“Dreaming In League With God”

The philosopher Howard Wettstein argues (NYT) against the usefulness of debating whether or not God “exists.” How he – a self-proclaimed naturalist – approaches religion:

Religious life, at least as it is for me, does not involve anything like a well-defined, or even something on the way to becoming a well-defined, concept of God, a concept of the kind that a philosopher could live with. What is fundamental is no such thing, but rather the experience of God, for example in prayer or in life’s stunning moments. Prayer, when it works, yields an awe-infused sense of having made contact, or almost having done so. Having made contact, that is, concerning the things that matter most, whether the health and well-being of others, or of the community, or even my own; concerning justice and its frequent absence in our world; concerning my gratefulness to, or praise of, God. The experience of sharing commitments with a cosmic senior partner, sharing in the sense both of communicating and literally sharing, “dreaming in league with God,” as A.J. Heschel puts it, is both heady and heartening. Even when that partner remains undefined and untheorized.

He goes on to explain why he believes we’ll never have a “complete explanation” of religious experience:

Say we had a really satisfying psychological account of, for example, what we experience in a moment of intense love. Say further that this was somehow perfectly correlated with a neurophysiological account. Would this be a complete explanation? Would there be no more questions — “why” questions — to ask about the experience? Couldn’t we still be puzzled about the role that love plays in the human emotional economy? Wouldn’t we want to know what it says about these creatures, their needs, their frustrations, the things that make life worthwhile for them? I’m not sure that we can ever close the book on our multiple explanatory projects.