Religion Without God by Ronald Dworkin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Enchantment

One of the consequences of language, perhaps the most important but least recognised, is that the world becomes symbolic. Things stand for other things, things they are not. Symbols, including words, are not like things that are not symbols. Although it gets very complicated, what it comes down to is that while they have no value in themselves, symbols connote value. ‘Food’ is good; ‘poison’ is bad. The symbol for the highest good (and bad) is what constitutes the divine. Words in particular tend to become sacred. Value, and therefore God, is inherent in language-using. We extol religion every time we open our mouths to speak.

The source of religion in language is not part of Dworkin’s analysis. But it should have been. It would clarify his opinion that “religion is deeper than God.” As it is, Dworkin narrows himself unnecessarily into religion as a “worldview,” an attitude which relies on a belief in “the full, independent reality of value.” For him, value exists in a sort of Platonic realm as an ideal to which we commit ourselves as if to another person.

Dworkin’s position resolves itself into a sort of poetic pantheism: “I shall take these two—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life.” Really? Intrinsic meaning and beauty? Such belief, such faith, has fundamentalism written all over it. What on Earth could an otherwise intelligent human being have been thinking? Meaning only exists in the language that expresses it. And nothing of intrinsic value exists within language.

Dworkin is afraid that some people consider values as illusory. I understand his concern. But the way to contest this opinion is not to argue about their reality, much less their permanence, but simply to point out that ‘illusory’ is a term denoting value for the people who use it. They make his argument for him if only he would have listened. His worry was one typical of those intellectuals who mistake the map of reality with the journey of life.

Value, like language, is a social phenomenon. Both are real but not because they exist in some other spiritual world. They certainly are beyond us as individuals; they are a crucial part of our lives that we cannot control; and they make the communal lives we have possible. But neither value nor language is intrinsic to the world aside from our creating it. Both change incrementally whenever they are employed. They are neither subjective nor objective, but reside in that fascinating intermediate universe of the inter-subjective, where all existence is shared. One can remain enchanted with these things, and the world, without claiming more for them than they deserve or demand.

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