circles run faster than apathy?” We can take a very similar line of attack towards the question of “do our lives have meaning?” and come to a similar conclusion.

With this observation, we come a little closer to understanding what we mean by “religious thinking”. If we argue that in order to qualify as “religious” an endeavour must attempt to answer these “big questions”, and if we then argue that these “big questions” are either meaningless or actually not even real questions at all, then we start to wonder very seriously about what exactly it is that religion purports to be doing. As we stated earlier, the most usual criticism against religion is that it requires supernatural beliefs. But now we start to see that if you strip those supernatural beliefs out, what you’re left with is something no more sensible. If religion is intended to provide answers to “non-questions”, then those answers must be “non-answers” as well.

Thus, when we examine Bowie’s claim that religion addresses “certain human needs, such as assuaging existential anxiety, maintaining a sense of purpose”, we can see that these supposed “needs” are not real needs at all, but simple conceptual thinking mistakes. “Existential anxiety” arises from a simple failure to understand what “meaning” and “purpose” actually are. If these “needs” are fundamentally non-questions, which are fundamentally not capable of being addressed, then no form of religion can “address” them. The best any religion can possibly hope to do is to distract people from thinking about them. And why would any rational human being think this was a “good thing” when nothing but a little linguistic maturity can remove such “anxiety” altogether leaving a religious answer – or any answer at all – not only unnecessary but understood as being utterly nonsensical?

As we said earlier in this section, “religious naturalism” must provide something over and above simple facts to be deserving of the word “religious”, and now we can start to see what “religious” must actually mean in this context. Questions such as “does my life have meaning?” are simply not factual questions at all, and cannot have factual answers. Thus, naturalism cannot possibly hope to address such questions, because no matters of fact can. No matters at all can address such questions, in fact, since as we have already seen they are not real questions at all. Thus we can tentatively define “religion” as the belief that such questions are real, and that they can be addressed.

In this way, we can start to see why religion suffers from problems which go beyond the mere factual inaccuracy of supernatural claims. The “problems” which religion purports to address – even “naturalistic” religion – simply are not real problems, and therefore no religion can provide any “solutions” for them. Thus no religion can really be said to ever be truly “naturalistic”, since all religions require the adoption of such non-factual beliefs as this.

Finally, then, we can define “religious thinking” as “the act of giving mental credence to, and metaphysical validity to, imaginary ‘problems’ which are traditionally considered to be the domain of religion, such as the meaning and purpose of life, and the existence of morality.” Although we said earlier that morality was not a religious concept per se, the ascribing of metaphysical reality to imaginary “problems” is, and such thinking is a prerequisite for a belief in morality.

There is nothing “naturalistic” in religious thinking. Let us be clear, here: religious thinking is a mistake. It arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, and any religion worthy of the name – including religious naturalism – suffers from this mistake and this misunderstanding, regardless of whether or not it requires any supernatural beliefs about the universe.

Stephen Jay Gould has written of the “non-overlapping magisteria” between religion and science, arguing that:

The net, or magisterium, of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap

Richard Dawkins has argued against this idea, on the grounds that religious claims such as “God exists” are demonstrably scientific hypotheses, since a universe including an intervening deity would be a very different – and an observably very different – universe than one without such a deity. Yet if we consider the “questions” over with “the magisterium of religion extends” to be just those questions which we have described in our analysis of religious thinking, then we can accept Gould’s idea, because such questions quite demonstrably have nothing whatsoever to do with fact. And the reason they do not overlap is because they are, as we have said, not real questions at all, and no factual explanations – either naturalistic or supernatural – could possibly have anything to say about them. The idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” fails if by “religious claims” we include “claims made by religion”, such as the existence of an intervening God, as Dawkins has successfully shown. But it does not fail if we define “religious claims” as “those claims of a religious nature”, defining “religious nature” as that which specifically excludes questions of fact from its domain.

Thus, we said earlier that “it seems that religious naturalism, in this sense, is a solution in search of a problem” and that “One aspect of what we are going to introduce as ‘religious thinking’, then, is the belief – and, make no mistake, it is a belief – that religion is necessary.” The person engaged in religious thinking begins by believing that questions such as “does my life have meaning?” are legitimate questions, and that they are legitimate questions which deserve an answer. To anyone who thinks this, and who believes that religion can provide an answer, religion will indeed be “necessary”. But to anyone who disregards these spurious questions as the nonsense that they are, religion in any of its forms – including religious naturalism – will at best be seen as unnecessary, and more likely seen as harmful in that they encourage people to give credence to and to torment themselves with these meaningful questions, and to hang a carrot in front of their noses, dishonestly promising solutions to such questions if they’d only subscribe to one’s religion. An enormous amount of mental agonising (see the example of Hare’s Swiss teenager), not to mention an intergalactic quantity of wasted time, could be saved by abandoning religious thinking and abandoning the notion that religion is anything other than a huge disservice to humanity.

We further said that Bowie’s assertion that “we lose something by a lack of faith in supernatural beings that are concerned with humans” was also illustrative of “religious thinking”. All these supposed “benefits” of faith that he believes to exist are only beneficial to those who give credence to these nonsensical “big questions”, and who torment themselves with their absence of answers to them. Without a belief in the validity of these “big questions”, such matters of faith bring no benefits whatsoever. We can go further and say that religion, by encouraging a belief in the validity of such questions, creates the very crises and problems that it then attempts to solve. Religion – even naturalistic religion – can be likened to a group of doctors who go around deliberately infecting people with disease just so that those people can then enjoy the wonders of modern healthcare, and perhaps then going on to berate those who would criticise their actions as if they were against people “getting better”.

Conclusion

As promised, we have shown that religion creates the very problems it purports to solve as a result of religious thinking, and that what is really needed is not a naturalistic religion, but a naturalistic alternative to religion. The very idea that “religious feeling” of any kind is capable of enhancing life is absurd and demeaning to human dignity. A feeling of awe and wonder inspired by looking at the heavens can only be lessened and cheapened by an interpretation though a religious point of view. Bowie quotes “UU Minister” William Murray as saying that:

The epic of cosmic evolution is the narrative that underlies humanistic religious naturalism and that provides the individual with a meaningful worldview and a sense of belonging to a larger process…Like no other story, it teaches us that we are all members of one family sharing the same genetic code and a similar history; it evokes gratitude and astonishment at the gift of life itself and inspires responsible living. Like no other story, it gives meaning and purpose to human beings as the agents responsible for the current and future stages of cultural evolution.

On the contrary, one’s appreciation for the process of evolution can only be turned into a small and tawdry notion if one adopts the patently absurd religious belief that “it gives meaning and purpose to human beings”, or if we regard life as some kind of “gift” given to us by a beneficent process which is actually impersonal and blind. There is no way one can get the idea that human beings are “agents responsible for the current and future stages of cultural evolution” from an observation of facts, especially when an observation of the facts tells us that it is natural selection that is responsible for evolution – or its equivalent in the “memetic” world of cultural evolution – and not human beings at all. Such an idea is most definitely a religious belief, and even though it may not be supernatural it is nevertheless a religious belief that is not “true”, and there is therefore nothing “naturalistic” about it. The contribution of “religious naturalism” as opposed to just plain naturalism – if “religious naturalism” were actually a coherent scheme that did anything, of course – would be this type of arbitrary and false religious belief, whose falsity is not in the least bit affected by its non-supernatural nature.

One can perfectly well have a joyous outlook on life, a deep appreciation of the natural world, and a sense of wonder at the grandeur of the universe and the emergent processes within it, without having to descend into the tawdry and vulgar habit of religious belief, and it is an insult to atheists across the globe to suggest that one can’t. One gets the impression that these “religious naturalists” are merely former adherents of legacy religions who, whilst finding it impossible to continue to hold supernatural beliefs, are as yet not philosophically or spiritually mature enough to shed their perceived need for “religion” in its entirety, which we might expect would be the next logical step. There are millions of atheists all over the world who neither need nor want the kind of “religious comfort” that these religious naturalists assert is so necessary for meaningful human life, and those who have managed to pull themselves away from their former religious belief would likely resent the implication that they are somehow less complete people for not retaining that additional element of absurdity in their worldly outlook, as well as the implication that the majority of their positive emotions are somehow “religious”.

Religion is then, as we have said, a “solution” in search of a problem, and not a very good solution at that. The complete and abject failure of religious naturalism to come up with any coherent and accepted “religious” framework should be evidence enough that such an aspect is neither needed nor wanted. Although doubtless well-meaning, it is hard to shake off a distaste for the activities of these religious naturalists who, while bemoaning the absurdities of conventional theistic religion, are simultaneously asserting the value and legitimacy of religion as a whole at a time when religious belief, although shrinking in quantity, is increasing in tone and stridency, and reasserting its position as a genuine threat to the kind of humanity that the religious naturalists claim to stand for. While Bowie may be hoping for a day where this kind of religion is the foundation of the lives of many, others might hope for a day where they can at least count upon fellow atheists to discard the absurd and meaningless practice of religious thinking to the waste paper basket of history where it belongs.