Yasir Qadhi – What Happens When Religion Fades- 5 Western Philosophers Who Explained Its Decline
AI: Summary ©
The "right side" of the COVID-19 pandemic is discussed, including the decline of religion and the importance of religion in modern society. The transformation of religion in modern society is discussed, including the transformation of religion into a source of morality and the transformation of religion into a state of chaos and disarray. The transcript provides insight into the complexities of religion's role in modern society, including its impact on society and its importance in shaping modern life.
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen,
wassalatu wassalamu ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi
wa sahbihi ajma'een.
Amma ba'd, I welcome you to the first
of our series of classes entitled Lighthouse.
And before I begin, a small disclaimer, I
am a bit under the weather so apologies
about my voice.
May Allah Azawajal cure all of us that
are sick inshaAllahu ta'ala.
Today is going to be an introductory session
and somewhat of a rambling if you like
of miscellaneous topics.
And I want to begin by pointing out
that nobody chooses the time or the era
that we are born into.
It is Allah's choice on us.
We didn't choose when to be born, when
to live, which challenges that we face.
And the fact of the matter is that
the bulk of the trials and tests that
are laid out for us deal with issues
that are relevant to the time and the
place and the geography of where we live.
And therefore, every generation has challenges that are
unique to that generation.
The fact that we're born into it many
times blinds us to this reality and we
assume that these challenges are universal.
But the fact of the matter is that
our generation in particular is facing a unique
set of challenges.
As the Chinese say, may you live in
interesting times, we are living in interesting times.
More has changed in the last 100 years
of our existence than in the last 100
,000 years of humanity.
I repeat, more has changed in the last
100 years than in the last 100,000
years of humanity.
And that change is exponentially accelerating.
The most obvious area of change is technical
and scientific.
How people interact, global connectivity, technology are simple
realities that even I as a child could
never have anticipated the type of world we
live in today.
And by the way, the amenities that you
take for granted, your daily routine, your daily
access to your lifestyle that you and I
take for granted, the access to clean water,
fresh fruits throughout all of the seasons, air
conditioning, water heating, your car, your flying in
half a day so that you're across the
world.
You do realize you as an average middle
class modern citizen is living a more luxurious
lifestyle than all of the ancient kings and
emperors and pharaohs combined.
Your lifestyle is more comfortable than the lifestyle
of even the pharaohs and the emperors of
old and you take it for granted.
But it is not just advancements in science
and in medicine and in technology and in
the quality of life that we're here to
marvel at.
These changes have not come in a vacuum.
They have come amidst social, cultural, and religious
transformations.
And it is those changes that we as
Muslims are navigating and trying to make sense
of.
And so, in today's introductory class, I want
to give a bird's eye view of miscellaneous
topics.
First and foremost, a very, very brief synopsis
of how these changes have been viewed by
a select group of philosophers and thinkers that
I want you to be aware of.
In other words, the changes that we're seeing
at the cultural level, the religious level, the
rise of secularism, the absence of religion in
the modern world, the failure of religiosity, of
Christianity.
These changes, many people are embracing them.
Many people are happy at them.
But others are wary.
And I want you to be aware of
a group of thinkers who are not too
happy at these changes.
And I want to introduce you to names
and concepts and ideas that insha'Allah will
provoke you to do your own research and
study.
That's going to be our first brief foray.
After we summarize some key figures that I
think every person who's interested in this topic
should be aware of, we will then move
on to us as Muslims.
How do we navigate these changes?
What are some of the areas of challenges
that we are going to face?
And then, putting these two together, I'm going
to conclude today by introducing us to the
concept of this class.
So the changes that have taken place, how
they're analyzed, how those changes affect us, what
are the areas we're grappling with, and then
therefore putting all of this together, the need
to that class.
And as I said, today's class will be
a little bit of an overview and rambling
and that is done on purpose because we
have to situate ourselves in why exactly we're
here today and what is the content and
what is the need to talk about these
areas that we are talking about.
Now, obviously, the first topic is a brief
introduction to some of the key figures that
have pointed out these changes are coming at
a cost and these costs are not all
positive, they're also negative.
A number of key Western philosophers, Western intellectual
thinkers have, if you like, foreborn.
They have warned of the impending catastrophes that
are happening in the Western world and they
point out that unless something happens, the future
is not as bright as many claim it
to be.
And I want to begin by perhaps the
first person who was the, if you like,
the beginning iconic figure to start thinking of
civilizational shifts.
We go back three, four hundred years, a
name that not too many of you are
familiar with and yet he is iconic in
the Western hemisphere.
It is a historian and a philosopher by
the name of Edward Gibbon.
Edward Gibbon, in the 1800s, he wrote a
magnum opus, an iconic work called The History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.
And Gibbon was one of the first to
really point out a civilizational shift was occurring
and that is that Christianity is ceasing to
lose its place in the Western world.
Now, Gibbon is, of course, writing at a
time when everybody is religious.
Do understand, even 200 years ago, there was
no such thing as a bona fide atheist.
You could not reject religion publicly, even as
recently as 200 years ago.
If you openly denied the existence of God,
you would be socially ostracized.
There was a famous case of one of
the professors of Oxford losing his professorship in
1821 because it was discovered that he was
a secret agnostic.
He didn't even come out and say it,
but he was talking to his friends and
they complained about him that this person doesn't
believe in God and he was removed from
his post.
This is 200 years ago.
How quickly the world has changed that in
200 years, if you did not believe in
God, you would be fired from a professorship
of the humanities, a professorship of science at
Oxford, because that was something that crossed the
red line.
So again, Edward Gibbon is writing at a
time when you cannot publicly be antagonistic towards
religion and of course, outwardly, he was a
religious person, yet nonetheless, you begin to find
within his writings a bit of a dismissal
of Christianity.
He actually believed that Christianity was one of
the primary causes that was the cause of
the decline of the power of the Roman
civilization.
When I say Roman here, think of Western
civilization.
So in the 1700s, in the 1800s, Gibbon
is already pointing out that it's because of
religion that we've kind of been held a
little bit backward.
His work reflects an early Enlightenment skepticism towards
organized religion and it provides a gateway for
the foundational critique of religion's role in public
society.
This is the beginnings, if you like, of
trying to dismantle religion and his work is
not as much a critique of Christianity per
se, because he can't get there yet, but
it is more a critique of the institutional
role of Christianity and not the theology of
Christianity.
And he seems to claim that the decline
of the greatness of Western civilization is due
to Christianity because, believe it or not, religion
asks you to focus on the afterlife rather
than civic responsibility.
So when you start thinking of the afterlife
in his mind, what happens is you erode
the civilizational strength of the world that you
live in right now.
And so he believed that Christianity and its
emphasis on spirituality was actually detrimental overall.
And of course, out of all of the
thinkers we're gonna quickly introduce today, he is,
of course, the most excited about the changes
because he's writing in the 1700s, 18th century,
the 1700s.
So he hasn't quite realized where Western civilization
is heading.
A hundred years later, when people have seen
the beginning of the decline of Christianity, the
tone of so many Western thinkers changes, and
a few people that every one of us
should be aware of, especially if you're interested
in the role of religion in the public
sphere, is the famous German philosopher Max Weber,
who died 1920.
And Max Weber, he wrote his influential work,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
And in this work, which actually played a
vital role in the revitalization of German philosophy
in the continental sphere, and especially here in
America.
In this work, Weber linked the development of
modern capitalism to Protestant values.
He claimed that Protestant values brought about the
spirit of the capitalist reformation.
And at the same time, he noted the
paradox of religion.
He claimed that while religion contributed to the
development of rational systems like capitalism, he also
said its dominance waned as rationalization advanced, i
.e. the more rationalistic you are, the more
scientific you are, the more it will impact
religion.
And as it impacts religion, it's also going
to erode civic responsibilities and duties.
And he predicted that religion, while it would
not disappear, it would have less and less
of an influence in shaping modern life, and
it would become more private and less institutional.
He predicted this almost 180 years ago, and
he turned out to be correct in this
prediction.
Around the same time as Weber, perhaps the
last great iconic philosopher of the Western world,
and I mean here Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche
was one of the most iconic philosophers who
diagnosed the problem of the rise of modern
secularism and the absence of religion in the
public sphere.
And of course, Nietzsche is famous for his
blasphemous line, God is dead, which is one
of the most oft-quoted statements of our
times.
And a lot of people simplistically assume that
Nietzsche was an anti-religious person.
But the fact of the matter is that
Nietzsche's stance on religion is very complex.
While he was not a fan of Christianity,
and perhaps in his own life he veered
towards atheism, his views go far beyond a
simplistic rejection of religious belief.
Nietzsche, when he said his blasphemous phrase, God
is dead, if you read the actual passage,
he is not triumphantly celebrating that there is
no religion or there is no God in
his worldview.
But he is observing that the Western culture
shift away from religious faith is in fact
a testimony to their own demise and death.
In other words, Nietzsche predicted that the death
of God is going to signal the death
of Western civilization.
Nietzsche predicted that if you remove God from
the picture, then unless you replace it with
something more meaningful, with something that will give
morality, that will give nobility, that will give
cultural and existential frameworks, unless you replace God
with something that is just as sacred as
God, what you've done is you've created a
vacuum, a cultural void that would lead to
an existential crisis of the highest magnitude.
And while he, in his own view, claimed
that you needed to substitute God with what
he called an uber-menstrual Superman, by Superman
we don't mean your Marvel Comics Superman, we
mean the notion of man being, if you
like, almost divine in his own way, while
he felt that this is the only way
forward, obviously neither he nor his followers could
actually successfully substitute the role of religion and
God.
And what Nietzsche does point out is that
without religion, you have removed the only stabilizing
force, the only unifying force, the only source
of order and morality.
And so, by removing God, as one of
his famous passages says, the passage is that
villagers are quote-unquote, Astaghfirullah, celebrating the death
of God, and he actually remarks on this
that, do the fools not realize that as
they celebrate the death of God, they are
celebrating their own demise as well?
He literally points out that they're not thinking
things through.
When you remove religion, then what is the
purpose of life after that?
And in fact, Nietzsche himself famously went crazy
towards the end of his own life, perhaps
if you like, demonstrating what happens when you
really don't have a higher sense of purpose
and of nobility of living.
So, Nietzsche is a classic, if you like,
iconic figure who argued that unless and until
you're able to substitute religion with another set
of values, traditional values such as truth, such
as justice, such as compassion, could no longer
be justified.
And when you remove compassion and truth and
nobility and justice, society is left vulnerable.
Society is left deprived of even a cause
for existence, and you open up the door
to moral relativism and to existential despair.
And of course, Nietzsche is considered to be
the last of the great philosophers of the
Western tradition.
There are a number of philosophers in our
times that I strongly encourage all of you
to be familiar with, and again, the people
that I'm quoting are those who pointed out
the dangers of these changes taking place.
Some of these are coming from a religious
paradigm, and some are, while they themselves might
not be religious, they point out the dangers
of not having religion in modern society.
Perhaps the foremost modern philosopher still alive in
our times, I think he's 100 years old,
well, maybe 95 years old, is the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor.
Charles Taylor wrote A Secular Age, and this
is considered to be a magnum opus.
All of you should at least read a
summary of it or get a Cliff Notes
version, whatever you want to call it.
It is a seminal work of our times.
It's called A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
And in this book, he explores the remarkable
transformation that has taken place in the Western
society, in which barely 150 years ago, it
was inconceivable to be a part of without
believing in God, and yet in our times,
it is almost inconceivable that a person who
believes in God will make that the center
of his existence, unless they're a cleric or
a preacher or a pastor.
Otherwise, as a politician, as a public activist,
as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, if you
have a religious belief, it had better be
private, or else it would impede your progress
and you will not succeed in the modern
world.
So he documents how this transformation takes place.
The book is a massive 850 pages tome,
and it weaves together history, philosophy, sociology, theology,
to provide a detailed account of secularization and
its implications for modern life.
And one of the things that Taylor does,
and of course he himself is a devout
Christian, Taylor challenges conventional narratives of secularization.
And he provides a rich, multifaceted understanding of
the processes that have shaped contemporary Western society.
Taylor treats religion with intellectual seriousness.
He explains how faith provides meaning and structure
to human life throughout history.
He claims that religion has never been irrelevant
and it shall never be outdated.
And he dismisses those secularist thinkers who tend
to consider religion to be something that no
longer needs to be discussed.
Taylor understands that religion is here to stay.
And in fact, belief in God, according to
him, offers a profound sense of fullness that
no other secular worldview can replicate.
In other words, it is only religion that
provides a profound sense of nobility and of
purpose, and no other system that is devoid
of religion can compete with religion when it
comes to providing meaning in life.
And of course, Taylor is coming from a
Catholic background, yet at the same time, he
is not advocating a simplistic return to Christianity.
One of the things I like about Taylor
is that Taylor is very candid that institutional
religion has failed in his view, i.e.,
organized religion, as has been understood by the
West, according to him, has failed to meet
the spiritual and moral challenges and needs of
the people.
And this is why it has declined in
the modern sphere.
Taylor also acknowledges that living a religious life
in a secular age is profoundly challenging.
And he points out that believers must now
grapple with a level of pluralism and a
level of doubt that never existed pre-modernity.
We as Muslims are going to come back
to this point.
Never have religious folks had to compete with
so many religions and with so many non
-religions at the same time.
And never have they been exposed to the
sheer quantity of doubts as they're being exposed
to in the modern time.
So Taylor points out something that every one
of us is very familiar with as a
Muslim in this part of the world.
And Taylor also mentions that in order for
religion to flourish, it is going to have
to adapt to the modern world.
In other words, he's not a simple-minded
fundamentalist.
Taylor understands that the damage that has been
done to institutionalized religion will only have to
force religious folks to rethink through their religious
traditions if they want to compete in the
modern sphere of ideas.
You can no longer be a simple-minded
fundamentalist, according to him, if you want your
religion to advance in the modern world.
So Charles Taylor is a very interesting figure
for us as Muslims to be aware of
and think about.
And he's still alive, although he stopped reading
and writing for a while because he's so
old.
But his works really are considered to be
of the most important works written of our
generation.
Another still alive, again, probably older than him,
he's probably 97 years old now.
And again, no longer active on social media
or reading and writing.
But back in the 70s, 80s, and even
the early 2000s, the philosopher I'm referring to
is Alasdair MacIntyre.
Alasdair MacIntyre is a Scottish-American philosopher who
has written a number of books, most prominently
After Virtue.
Alasdair MacIntyre's book After Virtue is a profound
critique of modern philosophy.
And the title itself, After Virtue, he is
critiquing the fact that virtue seems to now
be something that is gone from the modern
discourse.
And we need to now rediscover virtue.
And he argues that the modern Western world
is in a state of disarray, a state
of chaos, fragmented by emotionalist reasoning, where moral
claims are treated as mere expressions of preference
rather than grounded in objective standards.
Morality is how you feel.
Morality is what you want.
Morality is your desires rather than grounded in
objective standards of truth.
So Alasdair MacIntyre is another great philosopher who
is pointing out the moral bankruptcy of the
Western world and the fact that religion, now
that you've removed religion, you haven't replaced it
with something else.
Unless you do so, there is going to
be a vacuum that is going to bring
about destructive elements in the future.
Other thinkers as well, just be aware of
them.
I'm not going to go over them in
a lot of detail.
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is another thinker.
Habermas has written quite a lot.
Now he himself, actually, I don't think he
himself is religious personally in his own life.
Maybe he is, I don't know.
But he's more a sociologist and a philosopher
who has written extensively on Christianity, on Islam
in the Western context, and realized that in
order for the modern world to flourish, there
has to be a bridging of gaps between
religion and between secularism.
Secularism is but one competing set of ideas.
It is not the absence of faith, it
is a faith in and of itself.
So Habermas continues to point out this notion
that secularists don't have faith.
No, secularists have a different understanding of faith.
And at times you can be just as
fundamentalist as a secularist as you can as
a religious person.
You can be a fanatic secularist as you
can be a fanatic religious person as well.
And so his vision is a post-secular
society where secularism and religiosity have to learn
to coexist together if they wish to shape
a productive future.
And so Jürgen Habermas, Jürgen is spelled J
-U-R-G-E-N, Jürgen Habermas positions
himself as a mediator between faith and reason,
between secularism and religious movements wanting to bring
about a pluralism that is healthy for civic
society.
Another thinker that I believe Muslims should benefit
from and be familiar with, these are all
in the Western side of the world as
well, obviously the Eastern side is a different
set, we'll come to them later on, not
today.
Another thinker that I want to introduce you
all to is the Catholic philosopher at Princeton,
Robert George.
Robert George is actually the only one of
these that is active on Twitter and Facebook
and social media and he's constantly commenting on
modern politics.
So if you follow him you get an
idea of a modern thinker who's engaging challenges
from a religious paradigm.
And Robert George again has commented quite a
lot even on the Muslim side of things,
he himself is a Catholic but he is
very much involved in the Muslim aspects as
well and he has had a number of
dialogues with a number of Muslim thinkers in
the Western world.
Now all of these thinkers, I believe it
is important for us as Muslims to be
aware of them and the one thing that
combines all of them, which is why I'm
bringing their name up, is that they are
pointing out that these changes we're witnessing are
not all positive.
These changes are potentially dangerous, maybe even destructive,
and unless and until we recognize the destructive
nature of these changes it is possible that
Western society will no longer exist the way
that it exists.
And so all of them are pointing out,
in more harsh words than others, the bankruptcy
or the vacuum or the lack of a
nobility that stems from having removed religion from
the public sphere.
Now clearly therefore we're all familiar with the
fact that these changes are impacting not just
Christians but us as Muslims as well.