Maverick Philosopher

Suppose you believe that man has been created in the image and likeness of God.  Can you, consistently with that belief, hold that only some possess a religious disposition?

 I often say things like the following:

The religious person perceives our present  life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness.  He feels his fellows to be fools endlessly distracted by bagatelles, sunken deep in Pascalian divertissement, as Platonic troglodytes unaware of the Cave as Cave.

I maintain that one in whom this doesn't strike a chord, or sound a plaintive arpeggio, is one who lacks a religious disposition.  In some it is simply lacking, and it cannot be helped.  I 'write them off' no matter how analytically sharp they are.   One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them, any more than one can share one's delight in poetry with the terminally prosaic, or one's pleasure in mathematics with the mathematically anxious.  Religion is not, for those who lack the disposition, what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. It can only be something strained and ridiculous, a tissue of fairy tales, something for children and old ladies, an opiate for the weak and dispossesed, a miserable anthropomorphic projection, albeit unconscious, a wish-fulfillment, something cooked up in the musty medieval cellars of priestcraft where unscrupulous manipulators exploit human gullibility for their own advantage.

A perceptive interlocutor  raised an objection that I would put as follows.  "You say that some lack a religious disposition.  I take it you mean that they are utterly bereft of it.  But how is that consistent with the imago dei?  For if we are made in the divine image, then we are spiritual beings who must, as spiritual beings, possess at least the potentiality of communion with the divine source of the spirit within us, even if this potentiality is to no degree actual.  After all, we are not in the image of God as animals, but as spiritual beings, and part of being a spiritual being is having the potentiality to know itself, and thus to know that one is a creature if in fact one is a creature, and in knowing this to know God in some measure."

How might I meet this objection? 

One way is by denying that all biologically human beings bear the divine image, or bear the divine image in its fullness.  Maybe it is like this.  The existence of specimens of the zoological species to which we belong is accounted for by the theory of evolution.  God creates the physical universe in which evolution occurs, and in which human animals evolve from lower forms.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is not an account of how human animals came to be that is in competition with the theory of evolution.  It is not about human animals at all. Adam is not the first man; there was no first man.  Eve is not the first woman; there was no first woman.  Adam and Eve are not the first human animals; they are the first human animals that, without ceasing to be animals, became spiritual beings when God bestowed upon them consciousness, self-consciousness, free will, and all their concomitants. But the free divine bestowal was not the same for all: from some he withheld the power to know God and become godlike.

I suspect this is not theologically 'kosher.'  But it fits with my experience.  I have always felt that some human beings lack depth or spirit or soul or inwardness or whatever you want to call it.  It is not that I think of them as zombies as philosophers use this term: I grant that they are conscious and self-conscious.  But I sense that there is nothing to them beyond that.  The light is on, but no one is there. (In a zombie, the light is off.)  There is no depth-dimension: they are surface all the way down.

But it may be that a better line for me is the simpler one of saying that in all there is the religious disposition, but in some it is wholly undeveloped,  rather than saying that in some it is not present at all.

UPDATE (12/19):  The "perceptive interlocutor" mentioned above responds:

To suppose that some persons lack the religious disposition is certainly not theologically kosher, at least not from the Christian perspective. This is more akin to certain varieties of predestinarian gnosticism to which early Christian theologians (e.g., Origen, Irenaeus, et al.) vehemently objected. These gnostic theories proposed that there were various different classes of human persons, some of whom were structurally determined to realize saving knowledge (gnosis) of Reality whereas others were cruder, baser, and doomed to live unenlightened lives in the body. The difference between classes was not choices they had made or anything of the sort; it was simply their ontological structure to reach enlightenment or not. The early Christians objected to this in two ways: first, it is denial of the freedom of the will of the human person, since some evidently are intrinsically incapable of choosing salvation; second, it is incompatible with God's goodness, since if he is good, he desires the salvation of all and works to accomplish it.

 

I suppose these are the two greatest problems for the quasi-gnostic position you consider in that post. Another problem would be that it might ethically justify mistreatment and prejudice against persons deemed to lack a religious disposition. After all, if they cannot sense God's existence and enjoy communion with him, how are they any different from animals? If God himself didn't care to make them such that they could know him, why should theists and those having the religious disposition care for them any more than for a dog?