Religious Naturalism: Spirituality without Faith
To what extent can secular humanists be spiritual? Can those of us with a more or less naturalistic view of the world, one that doesn’t involve spirits, gods, or ghosts, legitimately seek spiritual experience? There seems a prima facie difficulty here since traditional notions of spirituality often posit a non-physical realm categorically separate from the world described by science. Such dualism is of course the antithesis of naturalism, which understands existence to be of a piece, not split into the natural and supernatural. If for humanists the ultimate constituents of the world don’t include immaterial essences, souls, or spirits, then it might seem that spirituality is off limits.If you look up the etymology of the word “spiritual,” you’ll find that it derives from the Latin “spiritus,” meaning “wind” or “breath.” Standard dictionary definitions of spiritual contrast it with physical or material, so dualism is more or less built into the ordinary conception of spirituality. But I will argue that just as we can be good without God, we can have spirituality without spirits. Even within the monistic view of the cosmos entailed by a commitment to scientific empiricism, we can avail ourselves of spiritual experience and take an authentically spiritual stance when appreciating our situation as fully physical creatures embedded in a material universe. I hope to show that in its dualism, the traditional notion of spirituality in effect sets up problems of existential alienation and cognitive dissonance that religions have wrestled with, more or less unsuccessfully, for millennia. At a stroke, naturalism cuts these problems off at the root, providing an emotionally satisfying and cognitively unified basis for feeling completely at home in the world.
Many humanists, of course, will not necessarily want to access what I will call the “spiritual response.” Even if I persuade them that there’s nothing conceptually incoherent about a naturalistic spirituality, they might be constitutionally disinclined to indulge in emotions or practices that even temporarily disengage the rational mind set. I won’t argue against such reluctance, since each of us has his or her own tastes in aesthetic experience, and varying “comfort levels” in letting go. But the spiritual response is there for those who wish to experience it. It’s intrinsically rewarding in its own right, and a valuable resource in getting us through tough times.
What would it mean to naturalize spirituality? What precisely would a naturalistic spirituality look like? Before turning to these questions, I want to briefly touch on some basic aspects and functions of spirituality, whatever its type, and then see how traditional spirituality fulfills (or tries to fulfill) these functions. This will set the stage for exploring how naturalism might work as well or better in grounding spiritual experience and in addressing our ultimate concerns.
