Religion Without God

193 Pages·2013·0.823 MB·English

by  Ronald Dworkin

RELIGION WITHOUT GOD

R E L I G I O N
W I T H O U T
G O D
Ronald Dworkin
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, En gland
2013
Copyright © 2013 by Ronald Dworkin
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Dworkin, Ronald.
Religion without god / Ronald Dworkin.
pages cm
“Based on the Einstein Lectures that Ronald Dworkin
delivered at the University of Bern in December 2011.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-72682-6 (alk. paper)
1. Religion—Philosophy. 2. Atheism. 3. Freedom
of religion. 1. Title.
BL51.D96 2013
200—dc23 2013020724
To Tom— who led me into the mysteries
of the secular temperament
And to Reni— forever

CONTENTS
Publisher’s Note ix
1 Religious Atheism? 1
Introduction 1
What Is Religion? The Metaphysical Core 10
Religious Science and Religious Value 21
Mystery and Intelligibility 29
Impersonal Gods: Tillich, Spinoza,
and Pantheism 31
2 The Universe 45
Physics and the Sublime 45
How Could Beauty Guide Research? 53
But What Kind of Beauty Could This Be? 65
Symmetry? 69
Is There a Way the Universe Just Is? 77
Inevitability and the Universe 82
The Beauty of Inevitability 97
CONTENTS
3 Religious Freedom 105
The Constitutional Challenge 105
Is Religious Freedom Only about God? 110
Freedom Out of Control? 117
Confl ict within Freedom 124
Is There Really a Right to Religious Freedom? 128
The New Religious Wars 137
4 Death and Immortality 149
Notes 161
Index 171
viii
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
this book is based on the Einstein Lectures
that Ronald Dworkin delivered at the University
of Bern in December 2011. He planned to greatly
extend his treatment of the subject over the next
few years, but he became ill in the summer of 2012
and had time only to complete some revisions of
the original text before his death in February 2013.
The publisher would like to thank Hillary Nye, a
doctoral student at the NYU School of Law, for
valuable research assistance in preparing the book
for publication. Professor Dworkin’s research was
supported by the NYU School of Law’s Filomen
D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Foundation.
ix