Reis Cerić on reason, faith and morality

The religious leader of Bosnia’s Muslims, reisu-l-ulema Mustafa ef. Cerić, has recently been musing on the relationship between faith, reason, science, and morality. In his Bajram sermon (19 Dec 2007), Cerić asserted that “if there is no faith, there is no morality”.

Pobožnost je, dakle, najsnažnija riječ u vjeri; vjera je najvažnija riječ u moralu; a moral je najsigurniji način života. Jer, ako nema pobožnosti, nema vjere; ako nema vjere, nema morala; a ako nema morala, nema sigurnosti.

– Cerić

Oslobodjenje daily felt many of its readers would object to this claim, and no doubt they would: it is not the first time the non-religious are told (or think they are being told) that they cannot be properly moral (or, in other cases, that they cannot be proper patriots). The newspaper opened its columns for a debate, which Cerić joined with a text titled “Naše zablude treba zamijeniti, treba se promijeniti i vratiti vjeri i moralu” [also here].

This text opens up many lines of argument:

• Religious belief is claimed to be natural and innate, unbelief artificial;
• and intolerance to follow from a deficit of religiosity, not a surfeit.
• All human thought depends, in the end, on underlying belief.
• Enlightenment and secular life are not two sides of the same coin, but both arose from a religious impulse.
• Science presupposes a rationally ordered universe,
• which, Cerić believes, presupposes a belief in an omnipotent transcendent (creator) god.¹
• The principal moral concept from which all others are derived is God‘s commands and prohibitions, reward and punishment.
• Secular moral theorists cannot get away from this starting point.
• A Kantian approach, which founds morality in reason, but requires the existence of God to make possible the existence of the highest good for which we must strive, is acceptable; a Humean one is not.

Cerić’s strong conviction that reason and faith go hand in hand presumably owes something to his study of Māturidī theology, with its rationalist elements. The argument is otherwise punctuated by quotes from great thinkers of the Western tradition: Newton, Pascal, Durkheim, Kant, G. B. Shaw, and Lukacs.

This Bosnian debate on faith vs. reason is part of a broader trend. The current Pope takes a personal interest, and it was the topic of his controversial Regensburg speech last year, with its provocative quotation about Islam (Cerić at the time gave an admirably coolheaded response). Several atheist tracts arguing for the incompatibility of science and religion made the world bestseller lists last year, like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and no doubt Bosnian imams like clergy everywhere are being confronted with their arguments.

I think the tone of this article, and of the debate it belongs to, should also be understood against the background of the particularly tense relationship of mutual distrust and disqualification that one finds between religionists and secularists in Bosnia and other countries of the region.

Of course, it is not only in post-Communist societies one finds unreasonable claims by believers to monopolize morality (edit: on a reasonable reading that is not Cerić’s claim)², and of non-believers to monopolize modernity (claiming Enlightenment and secular life as “two sides of the same coin”). But Socialism’s decades-long refusal to grant religion legitimacy in the public sphere, and its insistence that atheism is rational and scientific, has surely deepened the tension and led to (fears of) a backlash.

I don’t want to enter into the theological or philosophical merits of Cerić’s argument. But I am puzzled by some of the views he cites and attributes to others.

Take the question he strangely attributes to “godless moralists” — whether something is good because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is good. Cerić dismisses it, rather peremptorily,³ as a false dilemma, recognizable as such to the believers. But for centuries it was not so recognized; to the contrary, and as Cerić must know very well, it was intensely debated, not by the “godless” but by pious Muslim scholars, who saw it as a vital question with God’s justice and omnipotence hanging in the balance. It partly defines the positions of the best-known Islamic theological camps, the Ashʿarīs (it is good because God commands it) and the Muʿtazila (God commands it because it is good).

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī was deeply involved in that debate, but why does Cerić present him as striving to prove “that man is capable of independently reaching objective knowledge of good and evil”? Wasn’t this precisely the kind of theological view Ghazālī, as an Ashʿarī theologian, a Shāfiʿī jurist, and an original epistemological sceptic, dedicated himself to refuting?⁴

Cerić also quotes Émile Durkheim that “beliefs have a basis and they express a reality”.⁵ Durkheim certainly did think so, as opposed to some of his contemporaries who traced religious beliefs to dreams, hallucinations, or logical errors. But he famously argued (in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life], 1912) that the basis and cause of religion is social, and more specifically that the reality expressed by religious thought is society itself, personified and represented in the form of a god! As for religion and morality, Durkheim writes in one place that religious forces

…are moral powers because they are made up entirely of the impressions this moral being, the group, arouses in those other moral beings, its individual members; they do not translate the manner in which physical things affect our senses, but the way in which the collective consciousness acts upon individual consciousnesses. Their authority is only one form of the moral ascendancy of society over its members.

– Émile Durkheim⁶

Somehow, I don’t think this is the point Cerić is trying to make. A different matter, of course, is how Durkheim looked at the necessity of religion for the maintenance of society and morality.