What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?
Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).
I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.”
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.
Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.
The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:
Believers without belief - TLS
Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).
I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.”
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.
Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.
The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:
Believers without belief - TLS
According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.
However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...
But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.
Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.
What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...
Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...
The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.
One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.
However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...
But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.
Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.
What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...
Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...
The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.
One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.
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