Reading John Hick – Religious awareness –
Hick’s thesis is that awareness of the transcendent is not easily apparent but has to be cultivated. This stems from the fact that we are free to make choices. I agree that personal freedom is a factor but it is not the whole story. Being human means that we are not determined from birth by instincts and environment in the way that a mouse or a lobster is. Our genetic endowment and social environment, though vitally important, are not wholly determinative, not even, once a certain level of development has been achieved, in extreme situations such as famine or war, cf. the countless stories of altruism, self-sacrifice, heroism and the ability of many individuals to transcend a destructive environment. Self-consciousness gives us the ability to step back from the physical, moral and social inputs and cancel instinctive reactions. This allows us to be creative in our responses, to be proactive, taking into consideration other factors than those immediately apparent.
Some, relatively few, are born with a profound sense of religious awareness, cf. Bernadette Roberts and examples in the findings of The Religious Experience Research Unit at Lampeter. Some seem to have little or none. For the majority it is something that needs to be cultivated. Sooner or later we all encounter limit situations where existential questions are thrust on us.
The meaning one attaches to life, to being human, has to take into account our present situation. The meaning/purpose of life is not clear because we do not possess the whole picture. Hick is not rigorous enough (p. 50). True, our dispositional structure affects the way we live, but equally, the way we live, the worldview in which we are immersed, affects our dispositional structure. It may be almost impossible for an individual in an antipathetic social milieu to ‘experience as’ in a religious sense even though all the clues may be there. Marx’s insight that the social being of man determines his consciousness is apposite here. That said, finding oneself in a limit situation which brings into question the belief structures and hidden assumptions, hitherto unexamined, and shows them up as relative can be the stimulus which brings about a new way of seeing/experiencing.
The question of meaning cannot be answered in spatio-temporal terms. This is why the question is often seen to be meaningless, or unanswerable. Any possible answer must be relative and conditional. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ without any qualifying words such as ‘now’, or ‘for me’ demands a definitive answer. Since the human situation is always provisional and in process such an answer cannot be given. One has to get beyond the conditional and the relative to the essence of humanity. And this is the problem – what is the essence of humanity? Some would say we are simply intelligent animals. If this is all we are the question of meaning can be answered in material terms. Others, perhaps the majority, would say that there is something in us which transcends our psychosomatic limitations. What is this ‘something’ and in what way does it transcend the spatio-temporal dimensions of experience? It could be said that this transcendence consists in the fact that as self-conscious and self-determining beings we have the power to transcend many of the physical and social constraints of our environment. This is why we have been able to progress from a primitive existence to our form of life today, able, at least in prospect, to manipulate the genes that determine our bodily existence – a fact that fills many with horror because we are tinkering with our humanity, a humanity we do not fully understand.
Others would say that the transcendent element in us is the fact that our being opens out into the being of God. What does that mean? We are not self-sufficient. Physically we need food, clothing and shelter to survive. Socially we need others in order to become persons and, having become persons, to achieve a certain level of happiness and fulfilment in loving and being loved. Intellectually we need others to learn language, not only to communicate with them, but also to think, process ideas, arrive at conclusions and make decisions planning for the future. When all our physical, social, emotional and intellectual needs are met we still find that life is not satisfactory. Something in us remains unsatisfied. On the one hand the three brute facts of existence, powerlessness, contingency and scarcity gnaw at the mind’s complacency. On the other hand there comes from time to time the feeling that the walls of our existence are translucent and behind them we catch glimpses of a Presence.
[John Hick; The Fifth Dimension, One world, Oxford, 1999]