religious revolution now 225In the contemporary setting, it almost always stands in the ser vice of a
conventional secular humanism. Th e simple accusation to which it has
no satisfactory answer is that we have no use for it. We can say of it
what Lavoisier said to Napoleon of the idea of God: we do not need this
hypothesis.
Th e demythologized religious consciousness might be thought ca-
pable of performing a role that the secular humanism is powerless to
undertake: to console us for our mortality, our groundlessness, and our
insatiability. However, it seems unable to acquit itself even of this ele-
mentary responsibility. Th e answer to death and nihilism, as well as the
quieting of desire, remain inseparable from the history of creation and
of redemption. Without the incidents of that history, the hope for eter-
nal life ceases to be justifi ed. Th ere is, however, no self- evident and
stable place at which the operation of decoding the narratives and doc-
trines of the religion as meta phors or symbols of an acceptable truth
can stop.
Th ree distinct scandals of reason account for the diffi culty of faith
and explain the retreat into the untenable position of half- belief. It is
customary to take only the fi rst of these three scandals into account.
Th e result is to misunderstand both the depth of the problem and the
consequences of the false solution devised by half- belief.
Th e fi rst scandal of reason is supernaturalism: suspension of belief
in the workings of causality in the nature. It is the problem presented
by miracles. More generally, however, all the redemptive intervention
of God in history, as portrayed by the salvation religions, is miraculous.
Th e problem presented by supernaturalism is not simply the credibility
of the initial suspension of causality; it is the consequence of this sus-
pension for our thinking of how the world, modifi ed by the miraculous
intervention of God, works. If the intervention interrupts the workings
of causality or of the laws of nature underlying them, how then can we
invoke these same laws to understand the eff ects of the intervention?
Th is selectivity in the approach to causation is a familiar problem be-
setting counterfactual explanation. Once we have violated the causal
continuity of nature, all bets are off. We are not entitled to go on think-
ing about the world, changed by redemption and grace, as if it were
otherwise the same, except for a series of exceptions, with no conse-
quence for either the world or the understanding.