Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin (PDF)

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In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses timeless questions: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What are death and immortality? He joins a sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. Belief in God is one manifestation of this view, but not the only one.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The author of this book informs us that religion is a “deep, distinct and comprehensive worldview that holds that [1] inherent, objective value permeates everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, [2] human life has purpose and the universe order. A belief in God is only one possible manifestation or consequence of this deeper worldview.” Whatever else God may be doing, this has been the center of his appeal, as well as “filling the world with value and purpose.” Atheists such as Einstein and Shelley, have shown this attitude and therefore qualify.He wants a deeper way of characterizing the beliefs of religious atheists. Einstein’s belief is not in just physical law but a transcendental and objective value, neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction. (Moral and ethical values are part of Einstein’s belief.) The US Supreme court for the purpose of interpreting certain clauses of the Constitution has endorsed this view as religious. But the religious attitude rejects naturalism, the view that nothing is real except space-time and material objects. So love, for example is real as an emotion and as a value, i.e., people loving and setting a high value on love. But often ideas are “ungrounded” — meaning they cannot be actually confirmed or disproved by other ideas. Religious atheists accept that such ideas have meaning in an emotional sense but will not attribute them to a God. For both the religious and nonreligious, entire systems like mathematics are ungrounded because nothing empirical can prove or disprove them.Religious theists have a more complex view. They must have a “religious science”, in addition to actual science, to enable the actions in the world that they feel are real but do not fall within the scientific worldview. (Belief in miracles would be part of religious science, I suppose.) Then there are the rituals, prayers, and the values implicit in moral and ethical codes which could work effects through religious science. But there is no way to use religious science to prove or disprove what really happens in the physical world; that is the province of actual science. Dworkin appears to ignore religious claims about the origin of the universe and does not state the role of religious science in creation. But the ambiguity is difficult: “… divine creation, whatever else it is, [must] be an act of intelligent agency. It is hard to see what would be left of theism if some form of creative agency did not form part of its science.” (p. 30) Dworkin apparently sees theists as compelled to believe in a separate intelligent religious science. Not a theist himself, he says that the theism requires the belief that this science has been part of the universe since the beginning, acting through the innate structure of the universe — even when the universe had not been created yet . There is no resolution of this paradox. There is no list of specific differences between Religious Atheism and godly religion. I’m not quite sure of all this.The author then attempts to identify the major features of the modern scientist’s universe. By way of various popular books on relativity, quantum theory, and so on, he identifies the foremost as “radiant beauty.” Being astronomical, they are large-scale like the Grand Canyon. What makes them beautiful? Large size itself is a factor. A human-made Grand Canyon would not be interesting, simply because it could not be sufficiently large. The Grand Canyon invokes the entire history of the earth and the evolutionary process as no human-made model could. Theories about large scale entities like the universe are interesting and beautiful for their breadth alone. Another consideration in beauty is symmetry. Symmetry in space tends to be attractive; he also mentions symmetry in time. Then he sets aside the quest for beauty momentarily to consider the opposition’s point of view, for example, in Leibniz and Mario Gleiser. That is, the universe is just the way it is. That is, the universe is nothing but itself. He thinks this admission may amount to just a way of admitting we don’t understand it, or evading the deterministic implication that if one piece of a theory turns out wrong, we may have to give up all of it. (This is not how I understand determinism.) What is needed is “shielded strong integrity” which means there are reasons that emerge from the universe-theory itself that show that any contrary explanation does not make sense so cannot exist. The theory is then self-confirming like mathematics, but it is then purely aspirational. This is as far as we can go with the structure of the universe.Even by the third chapter, on religious freedom, the author still seems preoccupied with protecting atheism. In some countries, rights doctrine sets all religions as equal, but sometimes does not include atheist freedom. The author’s response to this is that the importance of religion demands that we should not adopt a limited definition, and therefore should include atheistic philosophies. The global importance of religion is shown by documents from the United Nations, the European Court of Human rights and so on. The religious wars of European history show the value of toleration as a practical right. How can it be defended as a human right? Obviously the government cannot favor one religion over another, so there can be no Christmas creches, courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, and so on. The author wants to subsume the widest possible range of behavior under a cancept of “ethical independence,” which “limits the reasons government may offer for any constraint of a citizen’s freedom at all.” (p.133) In the case of the Native American Church asking to use peyote in its rituals the specific right of a religious exemption is no longer needed because the expanded role of ethical independence would make it protected anyway. This is what the author wanted, but Congress moved the goal posts by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.It should be noted that because of the author’s death, this book was completed by someone other than the author. This may explain why it is sometimes unclear, sometimes repetitious, and the exposition reveals gaps.

⭐This short volume is engaging and easy to read, particularly if one is familiar with Ronald Dworkin’s thinking in previous works, especially “Justice for Hedgehogs” (Belknap/Harvard, 2011). “Religion without God” continues the earlier volume’s argument for the existence of an objective realm of values and therefore emphasizes the critical personal and social importance of ethics. Dworkin, in that respect, goes against the grain of relativism and subjectivism popular in discussions of values. The current volume, however, clarifies one of his roots in this regard: he explains that, in his view, it is possible to be “religious” by acknowledging the realm of value without necessarily believing in God or the gods. He argues in the first chapter for a “religious atheism”, and he goes on to argue throughout the book that this religious atheism need not be in conflict with other religious orientations.A second chapter examines “the universe” and modern physics’ view of the universe for evidence of that realm of value. In particular the scientist finds beauty to be a key manifestation of the reality of value, as many of the rest of us do. Dworkin actually does an amazingly good job of unpacking a lot of pretty sophisticated scientific thinking, the kind of unpacking that happens all too seldom in college survey education in science not to mention secondary education. It is all the more remarkable that he is not a scientist himself.The third chapter evokes Dworkin’s background as a law professor in exploring “religious freedom”, including the degree to which religious views and beliefs can be expressed publicly without infringing on the freedoms of others to be religious in their own ways or free from others’ religiousity. He explores issues as diverse as public and school prayer and abortion.Finally there is a short concluding chapter on “death and immortality”. The chapter feels unfinished, but it does argue for an immortality that derives from “living well”, from being the successful author of one’s own life, another important theme in Dworkin’s larger opus. And it is touching in that this was Professor Dworkin’s last book, a book which apparently made several statements he thought to be very important in his end-of-life reflections.The book is based on the Einstein Lectures delivered at the University of Bern in 2011. Dworkin apparently meant to expand what he left us here, and indeed the book seems incomplete both in scope and also in terms of a unifying theme. While his death regrettably cut short his project, what we have in “Religion without God” contributes significantly not only to discussions of ethics and law, not only to thinking about value, not only to a fuller understanding of this fascinating thinker, but also to possible discussions of what religion is. It is well known that religion does not necessarily need a god, as in Buddhism, but perhaps “atheism” is too loaded a word to be quite accurate or adequate for the purpose here. I would suggest a better title might have been “religion without theism”.

⭐It is interesting how last books carry with them a special meaning that, curiously enough, have something to do with what Dworkin tries to convey with RwoG. I could only think of Nemesis, where Philip Roth wrote his last word: “invincible”. Here, Dworkin seems to compile all he knows into a “theory of everything” that puts together quantum mechanics, semiotics, philosophy of art and theology into a vision about what life means and, more importantly, what death means. He cannot avoid thinking of all the legal issues he work on all his life but what makes me give 4 stars to this book are the very two last pages. This is Dworkin’s parting glass, all his money he’d ever had spent in good company, all the harm he’d ever done to none but him… Good night and joy be with you all.

⭐Regarding the first chapter “Religious Atheism”: I really do not understand the late Mr. Dworkin’s effort to combine religion and atheism. If he wishes to add a spiritual dimension to atheism there are quite a few books on the worldview of Religious Naturalism, as atheism is not a worldview. However, Mr. Dworkin takes exception to the Naturalism and the works of Richard Dawkins (an ethology and evolutionary biologist).As I read this book, what keeps popping into my mind is Plato’s Theory of Forms. In Mr. Dwokin’s case his thinking is about value. He seems to want to make value a real objective thing rather than a process of the mind. I see an interesting parallel with the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design and Mr. Dwokin’s reliance on mathematicians. Intelligent Design claims professional scientists among it’s ranks but most are mathematician with few from the biological scientist ranks. Similarly, there is no biology to be found in this book.

⭐I have enjoyed a lot the argument. I think that it is very close to the Kant’s well-known sentence:’Der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir’J.J. Moreso

⭐Man sollte ganz gut englisch können, um dieses Buch zu mögen. Manchmal geht die Argumentation ganz schön im Kreis herum.

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⭐A wonderful little book by a giant thinker.

⭐This isn’t Dworkin at his finest, far from it, but even so his philosophical voice remains compelling, even at the end of his life.

⭐神の存在を信じない人でも、より抽象的非人格的な最高存在を信じる人は宗教的な人だというかなり寛大な考え方をする人のようです。米国憲法の諸条項などが多く引用されている点は、法律学者にとっても役に立つと思います。

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