ON THE DEFINITION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Abstract

In just about all of the current discussions of religion there is a glaring and crucial omission,
namely, a definition of what religion is. This plagues not only contemporary discussions of the justification
of religious beliefs themselves, but also every attempt to establish the proper relation of religious belief and
practice to science, law, ethics, and culture. This list must also include, of course, views of the proper role
of the State to religious institutions and religious institutions to the State. In the following article I tackle
this omission by defending a real definition not of “religion,” but of “religious belief.” This definition, first
proposed by Anaximander around 650 BCE, is still, to my knowledge, the only one that covers all known
traditions of religious belief and fails to apply to beliefs that are obviously not religious.

I. Defining Religious Belief

Long ago, when I was first preparing teach courses on comparative religion, I quickly discovered
that every tradition widely recognized as a religion centered upon a belief in something as divine (some
used “holy” or “sacred” or other terms as equivalents). That was not surprising. What was surprising was
the discovery that while there were many different ideas as to who or what is divine, all the traditions
seemed to agree on what it means to be divine! So even though the religions I’d been lecturing on had
contrary ideas about how to describe the divine reality, they all agreed that the divine is whatever has
independent reality and generates all that is not divine. From now on I’ll use “self-existent” as equivalent to
“unconditionally nondependent,” and regard its being the origin of all else as the status of divinity. I will
distinguish this status sharply from every specific idea of the reality that has this status.

Since this is the definition I intend to defend, I now want to give it a more precise statement. I
think the logically cleanest way to state what I found all religions to agree upon, is that the divine is the
self-existent reality that generates all that is not divine. This I found to be invariable no matter how else the
divine is further characterized. Whether what is believed to be divine is further thought of as personal or
impersonal, changeless or changeable, a single divinity, dual divinities or an entire realm of divinities, the
core meaning of “divinity” remains the same. It even applies to traditions that insist the divine is incapable
of being conceived at all; that, too, is a specification that goes beyond mere self-existence. For my
introductory classes, I explained the status of divinity by making an analogy with a close presidential
election. If an election is close, people may disagree about which candidate actually won the office. But all
the while they may disagree about who has won the office, they still agree on the office that is at stake. Just
so, different religious traditions all agree on what constitutes the status (or office) of divinity, although they
disagree with one another concerning who or what has that status.

Since this discovery ran counter to what I found in virtually all the comparative religion books I’d
surveyed, I at first thought I'd discovered something new. But immediately I had the feeling I’d seen this
definition before – not in comparative religion books, but in the writings of philosophers and theologians.
So I began to re-read what ancient philosophers and poets had said about religious belief. I started with
those of ancient Greece and discovered that it was Anaximander (610- 546 BCE) who first came up with
this definition (Jaeger, 1960: 31-32), and that almost every influential thinker after him in ancient Greece
accepted it including Plato and Aristotle (Plato, Laws: 50; Aristotle, Physics 203b 5-14; Metaphysics 1064a
33-38).

I then proceeded to re-read medieval thinkers and found that, no matter how else they disagreed,
every major thinker of that period – whether Pagan, Naturalist, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim - agreed that
the Divine was the reality “whose essence is existence” (the Latin term for this is “aseity”). Both
expressions mean that the divine is that which exists on its own, and a number of Theistic thinkers took it to
reflect the name of God as revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14, where God tells Moses that His name is “I

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AM that I AM.” Reading further, I found later writers used the term “Absolute” for the divine, while still
others favored “ultimate reality.” But in each case the meaning of the expressions still always included
independent existence. In the 16th century Martin Luther and John Calvin also held the same definition. For
example, Calvin wrote (speaking about God): “...that from which all other things derive their origin must
necessarily be self-existent and eternal.” (Inst I, v, 6), and that “nothing is so proper to God than his self-
existence...” (Inst I, xiv, 3). A century later the philosopher Spinoza expressed the same idea when he said
that the divine is whatever is “uncaused and unpreventable.”

I was dumbfounded! How could this definition be the common property of so many scholars for
all those centuries, only to be forgotten by the onset of the 20th century? How could the textbooks on
comparative religion do a proper job without it? Had it really been lost completely? I began to survey 20 th
century writers to see if the definition had really been lost, and learned that while it had fallen into neglect
in the comparative religion textbooks, it was far from unknown among philosophers and theologians. A
sizable number of very prominent thinkers had reaffirmed the ancient definition, and I will now name only
a few of the better-known among them: Wm James (James, 1929: pp. 31-34), C. S. Lewis (Lewis, 1948: pp.
10, 86), Paul Tillich (Tillich, 1957: p.12), Karl Barth (Barth, 1968: p.3), Hans Kung (Kung, 1986, p. xvi),
Lesslie Newbigin (Newbigin, 1995: p. 50), Norman Kemp Smith (Smith, 1967: p. 396), John Findlay
(Findlay,1982: p. 117), Robert Neville (Neville, 1982: p. 117), Mircea Eliade (Eliade, 1958: pp 23-25), A.
C. Bouquet (Bouquet, 1973: p. 21), Werner Jaeger, 1960: p.31-32), Herman Dooyeweerd (Dooyeweerd,
1955 vol.1: P. 57), Paul Chenau (Chenau, 1989: p. 18), Will Herberg (Herberg, 1975: p. 283) and Joachim
Wach (Wach, 1961: p. 30).

This is a distinguished group whose members otherwise held to widely divergent religious views.
The significance of their divergence is that although they came at the question of the nature of religious
belief from very different angles, they still all came up with the same definition. The list is also significant
for another reason, namely, that it conveys just how vast the reading is that the definition is based upon. It
is not only derived from the lifetimes of reading and experience of all the major ancient and medieval
theologians and philosophers, but of all the writers from the many sides of the Reformation and the early
Enlightenment (Descartes, Spinoza), as well as the impressive list of 20th century writers given above. So
although I began by speaking of arriving at the definition as based on my own reading, it should now be
indisputable that the definition has a truly vast amount of empirical support.

As stated so far, however, the definition is incomplete since there are at least three more types of
belief that are also religious. These are secondary senses of “religious,” however, because their content is
parasitic upon a belief in something as divine in the primary sense. These secondary beliefs are: beliefs
about how the non-divine depends upon the divine, beliefs that identify who or what actually is divine, and
beliefs concerning how humans may come to stand in proper relation to the specified divine reality. So a
more complete statement of the definition is now expanded this way:

A belief is religious provided that:

1. it is a belief in something as divine, where “divine”

means the unconditionally nondependent reality that
generates all non-divine reality, no matter how the
divine is further described;

2. it is a belief that identifies who or what is divine by

specifying its nature over and above mere self- existence;

3. it is a belief about how the non-divine depends

upon the divine;

4. it is a belief about how humans can stand in proper

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 relation to the divine.

Two quick observations. First, it is items 2 and 4 that most people have in mind when speaking of
religion or religious belief. The definition confirms they are correct to do so, but adds that there is more to
consider. Second, the difference between 1. and 2. will sound strange if not nonsensical to anyone
acquainted only with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam because in those religions there is no difference
between God and the divine. In Pagan religions, however, there is such a difference. For example, in
ancient Roman religion the divine per se was called “numen.” Numen was the independently existing
power that generated and controlled everything else, but it was not personal and was not worshipped. The
gods were beings who had more Numen than humans and so could help or hinder worshippers. Because
they were personal and could be appeased, religious practice consisted of seeking their favor and the divine
per se was largely ignored (Stark, (2007): p. 96). This explains why the term “God” doesn’t mean the same
thing in Theistic religions as it does in Pagan traditions.

II. Some Observations About Definitions

Since the definition stated in 1. – 4. above is what I will defend in all that follows, we need to be
clear about that defense from the start. First of all, I will not be trying to prove that the definition is true in
such a way as to force everyone to agree with it whether they want to or not. (I know of no way to prove
any definition so that everyone is forced to agree with it.) That doesn't mean, however, that there can't be
overwhelming evidence for a definition, and that is exactly what we have in this case. Second, please keep
in mind that in everyday life we don't ordinarily seek the sort of precise definition that is at stake here. It
should be apparent that what I've presented is intended to be a scientific or what is called in Logic a “real”
definition, i.e., one that states the set of characteristics true of all religious beliefs but only religious beliefs.
Most of the time we neither need, nor go to the trouble to find, such a precise definition of anything. More
often we use the rough and ready method called an “archetypal” definition. An archetype is something we
consider to be the most outstanding example of a certain type of things, and we then judge other things to
be of that same type or not depending on how similar they are to the archetype. While this is often
sufficient for everyday practical matters, it is a disaster for trying to understand what counts as a religious
belief. For example, were Christians to use belief in God as their archetype religious belief, they would be
forced to conclude that beliefs about Brahman-Atman in Brahmin Hinduism and about the Nothingness of
Theravada Buddhism are not religious beliefs (some thinkers have actually done this!). Likewise, it would
require a Brahmin Hindu or a Theravada Buddhist who took their divinity belief as an archetype, to deny
that belief in God is a religious belief.

Neither is it possible to appeal to an operational definition for religious belief. An operational

definition is one that picks out a type of things by specifying what results can be expected from specific
actions done with them. For example, an operational definition of water says that if a liquid freezes at 0
degrees C., boils at 100 degrees C., and under electrolysis yields hydrogen and oxygen gasses at a ratio of 2
to 1, then it is water. Despite the prima facie implausibility of using this method for defining religious
belief, it has been tried and the results are as unimpressive as could be expected (Tremmel, 1984): 7 ff).

Yet another possibility is what is known as a “nominal” definition, which means that the definer is
merely stipulating a definition for purposes of the present discussion. As such, a nominal definition doesn't
even pretend to capture what the members of a type of things really have in common, or even to specify an
archetype. It should be clear, then, that what we need for comparative religion is a real definition, one that
states just those characteristics that all but only religious beliefs have in common. And that is precisely
what we have in the definition offered above.

III. The Evidence for the Definition

So just what is the evidence for this definition and why does it deserve to be called overwhelming?
The first piece of evidence has already been mentioned, namely, that it doesn't rest only on my own read-

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ing, or on that of myself plus a few other thinkers selected because they agree with me. Rather, it is the
view of dozens of philosophers, poets, theologians, and scholars of religion from every age of history and a
sizeable number of cultures, who held otherwise widely divergent beliefs concerning just about everything
including contrary divinity beliefs. They range from tribal myth makers and poets, to ancient Greek
philosophers, to modern experts in comparative religion; they include Pagans, Naturalists, Jews, Christians,
Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Since a number of people have suggested to me that Buddhism has no
such teaching, here are a few lines from The Sutra of Hui Neng:

To attain supreme enlightenment one must be able to know

spontaneously one’s own nature or essence of mind [such-
ness], which is neither created nor can it be annihilated.
(Wang, 1961: p.7).

Who would have thought that the Essence of Mind is intrinsically

self-sufficient? (Wang, 1961: p.20).

But the main evidence for the definition isn't simply the impressive number of thinkers who agree
with it. The main reason is the list of divinity beliefs that conform to it: God in Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam; Brahman-Atman in Hinduism; Nothingness, Void, Suchness, Dharmakaya (and other terms) in
Buddhism; T'ai Chi as found in the I Ching and later called the Tao by Lao Tzu, and Numen in ancient
Roman religion. It also covers the belief in Nam in Sikhism, and Ahura Mazda in early Zoroastrianism
(called Zurvan in its later development), and Kami in Shintoism. Likewise, it fits the soul/matter dualism of
the Jains, the high god of the Deiri Aborigines, the belief in Mana among the Trobriand Islanders, and the
idea of Wakan or Orenda among native American tribes. It also fits the ancient Babylonian belief that:
“The origin of all things was the primeval watery chaos, represented by the pair Apsu and Timat...”
(Moore, 1913: p.13). In fact, that Babylonian belief is not very different from the ancient Greek idea of the
divine found in Homer, which is also covered by this definition. Homer speaks of the original reality as a
watery expanse he calls “okeanos” which he says is the origin of the heavens, the earth, the gods, and
humans (Kirk & Raven, (1960): pp. 10-18, 24-31). It is worth noting that the divinity beliefs of ancient
Greece are not found only in the works of myth makers, however. After the rise of theory making, theories
also included Pagan and Naturalist divinity beliefs, such as theories proposing the divine reality to be earth,
air, fire, or water, as well as the theory that it is atoms and space that are the ultimate, divine, realities.

There are, of course, many tribal myths about gods that do not specify the nature of the original
reality from which they came or explicitly call anything self-existent (Eliade, 1974). Many merely trace
every-thing back to a source or beginning (to the gods or whatever produced them) without further
explanation. But in such cases whatever everything is traced back to is, by default, given the status of
divinity. For if all else stems from X so far as we can know, then so far as we can know X is the
independent reality from which all else stems. In this way something can be accorded divine status even if
the term “divine” is not used, and even if nothing about independent reality is explicitly asserted. And, as I
already pointed out, even where something is asserted to be self-existent, not every myth, scripture, or
theology uses the exact same terms I've been using for the divine status. Whereas I prefer “unconditionally
non-dependent,” other writers have used “self-existent,” “a se,” “origin,” “ultimate reality,” “absolute,”
“mother of all things,” “uncaused and unpreventable,” and “unproduced producer of all else,” among
others.

We should also now take notice of some characteristics that are not true of all religious beliefs,
and which therefore cannot be part of a real definition. The first that needs to be rejected is that religious
beliefs are all associated with worship. The fact is that Brahmin Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism have
no worship, and the same is true of Shintoism in which ancestors are honored but not worshipped. Neither
are divinity beliefs always associated with ethical teachings, as is exemplified again by Shintoism but also
by ancient Roman religion. Nor can religious beliefs be picked out by specific activities that always
accompany them. The fact is, an activity can be known to be religious only if we already know it to be

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associated with a divinity belief. Consider just a few of the myriad of activities which can be religious or
not depending upon whether they are performed in response to a divinity belief: circumcising an infant,
burning down a house, fasting, covering oneself with manure, meditating, killing an animal, killing a
human, having water poured on one's head, maintaining strict silence, having sexual intercourse, burning
incense, having one's head shaved, eating bread and wine, ringing bells, singing, and setting off fireworks.
It is only because of what is believed about such actions in relation to attaining a proper relation to the
divine that they have religious significance. Even an act of prayer cannot be distinguished from someone
talking to himself unless we know what he believes about his speech relative to his divinity belief. The
definition defended here avoids all these pitfalls.

It has already been pointed out that this definition of “divinity” also avoids the mistake of
specifying any particular number of divine realities. This would be a mistake not only because there are
ideas of divinity which have two or more divinities, but because there are religions which preclude any
number whatever being assigned to the divine (Theravada Buddhism, for example). Moreover, the
definition also allows for many different ideas about how divine realities can relate to one another when it
is believed there is more than one, as well as a plethora of ideas about the relation of the divine to the non-
divine world. For example, it might be maintained that there is a reality X that is unconditionally real but so
is Y. It is possible for such a dualism to hold that one segment of the non-divine world depends on divinity
X while another segment depends on divinity Y. But it is also possible to believe that the non-divine world
is not divided into such segments, but that instead each and every nondivine thing is partly X-dependent
and partly Y-dependent. The point is, even though it is still the case that the totality of what is non-divine
depends on some part of the divine, there are a variety of ways to parse how that dependency is distributed.
Our definition easily allows for this.

Another way this definition succeeds where others have failed is that it even allows for belief in a
realm of divine beings some of which have no important relation to the rest of the cosmos or to humans.
Beliefs in such “idle divinities” has puzzled some scholars and stymied attempts to make them fit into other
definitions. But these too are covered by this definition because even the idle divinities are still self-existent
and are parts of the realm of non-dependent beings upon which all non-divine reality depends.

The definition also accounts for how and why the same belief can be religious for one person and
not for another. For example, the belief that 1+2 + 3 + 4 = 10 was a religious belief for the Pythagoreans,
because they regarded numbers as divine. Here is their prayer to the number 10 (a tetraktys is a geometric
figure with sides that always add up to 10):

Bless us divine number, thou that generatest gods and men!

O holy, holy tetraktys, thou that containest the root and source
of eternally flowing creation! For divine number begins with
the profound, the pure unity until it comes to the holy four;
then it begets the mother of all, the all-encompassing, the all-
bounding, the first born, the never swerving, the never tiring
holy ten, the keyholder of all (Dantzig, 1954: 42).

For a Christian, on the contrary, the arithmetical formula should be seen as a necessary truth created and
built into the cosmos by God. Similarly, the formula will not be a religious truth for a materialist. From the
materialist perspective it is truths about matter/energy in the space/time continuum that will be religious.
The difference in each case will be determined by what is regarded as the self-existent origin of all else.

Finally, our definition also avoids any requirement that the divine be personal, conscious, trusted,
or loved, or good, and so allows for divinities that lack those characteristics or even possess their
contraries. And there are such. The history of religious belief includes beliefs in divine principles which are
not personal or conscious, as well as gods who are evil and hated such as the Dakota evil Great Spirit
(Fraser, 1951: p. 308).

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 This ends the summary of the positive evidence for our definition. The negative evidence for it
consists in how badly some of the most widely accepted alternatives to it fare by comparison.

IV. The Failure of Alternative Definitions

1. Religious belief is belief in a Supreme Being. This is plainly wrong for a number of reasons,
chief among which is that most forms of Hinduism and all forms of Buddhism do not have one supreme
being. Moreover, for all forms of both those traditions the divine per se is not a being at all, but is being-
itself or Nothing (not-a-thing). Thus the divine itself isn't a single being; it isn't an individual, and isn't a
person. It is the being-ness which comprises the true reality of everything we experience. Another way to
put this is to say that beneath our (illusory) everyday experience of transient individuals with qualitative
differences, is their true being which is the divine being-itself. Only this is fully real because it lacks all
qualities, is changeless, and does not come into being or pass away. These beliefs are sufficient to show
that the definition “belief in a Supreme being” fails to pick out a common component of all religions.

2. Religious belief is belief in one's highest value (Hall, T.W. ed., 1978: p.16). This definition
appears more plausible than it deserves because of the way many people speak figuratively of their
obsessions as their religion. For example, a sports fan may speak of golf as his religion because of the way
his devotion to it resembles the devotion to God shown by a saint or prophet. But the devotion of a sport's
fan to his favorite sport won't make that a religious belief any more than the devotion of a saint to God will
make religion a sport. The fact is, there are religions that do not value or even hate at least some of what
they regard as divine, and the Dakota evil Great Spirit is not the only one (Plato, Laws, 10, 86). So this
definition has the absurd consequence of requiring that belief in such non-valued gods would not be
religious belief at all! (I assume without argument that belief in a god or God is religious belief.) The
Anaximander definition I’m defending makes sense of all this.

Polytheisms that have despised gods are not the only counter-examples to this definition, however;
Christianity is one also. The New Testament has much to say about the proper ordering of our values, but
God himself isn't one of them. Rather, everything it teaches about ordering our values already presupposes
belief in God. What a Christian is admonished to value above all else is God's favor; there is to be no
higher value than the Kingdom of God and the righteousness he offers to those who believe in him (Matt.
6:33). But in order to do that, a person would first have to believe that God is the Divine Creator who
rewards those who seek him (Heb. 11:6). Clearly, then, believing that God is real and trustworthy is a
precondition for what we are to value most, and therefore cannot be identical with what we value most.
Another way to put the same point is to say that God is the Creator of all values and not himself a value.
Anyone who thinks that belief in God is simply a value (even if the highest value), has degraded the total
commitment of our whole being to God that is demanded by the first commandment into merely valuing
God. Loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is not merely a value.

3. Religious belief is a person's ultimate concern. This is the definition made famous by Paul
Tillich who explained “ultimate concern” to mean both what a person is ultimately concerned with, and a
person's concern with what is ultimate. In the first sense, all people are ultimately concerned with
something at every moment and so have some religious belief or other. In the second sense, people aim to
be concerned with what is really ultimate, though it is possible for them to be mistaken (Tillich, 1951,
volume 1, pp. 11-55). Obviously, then, the key to this definition is what is meant by “ultimate.”

Tillich defines ultimate in several ways. He identifies it, for example, with the “holy” and the
“sacred” but takes those terms to be figurative. The only literal meaning that can be ascribed to the ultimate
reality, he says, is “being-itself” or “the infinite” (Tillich, 1951: p. 237 and 1957: pp. 1-11). Moreover, he
makes it clear that whatever is infinite in this sense must be unlimited in such a way that there can be
nothing distinct from it. So he thinks that if someone were to say that God is ultimate but also that the
cosmos is a reality distinct from God, that person would be inconsistent. For were there anything that is not

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God, God would be limited by what he is not and thus not infinite and so not really ultimate. Thus,
according to Tillich, anyone ultimately concerned with that sort of god (a god who is a being rather than
being-itself) would be putting his or her trust in something that is not really ultimate and would therefore
have a false religious belief (he calls “false faith”) (Tillich, 1957, p.12).

By understanding “ultimate” in this way, Tillich has given us a definition that is too narrow to
cover all religious beliefs. It does not describe a common element in them all but is instead a prescription
for what he considers to be true religious belief. So whether he's right about what constitutes true religious
belief is beside the point right now, because it is a fact that there are religions which do not believe that the
divine is infinite in his sense. Tillich was aware of this objection, of course, but failed to realize it is lethal
to his definition. He tried to sidestep it by saying that religions which do not believe the divine to be infinite
in his sense intend to do so, but fall short. That is, whereas true religious belief succeeds in putting faith in
the infinite, false religious belief attempts to do that but fails by conceiving of the divine as finite.

That, however, is simply false. The prevailing understanding of God in all three Theistic religions
- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – does not aim at belief in God as infinite in Tillich's sense. Rather, they
quite deliberately assert that God the Creator has called into the universe into existence ex nihilo so that it is
distinct from himself. They hold that while the universe depends on God, it is not made out of his being but
is another reality. This is not to deny that at other points Tillich came very close to the definition I'm
advocating. He certainly also believed that the infinite was also utterly non-dependent (Tillich, 1957: p.
12), but instead of picking that as the common feature of all divinity beliefs he picked infinity which is not
common to them all.

4. Religious belief can't be defined at all. This claim is most famously associated with the work of
John Hick and Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the latter half of the twentieth century. Their claim was that
religious belief can't be defined because there are no common characteristics whatever to all of them. They
based their view largely on a point taken from the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein once
remarked that it is not always the case that whenever we use the same word for a number of things, those
things must all share at least one common characteristic. As an example of this point, he offered the term
“games.” We apply this term to many games which are so varied as to have no common property, he said.
His explanation for how this happens is that they may all come to be referred to by the same term because
they share a “family resemblance” rather than actually sharing common characteristics (Wittgenstein: 1968:
sects. 55 & 67). Here's what that means.

Suppose we have four games A, B, C, and D, and each of them has a number of outstanding
features. In this illustration B has two of A's four outstanding features, C has two of B's features but only
one of A's, and D has two of C's outstanding features but none of A's. This, Wittgenstein suggests, is how
the same term (“game”) can come to be used for all of them. It's because of the overlapping properties
shared among them, even though there is not one single property they all share in common. The overlap
constitutes their “family resemblance”, but as there is no property common to them all there is no real
definition for what counts as a game.

While I have no doubt that Wittgenstein is right in saying that at times we use a word because of
family resemblances rather than common features, there are a few more things worth noticing about his
idea. First, he didn't say that all common nouns are like this; he was not suggesting that we never use the
same term for each of a class of things because we notice their common properties, and had he said that he
would have instantly discredited his proposal. Are there no common properties possessed by all instances
of water? All electrons? All plants? Of course, there are. Moreover, it's not even clear to me that his own
pet example was a good one. I can see nothing wrong with “game” being defined as: an activity engaged in
for amusement by one or more persons in which an arbitrarily set goal is accomplished in accordance with
arbitrarily set rules. And this should be sufficient to show that however difficult it may be to come up with
common characteristics for a class of things, the fact that it's difficult doesn't show there are none. So while
Wittgenstein was right to warn us not simply to assume there must be common characteristics among

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things called by the same name we should also take the rest of his advice on the point: don't just assume
there are common characteristics, he said, “look to see if there are” (Wittgenstein, sect.66).

That is not, however, what I find to have been done by those who appeal to Wittgenstein in order
to proclaim religious belief as indefinable. Wilfred Cantwell Smith jumped on the bandwagon of
indefinability without looking at all, and John Hick seconds his move in his introduction to Smith's book,
The Meaning and End of Religion (Smith, 1978). In fact, Smith not only doesn't look to see if there are
common defining properties among things designated by the class terms “religion” or “religious,” he
dogmatically asserts there never are essential properties common to the members of any putative class of
real things! Before I quote him on this point, let's be clear about what essential properties are. A property
(or set of them) is essential to a type of things if a thing has to have that property (or set) to be that type of
thing. So, for example, an electron has to be a subatomic particle and have a negative charge in order to be
an electron. Water has to be composed of hydrogen and oxygen, a plant has to be a living thing, and a
planet has to be a body of a sufficient size in orbit around a star. In each case the properties named are
essential to the types of things mentioned, and if something lacks an essential property it can't be an
instance of that type of thing. Now a real definition is, of course, more than simply identifying some
essential properties. It requires coming up with a list of them that is also sufficient to define what it is to
belong to that class of things; it requires producing a list of essential properties possessed by all but only
those things.

It should be readily apparent, then, that although we cannot always achieve essential definitions,
neither can we do without them. Not only in the sciences but in everyday affairs we would be helpless to
distinguish a dog from a lamp from a tree if we could not know any clusters of properties essential to them
and only them. So while the sciences often have to make do with operational definitions, even operational
definitions can only be useful within a broader context of knowledge that is in possession of many essential
definitions. Nevertheless, Smith tells us:

Science is not interested in essences.... A modern physicist

cannot define matter; but he can handle it, and can do so
because his predecessors eventually learned that the essence
does not signify. He understands the behavior of matter not
because he knows what matter is...but because he has
learned how it operates, and how it changes (Smith, 1978:
p. 143).

So how then does Smith get from the overstatement that science is never interested in essential definitions,
to the conclusion that there are none at all for anything that is real? He gives no argument but merely
dogmatically asserts:

The point is valid generally, it would seem; it may be

illustrated lavishly in the area of man's religious history
(Smith, 1978: p. 143).

And if that's not non-sequitur enough he adds:

Whatever exists mundanely cannot be defined; what-

ever can be defined does not exist (Smith, 1978, p. 146).

Please do not misunderstand my point here. I am not defending the notion that everything can be
defined. We have many ideas that are not mental combinations of distinguished properties (which is what I
understand a concept to be). For that reason, these ideas cannot be unpacked and spelled out as a definition,
because a definition is the statement of the contents of a concept. Yellow, justice, and love are examples of
such indefinable ideas, and there are many more. Moreover, there are many ideas we know intuitively, so it

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I am not arguing that we know only what we can define. As I've already pointed out, even for complex
concepts, we are often obliged to work with archetypal or operational definitions when we can't achieve an
essential (real) definition. But these points don't bring us within miles of the conclusion that nothing that
exists can be defined, or that it is “generally” true that we don't need to know the essential properties of
things, or that real definitions are possible only for things that don't exist.

Nor is it possible for Smith to be consistent with this position. For example, he takes for granted
that all the traditions he discusses in his book are in fact centered on one or another divinity belief, and for
that reason are all religions. But how can he know they are all religious if there are no characteristics
whatever that a belief must have in order to be religious? How did he know which beliefs to discuss?
Which traditions to study? The only possible reply I can imagine would be for him to claim that he
intuitively knows a religious belief when he sees one. But then how could he make a case for religious
belief as an intuitive idea rather than a concept, when he also insists that all religious beliefs are a complex
combination of elements? If they're complex, then we could only identify them via concepts, not just
simple, unanalyzable, ideas.

What has happened here is that Smith has confused the concept of an individual thing with the
concept of a class of things to which an individual may belong. When he makes the outrageous claim that
nothing that exists can be defined, I think what he means to say is that we cannot form a complete
definition of any individual thing. That, of course, is true. The complete concept of an individual thing
would have to include all the properties true of it, and there would be so vast a number of them that
enumerating them for any concept would be a practical impossibility. But what follows from that point is
that our concepts of individual things are always incomplete, not that we have none at all. It is false that our
awareness of a thing consists only of our experiential encounter with its brute individuality; it also consists
in our knowledge of the kind of thing it is and the types to which it belongs. That is what makes the world
amenable to rational thought, even if that amenability is not total.

For these reasons I conclude that Smith has jumped on the indefinability bandwagon without
justification. He has abandoned the project of defining religious belief because he has falsely identified it
with the overly-rationalistic position that everything can be given an essential definition because there are
independent realities called essences that determine every real thing. But in rejecting that overly-rationalist
position, Smith has embraced the opposite swing of the pendulum and asserted – for the flimsiest of
reasons - that nothing real can be defined at all. Neither extreme is correct.

My general conclusion from all this is that the old definition, held for so long but neglected by
comparative religion in the 20th century, succeeds. It covers a huge number of religious beliefs and has no
known exception. It makes sense of beliefs that otherwise seem to be difficult or to be borderline cases, and
it allows for the wide variations such beliefs display while still identifying an essential core meaning
common to them all.

Roy Clouser
Prof. Emeritus
Philosophy and Religion
The College of New Jersey

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