Center for Scientific Studies

Review of "Why Religion Matters"

by R. Kelvin Moore, Th.D., Associate Professor of Christian Studies

February 50, 2003 - Houston Smith is internationally recognized as the world’s foremost authority on world religions. Since 1958 Smith’s The World’s Religions book has been an invaluable resource. While Smith is a Christian and a member of the Methodist church, as one reads The World’s Religions one realizes that Smith, intellectually, is equally at home in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. Smith, raised by missionary parents in China, took an early interest in Confucianism and Taoism. Later he spent many years studying with spiritual masters in Hinduism and Buddhism. Among Smith’s impressive credentials include teaching positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. Including Why Religion Matters, the now-retired Smith has written over ten books.

Smith maintains that modernity has created within many individuals a tunnel vision that has destroyed their ability to see the “big picture” of life. He argues that science has become the world view of many. But Smith believes that science is incapable of answering life’s most perplexing questions of “How did we get here?” and “What is our purpose for being here?” Smith writes that science cannot answer the question of why individuals were created nor can science fill the void within a person’s life regarding life’s purpose.

Smith discusses what he calls three inescapable problems: how to win food and shelter from our natural environment or the problem that nature poses. How to get along with one another or the social problem. And finally, how to relate to the total scheme of things, which Smith calls the religious problem. He argues that modernity addresses the initial problems of nature and society but can not address the religion issue. Smith believes that modernity and post modernity have strengths: modernity provides a new view of science while post modernity emphasizes social justice. But the traditional emphasis upon religion has been omitted in modernity and post modernity. Herein, for Smith, lies the problem. While modern science and technology has aided humanity’s search for answers to the nature and society problems, modern science nor technology can not answer the religion problem.

Ingeniously Smith utilizes the analogy of a tunnel. He argues that many people are looking into this tunnel and have lost peripheral vision, i.e., the traditional worldview. Smith discusses this tunnel in detail. Smith labels scientism as the tunnel’s floor, higher education as the left wall, the media as the roof, and the law as the tunnel’s right wall.

Smith maintains that scientism must be differentiated from science. He writes that “Science is on balance good, whereas nothing good can be said for scientism” (p. 59). In short, scientism is science taken to a level where science is worshipped. Scientism maintains that science is the most reliable method of obtaining truth and that the thing with which science deals, that of material entities, is the most fundamental thing that exists. Smith maintains that he isn’t angry at science: “I am angry at us—modern Westerners who, forsaking clear thinking, have allowed ourselves to become so obsessed with life’s material underpinning that we have written science a blank check” (p. 4). Nor is Smith angry at scientists: “. . . I want again to exonerate scientists as a professional group from having gotten us into our tunnel” (p. 53). The author writes that scientists did not push society into this tunnel but society “. . . rushed headlong for it and all but dragged scientists with us” (p. 54).

Smith labels higher education as the tunnel’s left wall. Basically this chapter criticizes the promotion of scientism in academia. Smith writes that at one time the humanities, as advocates of the human spirit, were the heart of traditional education. Today the humanities are neither the heart nor the center of higher education but have been replaced by professionalism and science. Smith maintains that the once-pervasive presence of religion on college campuses has all but disappeared and that today’s universities erode every belief system other than those of science. Smith writes that “The modern university is not agnostic toward religion: it is actively hostile to it” (p. 96). A noteworthy quote comes from A. K. Coomaraswamy, an art historian: “. . . it takes four years to acquire a college education in American and forty years to get over it” (p. 102).

The media forms the roof to Smith’s tunnel analogy. Whereas the academy has been anti-religion, the academy shapes the modern mind, many of whom are likewise anti-religion. Within the media, science often appears as reasonable and tolerant whereas religion often appears as bigoted, intolerant, and backward-looking. Garry Wills maintains that the media often ignores the 120 million people or more in America who practice their religion regularly (p. 119).

Finally, the law completes the right wall in Smith’s tunnel. Smith maintains that nowhere is the contrast between the traditional and scientific worldviews seen more sharply than here. Laws require children to go to school but only science’s version of creation is taught in the schools. While Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana have attempted to make room for God to be taught along side the scientific view those attempts have been denied on constitutional grounds. “Reduced to simplest terms, courts rightly assume that theism is a religious position, while wrongly assuming that atheism is not” (p. 132).

In the second part of Why Religion Matters Smith maintains that there is light at the end of the tunnel. While some believe that a major storm is brewing that could level religion forever Smith believes that “. . . the skies are clearing . . . and the future of religion looks bright, even assured” (p. 145). He argues that modernity is coming to see that the gods it worshiped have failed them, clearing the path for resurgence of religion. While Russia utilized every means of suppression for over seventy years, Russia was unable to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. Churches in China are growing to the point that houses of worship can not seat the parishioners. Smith writes that “eventually the sun sets on every empire, and the sunset for the empire of science has arrived” (p. 187).

Smith writes there are six things science cannot “. . . get its hands on” (p. 197): values in their final and proper sense, existential and global meanings, final causes, invisibles, quality, and our superiors (pp. 197-199). Smith argues that science leaves much of the world untouched. The author argues that only a religious worldview can shed valuable insights in these areas. Smith provides the following helpful illustration of how science deals with the natural world while religion deals with the whole of things (p. 200):

Smith argues that religion matters because religion is the only entity that gives humanity a sense of purpose and belonging. While science and technology have made and continue to make valuable contributions to the advancement of society neither science nor technology can fill the “purpose” and “why” vacuum inside the life of every person. Only religion can do that: “The best thing about modernity was its science, the best thing about post modernity was/is its concern for justice, and the best thing about the traditional age was/is its worldview” (p. 213).

Initially, the title to Houston Smith’s book, Why Religion Matters, was an enigma. Personally I would have preferred the title “Why Christianity Matters.” Upon reading the book I realized that the light at the end of the tunnel is universalism for Houston Smith. Smith believes that in the end everyone will be saved: “The reality that excites and fulfills the soul’s longing is God by whatsoever name” (p. 3). “Everyone makes it in the end. . . . eternal damnation, struck me as monstrous doctrine that I could not accept” (p. 269). With that as a point of disagreement for me, Why Religion Matters is a challenging book but easily read. Smith draws and writes from a rich and varied background (from William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens to “Dear Abby,” and “The Lone Ranger”) that makes the book interesting as well as informative.