Religion and Understanding

Richard Dawkins once said: "I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” Many religious folks are satisfied with not understanding the world, or at least not the world as constructed by observation and experimentation. All religious folks, however, aren’t. All religious folks aren’t the same. All major religions have within their traditions mechanisms for adapting to the expansion of human knowledge. A notion like Ijtihad, the Islamic equivalent of legal reasoning, is an example. Ijtihad is the process of making a legal decision that is not based just on what has already been laid out. Ijtihad, whether officially or not, has continued to be used right up to today and has been present since the foundation of Islam. The Prophet Muhammad seems to have believed that God spoke through him to the people of the seventh century with a message they could understand and were ready to accept, but not one that was to stay that way for all time. Many Muslims today contend that men were allowed to have four wives because the custom was to have far more than four. It was a limitation that could be accepted at the time, not a limitation for all time. The United Church of Christ’s God is still speaking campaign is an example of an attempt by Christians to adapt their religion. It was inspired by Gracie Allen’s comment, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” What this means, essentially, is that God’s word is interpreted in light of our knowledge of the world right now. The bottom line is that religion is not a monolith and can’t teach any one thing, including satisfaction with a lack of understanding. Religion also isn’t an unchanging thing, and for that matter neither is the world. Religion has impacted the world, and not just negatively. Religious people seek to understand the world and have the world understand their beliefs, and in the process both are changed. To dismiss religion as ignorance is as ignorant as dismissing evolution as an unsupported theory. To dismiss religion is to assume that it is only about God. To dismiss religion as ignorance is to be satisfied with not understanding it.