Don’t atheists feel a religious need?
Some do while others don’t One atheist who did admit to feeling religious needs was the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. As Mark Lindley and myself once put it:
George Santayana (1863–1952) was born in Madrid of Spanish parentage but was brought at the age of eight to Boston and graduated there from an elite secondary school (Boston Latin) and from Harvard College. One of his teachers at Harvard was William James, whose writings include The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). After earning his undergraduate degree at Harvard, Santayana studied for two years in Berlin and in Cambridge (England), and then back at Harvard took his doctorate with a thesis on Rudolf Hermann Lotze and in due time became a professor of philosophy there. He remained a lifelong Spanish citizen and spent nearly half of his adult life in Europe, but his work was addressed mainly to Americans and he is generally thought of as an American philosopher and man of letters. (He coined many brilliant aphorisms,12and his writings include a very successful Bildungsroman,13 an appealing three-volume autobiography and a good deal of rhythmically soporific poetry.) His philosophical works include The Sense of Beauty (1896), The Life of Reason (5 vols., 1905–1906), Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–40). His most sustained and interesting discussion of religion is in Volume III of The Life of Reason, entitled “Reason in Religion,” where he said:
“The Life of Reason is the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion. Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and transforms ethics.”14
Santayana held that religion aims to realize the “life of reason” but largely fails to do so:
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“What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to rationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture and in its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues rationality through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it gives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts, insinuates ideals, or remolds aspiration, it is an imaginative substitute for wisdom –I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit of all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented in religion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the depth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than its contradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that of reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked poetical conceits.”15
He was far from scorning religion, however. He said:
“Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic representation of moral reality which may have a most important function in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the lessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuous incidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is strenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and in the conscience.”
On the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having taken the place of anything better, but rather as having come to relieve situations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitely worse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practical slavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it. Natural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what may happen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it. We must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral and natural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we must rather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculative insight which it has introduced into the world.”16
According to Santayana, religion though not literally true presents in metaphorical form important truths about the human condition. So he was critical of superficial debunkers of religion, who while correctly pointing out its falsehoods failed to appreciate its psychological and social functions in human life. Though himself clearly an atheist, he was reluctant to do anything to actively undermine religion and religious faith.
He held that while it is unfeasible to distinguish between religions in terms of their truth-value (since all of them are false), there are better and worse religions in terms of their usefulness in helping people to attain the Life of Reason. He felt that Christianity was to be preferred over its rivals — and Catholicism over Protestantism, which failed, in his opinion, to take into account the mythopoeic nature of religious beliefs and thus (as a leading scholar of Santayana’s philosophy has put it) “impoverished the symbols of Christianity without discarding its falsehoods.”17 He also thought, however, that it was unwise of some of the more liberal Protestants to jettison in Christianity that was inconsistent with modern science.
This preference of Santayana’s harmonized with his political outlook. The Roman Catholic Church was an extremely conservative institution. Santayana as a political conservative admired it in part because of his own conservatism. (But there was nothing mean about him. When, for instance, it seemed in 1937 likely that Bertrand Russell, whose philosophical views he strongly criticized, was about to have severe monetary difficulties in the USA, Santayana was willing to support Russell for five years if need be.)
