Information Resources
Review of Huston Smith's Why Religion Matters
(HarperSanFrancisco), 2001, 290 pps.
Most people these days, I believe, have a sense that something is missing from their lives. In his new book, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, Huston Smith, an internationally recognized expert on world religions, argues that what we have lost is the sense of something beyond ourselves that both enlarges our horizons and makes us fully human. Smith locates the source of our present spiritually impoverished condition in the scientism of the modern and post-modern worldviews. Scientism, not science, is the culprit: the disposition that claims that material reality is the only reality, and that science is the only method or, at the very least, the most reliable method for discovering truth. Science and technology have taken the high ground; metaphysics and religion lie battered and bleeding in the dust.
The book begins with an examination of the path humankind has walked that has brought us to where we are today. The author describes the three great periods of human history -- traditional, modern, and post-modern -- and demonstrates that the particular weakness of one period is the strength of another. As a cure for what ails us, Smith would have us combine the most valuable contributions of all three periods -- the cosmology of modernism, the social justice of post-modernism, and the metaphysics of traditionalism. He maintains that we must restore the traditional worldview to its rightful place in our lives because only religion can deal with the ultimate questions that human beings ask.
Smith devotes the first half of the book to a careful presentation of what he calls "modernity's tunnel," the creation of scientism, higher education, the media, and the law. He then turns his imagination in the second half of the book to a discussion of light: the light at the end of modernity's tunnel, the physics of light, the light of faith, and the remarkable convergences between the scientific and metaphysical understandings of light. Ultimately he concludes that what is fundamental to the world is not matter but spirit.
Why Religion Matters is an insightful, persuasive, and compelling book. But more than that, it is an entertaining and engaging book, a truly delightful read that mixes philosophical inquiry with poetry, humor, wisdom, and warm personal experiences. Huston Smith displays a stunning breadth of knowledge; he undoubtedly knows more about science than most scientists know about religion. And he asks the most amazing questions. "What if," he says, "in the Big Bang, it was Infinite Omniscience that exploded?" Indeed, what if?!
Reviewed by Janis L. Koch, ICJS Webmaster
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