Religion · Anthony Nuñez

Philosophy Principles and Problems - Roger Scruton

Chapter 7 – “God”

1. Overview: The Question of God and the Need to Understand Religion

Scruton opens with a blunt admission: whether God exists, “I don’t know”. But he argues that the next chapters can clarify what this question really amounts to. Much modern philosophy, he claims, leaves readers cold because it starts from a thin, impoverished picture of the human subject, ignoring concepts like self, will, freedom, responsibility, individuality, transcendence that we all dimly recognize as central.
He contrasts “continental” philosophers (Hegel, Heidegger, the Romantics), who engage these themes and have a wide following, with many Anglo-American philosophers, who tend to write mainly for each other. Yet he thinks Anglo-American philosophy still has much more to offer than the fashionable movements (Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, deconstruction), provided it reconnects with our deepest concerns.
Our most pressing philosophical need, he says, is to understand the “force which once held our world together, and which is now losing its grip”: religion. Whether religious belief disappears or re-emerges in new guises, we must understand its “why and wherefore”, because:

The human world and the subject who inhabits it were largely made from religious ideas.

The “ghostly residue” of religious feeling underlies many of our hardest philosophical problems.
He proposes to examine two interconnected phenomena:

Religious observance (ritual, worship, ceremonies).

Religious belief (doctrines, theological claims).
These can exist separately; the chapter explores their relation and how they converge in the concept of God.

2. Observance Without Belief, and Belief Without Observance

Scruton first shows that religious observance need not rest on detailed theology.
He points to traditional Chinese religion, which places great emphasis on ritual—especially acts intended to benefit ancestors—while offering only “rudimentary theological speculations” about how such things could work. Similar patterns are found in Japanese Shinto and the ancient religions of Greece and Rome.
In these traditions:

Pious observance mattered more than correct doctrine.

Roman religion recognized a changing plurality of gods, implying that it was not crucial whether one actually believed in them.

Emperors could declare themselves divine, making it hard to suppose that the average Roman took the gods wholly seriously.

Yet there remained a strong respect for sacred things on which civil order was felt to depend. It remained necessary to:

Invoke household gods (lares et penates),

Treat old age with reverence and new life with awe,

Consecrate birth, marriage, death, and citizenship to “something higher than one’s own desire.”

Social obligations arose not only from contracts but from solemn vows, implying a kind of “eternal jurisdiction” over human fate, as in the story of “pious Aeneas”.
Conversely, there can be belief without elaborate observance. Scruton cites the Protestant tradition in Christianity:

Over time it has shed what it sees as idolatrous ritual “trappings” of Roman Catholicism.

In its barest forms, it reduces everything to a “stark confrontation between God and the soul”, with minimal outward ceremony.
This “via negativa” (discarding images to reach the pure God) risks discarding God himself, as in some versions of negative theology (he mentions Karl Barth). Protestantism, in its war against the impure, is always in danger of negating itself. Yet in its more stable forms it often combines:

Clear theological beliefs, with

Great vagueness in ritual and worship.
The upshot: observance and belief can be separated, but historically they also come together in a striking and mysterious way.

3. The Mystery: How Rational Theology Became Religion

Scruton notes a deep puzzle:

Why should rational theology—abstract doctrines about God—also be religion, involving ritual, sacred things, and worship?
He illustrates transitional figures:

Aristotle, architect of a rational monotheism (a prime mover), still “comforted himself” with Greek myths and customs.

Muhammad, gripped by the notion of a single transcendent God, still dutifully visited the Kaaba and its sacred stone.
In such cases the light of monotheism had not yet dispelled mythic shadows. But eventually:

The God of theology—the prime mover, necessary and eternal, “cause of himself,” all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good—

“Congeals” with the ancient cults, which become cults of a supreme being.

The interest of ancestral ghosts and heroes in their descendants becomes an attribute of God. Astonishingly, the first cause, the unmoved mover, comes to take a “personal interest” in creation and in our lives.
The God of theology—argued for by an abstract and never fully refuted proof—is thus turned into a person, and in Christianity even an incarnate person, bridging the gap between:

The empirical world of experience, and

The transcendental world of belief.
Spinoza saw an absurdity in this and tried to rescue theology by rejecting:

Transcendence,

Divine personality,

The idea that God wants our love or needs our worship.
He dismissed myths and sacred customs as “graven images”. But for doing so he was denounced as an enemy of religion, one who saved theology at the cost of its practical purpose.
For most people, there is no felt contradiction between:

Theological belief in a creator God and eternal life, and

Local customs and rituals tied to ancestors, often accompanied by hostility toward rival rituals.
Scruton asks:

Why does rational pursuit of an answer to “the riddle of existence” lead us in “the very same direction” as mythic consciousness, guilt, defilement, customs, and ceremonies?

Why is the God of theology so readily adopted as the object of ritual and sacred observance?
This question leads him to the metaphysical structure of the self.

4. Subject, Object, and Metaphysical Loneliness

Scruton recalls his earlier theme:

I see myself (and others) as objects in nature.

I also see myself (and others) as subjects, “in some way outside the natural order,” looking into it from a “transcendental perspective.”
This subject–object division is inescapable and, as Hegel saw, the root of estrangement.

All projects that really matter are framed in terms of the subject.

It is the self I try to capture in love and desire, and which eludes me.

It is the self I try to realize in the objective world, demanding recognition and rights, yet remaining untouched by worldly honours.
He insists that nothing in the world can literally be a “self”:

To suppose otherwise is to fall for a grammatical illusion—deducing a self from the valid use of “myself,” as if from “for my sake” one could infer the existence of a “sake” as an entity. The question “What kind of thing is a sake?” is for him a paradigm of a philosophical confusion.
The rational being therefore lives in a condition of “metaphysical loneliness.” Even if he never uses that term, he experiences the gap between:

Human longing and human satisfaction,

Being “not of this world, but only in it.”
Animals are “innocent” because they have no knowledge of this gap. Our awareness of it leads both to:

Religious ritual, and

Belief in a transcendental deity,
which answer to one and the same need.

5. Ritual, Membership, and the “Sacramental Bond”

Self-conscious beings do not gather simply in herds or packs. They come together in two distinct ways:

As communities regulated by negotiation, law, and contract.

As tribes or congregations, united by a bond of membership.
Anthropologists have long puzzled over this need for membership and the rituals that establish and enforce it. Scruton invokes Durkheim’s view (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life):

Religious observance, in its primitive form, is part of the ritual of membership.

It gains its sense from the “sacramental” bond established when people share myths, liturgies, and a distinction between sacred and profane.
This sacramental bond is metaphysical:

It is a bond between subjects in a world of objects.

Through religious observance, people enter together into a sphere “beyond nature”.

Ritual mobilizes words, gestures, dances—behaviours rich in self-experience—and “turns them in a supernatural direction.”
Rituals are shared:

Each subject, repeating the “magic” words and gestures, is briefly freed from the world of objects, entering into a “mystic communion” with others who worship at his side.

Ordinary interpersonal commerce cannot do this, because it rests on negotiation, consent, rights, and duties—all presupposing the subject as alone and inviolable, shut in a private fortress.

The “first-person plural” of religious rite overcomes this isolation, creating the sense that “we stand together outside nature”, sharing a viewpoint otherwise known only as “mine.”
This shared subjectivity suggests a transcendental perspective:

A viewpoint not from the subject to the object, but onto the subject, seeing the self “as it truly is.”
Scruton identifies this as the conception of the monotheistic God:

A self-conscious subject who confronts other subjects directly,

Who allocates their place within the mystic communion,

In whom subject and object are one and the divide is overcome.
Without God, he says, the “collective subjectivity” of worship hovers on the verge of illusion. With God, it becomes reality:

Subjectivity becomes a higher objectivity.

We take our place in a realm where subjects are at home with each other and transparently known.
Religious ritual then does more than console—it redeems.

6. Guilt, Redemption, and the Personal God

Scruton connects this to his earlier discussion of self-judgement. The self-conscious being judges himself, and this judgement has a timeless character. Guilt persists as long as subject and object are divided—the judging self standing over the empirical self.
In this state:

Guilt cannot be removed by external changes in the world of objects.

It can be relieved only by an “inner renewal” that removes the stain.
God, conceived as the transcendental subject who sees subject as object, can heal the rift between them:

He “purifies” them of their common pollution,

Launches them as one into the world of self-conscious choice.
Scruton relates this to the experience of holy communion, dramatized (he notes) by Wagner’s Parsifal and explored in many devotional writings. Philosophers, with a few exceptions (Hegel and Kierkegaard), have largely ignored this dimension, focusing narrowly on proofs of God’s existence.
If his diagnosis is right, the impulse to believe in God stems from a metaphysical predicament—our loneliness and self-judgement, our need for a transcendental subject who can make our collective subjectivity real and redeem us. The God of monotheism is:

The only thing that stands wholly outside nature,

Confronts us as a person,

Raises us to the transcendental realm toward which our aspirations tend.
Hence, the existence of this personal God is a question of urgency, if indeed “the self calls out for him.”

7. The “God of the Philosophers”: Necessary, Timeless, Personal

Scruton now turns to the philosophers’ God. Historically, belief in such a God emerges when people move beyond local tribal gods, wandering among strangers, finding their former protectors inadequate.
This God is conceived as:

Timeless,

Immutable,

Omniscient,

Omnipotent,

Supremely good, and

Remarkably, a person who praises, blames, loves, hates, forgives, and acts within moral categories.
The concept is inherently problematic: it “runs to extremes in every direction” while retaining the claim that we are made in God’s image—which invites the cynical reversal that he is made in ours.
Still, no other conception really answers to our need for a transcendental subject who:

Knows all other subjects in their subjectivity, and

Has the power and will to heal the fissure in our world.
To investigate this God, Scruton examines arguments for necessary being.

8. Aquinas’ Argument from Contingency

He briefly presents one of Aquinas’s “Five Ways”: the argument from contingent being.

We find ourselves in a world of contingent things—things that might not have existed.

If everything were contingent, then it would be possible for all things not to exist at some time.

If ever there were nothing, nothing could come to be (“nothing comes of nothing”), so there would be nothing now.

But there is something now.

Therefore, not everything is contingent; something exists necessarily.

This necessary being is God.
Scruton notes that this argument has the same “dry and abstract flavour” as the ontological argument and is often compared with it.

9. Anselm’s Ontological Argument and Kant’s Critique

Scruton next recounts St Anselm’s ontological argument:

We understand by God “a being greater than which nothing can be thought,” a being endowed with all positive attributes and perfections.

If such a being existed only in our mind and not in reality, we could think of a greater one—identical in all respects but also possessing real existence.

That would contradict the original definition.

Therefore, the idea of a most perfect being must correspond to a real being; existence belongs to its very nature.

Hence God exists necessarily, not contingently.
Kant’s famous response: “existence is not a predicate”, and modern logic agrees. Saying that something with predicates F, G, H exists does not add a new property; it just says those predicates are instantiated.
Scruton notes, however:

Nobody has conclusively shown that the argument actually assumes that existence is a predicate.

Nobody has proved much about the argument at all.

Ingenious variants keep appearing; none is entirely convincing, but they suggest that “rumours of God’s death”are, philosophically speaking, exaggerated.
Both the cosmological and ontological arguments support the idea of a necessary being, which again pushes us into the timeless realm.

10. Necessary Being, Timelessness, and the Problem of Divine Personality

Scruton points out that necessary beings are timeless:

They cannot come into or go out of existence.

Their existence “follows from their concept.”
Numbers are the standard example:

If the number 2 exists, it exists in all possible worlds.

But this necessary existence is purchased at the cost of causal power: numbers cannot act or be acted upon. It would be absurd to say “the number 2 suffered a dreadful calamity.”
By analogy, anything that exists by necessity should have all its properties by necessity. Perhaps there is such a thing, possessing all perfections that are not bound up with change. But here lies the problem:

“The perfection of a person is linked inextricably with action, emotion, change, and mutability. And God, we are told, is a person.”
We could accept the God of the philosophers only if we could solve the earlier problem (from the chapter on time) of identifying one and the same individual in the timeless and temporal spheres.
The Christian doctrine of incarnation claims to do just that—one person, fully divine and fully human, in time and eternity—but Scruton calls it “the greatest of mysteries,” not a philosophical proof.
Thus we seem to reach an impasse:

God answers to our need only if he is a person like us.

But that possibility is threatened by his necessary and timeless being.

If so, “of what conceivable use could he be?”

11. “God Is Dead”: Nietzsche, Self-Transcendence, and the Meaning of Religion

Scruton recalls Max Stirner’s announcement that God is dead, taken up by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche, acutely aware of how hard it would be to live with this “news,” proposed as consolation the ideal of the Übermensch, a higher and stronger type achieved by self-transcendence, the overcoming of human nature.
Some followers tried to emulate this, typically with results unpleasant enough to discredit the attempt. As Scruton drily comments, if you are an Übermensch it is better not to advertise the fact.
He draws a lesson: Nietzsche’s morality of self-transcendence reveals “the meaning of religion for beings like us”:

Faith is a supreme overcoming of our transcendental loneliness.

Without it, we either make a virtue of that loneliness (as Nietzsche did) or live at a less exalted level.
The proclamation that “God is dead” is less about God than about us. Even if arguments for a necessary being succeeded, and we could ascribe personality to such a being, that would not by itself restore the religious attitude, because:

It would not revive the “mystic communion of the faithful”,

Nor the way in which the face of the world is revealed through that communion.
The “death of God” really means the death of an old form of human community—a community founded on holiness.

12. The Holy and the Sacred: Conceptual Disparity and Revelation

Scruton ends by focusing on the concepts of the holy and the sacred, which he says ought to interest philosophers greatly. They show how wide the gap can be between:

The concepts through which we perceive the world, and

Those through which we explain it.
He recalls an example from Chapter 1: the human smile. We experience smiles as expressions of reason and love and classify certain facial movements as smiles because of how we perceive and respond to them in the “dialogue of persons.”
Yet a scientist’s complete “book of the world” would describe only:

Muscles of the face,

Electrochemical processes in the brain,

Physical descriptions of movement.
The concept “smile” marks a perspective in which we see a person and recognize a viewpoint from “outside” the world.
Scruton argues that experiences of the holy, sacred, and miraculous arise similarly when we:

Direct this personalizing attitude not toward human beings but toward places, times, and objects.

Such things are “lifted from their mute contingency into the dialogue of reason.”
A sacred place is one where “personality shines from mere objects”—stones, trees, water. Such things have no subjectivity of their own, which is precisely why they can convey the sense of God’s presence. The experience of the sacred is therefore a revelation, a direct encounter with the divine that:

Cannot be explained in purely naturalistic terms,

Stands isolated and apart.
This ability to see the world in personal terms overcomes human estrangement:

It arises from an overflow of social feeling, where the experience of membership spills into nature.

Nature becomes filled with human animation, confirming our freedom by providing a mirror of freedom.

Nature ceases to be a prison; “its doors stand open, and no shadow falls between the intention and the act.”
But we have largely lost this image.

Old forms of community have disappeared.

Science has imposed a strict ban on any view of nature but its own.

Instead of a natural world made in the image of humanity, we find humanity redescribed as part of the natural world.

The scientific picture of the human being has replaced the theological, “demoralizing” the world by scrubbing out the mark of freedom.
Scruton’s final claim:

The demoralized world is not the real one, and it is the task of philosophy to show that this is so.
This line connects back to the book’s foundational aim: to “re-enchant” the human world, to vindicate the concepts—person, sacred, freedom, guilt, redemption—by which it is lived.

13. Connection to the Overall Book

Chapter 7 continues Scruton’s project of defending the “ordinary human world” against reductive, purely scientific accounts:

Earlier chapters examined truth, skepticism, subject–object, personhood, and time, arguing that our deepest concepts (person, freedom, justice, sacredness) are not illusions but indispensable ways of being in the world.

Here he applies that framework to religion, showing how:

Our metaphysical loneliness as subjects,

Our self-judgement and guilt,

Our need for membership and “first-person plural” community,

Our capacity to see personality in nature,
lead naturally to ritual, sacred objects, and the idea of a personal God who stands outside nature yet addresses us as persons.
At the same time, he exposes the tension between this religious God and the “God of the philosophers”—timeless, necessary, abstract—and leaves that tension unresolved, marking it as a central problem for any philosophical theology.

Concise Summary

This chapter explores why the idea of God arises and how it unites two strands of religion: ritual observance and theological belief. Scruton shows that many religions have rich rituals with minimal doctrine, while others (especially Protestantism) have strong beliefs with sparse ritual. Yet historically the abstract God of theology—necessary, eternal, omnipotent—has fused with the older cults so that the first cause becomes a person who cares for us. Scruton argues this convergence is rooted in the structure of self-consciousness. We experience ourselves both as objects in natureand as subjects outside it, which produces a condition of metaphysical loneliness. Religious ritual, he suggests, creates a “sacramental bond” between subjects: in shared rites we momentarily stand “outside nature” together in a mystic communion. The monotheistic God is then conceived as a transcendental subject who knows other subjects in their subjectivity and can heal the rift between judging self and empirical self, thus transforming guilt into redemption.
Scruton then turns to the “God of the philosophers”, defined as a timeless, necessary, supremely good person. He reviews Aquinas’s argument from contingency and Anselm’s ontological argument, alongside Kant’s critique, to show why philosophers have posited a necessary being. But if necessary beings are like numbers—timeless and changeless—then it is hard to see how such a being could also be a person who acts, loves, and forgives in time. This leads to an impasse: God answers to our deepest needs only if personal, yet philosophical arguments tend to strip him of personality and temporality. Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death is interpreted not as a proof against God, but as a sign of the collapse of a community founded on holiness. Finally, Scruton examines the concepts of holy and sacred, comparing them to the human smile: they mark ways of seeing the world in personal terms that are invisible to scientific description. Sacred places and objects are those in which “personality shines from mere things,” giving us a sense of God’s presence. Although modern science has “demoralized” the world by erasing freedom and sacredness, Scruton concludes that this demoralized picture is not the real one, and that it is philosophy’s task to show why.
Link to original