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  • Essay Composition On – Religion Without God – For W.B.C.S. Examination.

    For all that he tried to extend the scope of human sympathy, Professor Ronald Dworkin, who died last year at the age of 81, was a divisive figure. To his critics, the US philosopher and scholar of constitutional law was the theorist-in-chief of ‘rights culture’ and the poster boy for an anti-democratic (and always progressive) judicial activism.Continue Reading Essay Composition On – Religion Without God – For W.B.C.S. Examination.

    To his admirers, he was a liberal hero, a standard-bearer for justice and fairness, who stood up to demagogic politicians and the tyranny of the majority. To this extent his work was a shibboleth, or a fluid from which the litmus paper would emerge as decisively blue or red: whether or not you approved of it was a good indication of where you stood on such issues as abortion, gay marriage and school prayer.

    The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted.

    They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast universe but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.

    There are famous and poetic expressions of the same set of attitudes. Albert Einstein said that though an atheist he was a deeply religious man:

    To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.

    Nevertheless, this right-left division tended to mask rather more than it revealed. For what made Dworkin’s work so interesting, and indeed so problematic, was the fact that he took the kind of moral certainty normally associated with the first constituency and deployed it in the cause of the second.

    For Dworkin, improving the lot of women and enshrining the rights of oppressed minorities had nothing to do with identity politics or cultural relativism or ethnocentrism. It was the expression of a moral vision. Moreover, and since in Dworkin’s scheme there existed right answers to moral questions, the values informing this moral vision were the values it was morally right to hold.

    In his 2011 book, Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin went further than ever before in elaborating this distinctive worldview. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, derived from the poet Archilochus, between the adaptable fox and the predictable hedgehog – the first knows many things, the second only one – Dworkin declared himself a philosophical hedgehog and advanced the theory of ‘the unity of value’.

    This large and old philosophical thesis posits that ‘the truth about living well and being good and what is wonderful is not only coherent but mutually supporting’. Not only were there truths about value, Dworkin declared, but these truths were discoverable – discoverable not through God or science, but through the consideration of whether our arguments that something is true are ‘adequate’ ones. Value judgments are true, he suggested, ‘in view of the substantive case that can be made for them.’

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