Tillich, Science, and Being Religious

I’ve been blogging a re-reading of Paul Tillich’s “The Courage to Be” and I have reached the second chapter. It is slow going partly because I don’t have the time to be at it on a daily basis, but also because there is a lot in this book and a lot to think about whenever I want to write about it.

The first subsection of the first subsection of Chapter Two is called “The Meaning of Nonbeing.” It is a prelude to his discussion of human anxieties, which are very important to the rest of the book and are returned to again and again. However, I wanted to talk a bit about “being” and what Tillich’s emphasis on God as one’s Ground of Being has meant for me.

One of my struggles in being pretty much a “modernist” and growing up with a modern scientific understanding of the world around me but also being interested in being religious has been “what is the point of religion in a modern scientific world?” The standard answer among many folk interested in science and religion is that science is the study of how the universe is whereas religion is about how the world ought to be. That answer has never been satisfactory to me, though, because I don’t see how that creates a purpose for religion in our lives beyond the philosophy of ethics. Why not just get rid of religion and study Ethics?

The answer that I feel comfortable with now comes from my understanding of Tillich’s use of “being.” I have come to view the point of religion (for myself) as being about “Being.” I distinguish this from mere “existence” as (I think) does Tillich because “Being” implies action on the part of the individual in a way that “existence” does not. When Tillich talks of “Being” he is using it in the same way that Hamlet does in his famous “To be or not to be, that is the question” speech. When he talks of “The Courage to Be” the “Be” is there used as a verb – it is about doing something more than existing. A stone has existence but it is not clear to me it has “Being.” As conscious individuals we not only exist, but we experience our existence in a way that an inanimate object cannot be said to do. Tillich interprets “being” “in terms of life or process or becoming…” (Courage p. 32)which I suppose is a bit of a nod towards process theology. The experience of existence (or life, process or becoming) is often great, but it has its own inherent difficulties, including the anxieties that Tillich addresses in the rest of the chapter.

This has gone a long way to dissolving my cognitive dissonance between being a scientific modernist and a religious person. Science is about creating theoretical models that you can map on to the physical universe and observe the accuracy of in an attempt to understand that physical world deeper. Religion, to me, is about addressing my human need to deal with my experience of living in the universe with all of its good and all of its anxieties. If science answers questions like “why do we die, how can we prevent it as long as possible, etc.,” religion answers questions like “how do I live with the anxiety of knowing that I am going to die? What symbolic rituals can we develop to cope with it?”

Or, as another example, I think of science as asking (and attempting to answer, always imperfectly) the question what is the universe physically like? Religion I think of asking (and attempting to answer, always imperfectly) the question what is at the foundation or deepest depths of my experience of the universe?