visionshefner

The Future of IRAS

Philip Hefner

IRAS has a fascinating and distinguished history of more than fifty years—focusing on issues entailed in its name: religion in an age of science. I was actively engaged with IRAS for thirty years—1975-2005—and I have kept in touch from a distance since then. My reflections on the future of IRAS grow out of this history and out of my sense of what the future of our age of science will bring.

I take my start with the name: religion in an age of science. IRAS has attracted gifted scientists from its beginning—indeed that has been its contribution and its distinctiveness. A strong scientific presence is essential for IRAS—that’s what makes us interesting...

The struggle for IRAS has been and continues to be with religion. Our striving has been a distinguished one, but we continue to be dissatisfied with the outcome. In this we are a microcosm of the macrocosm—our culture as a whole has been unable to figure out how religion fits in an age of science. By persisting in the effort, we make a contribution to our society as a whole.

I look at religion under two aspects: traditional religion (TR) and religion re-conceived (RRC). RRC refers to the widespread sense that TR is obsolete, rendered irreparably out of touch by the developments of science--thus calling for a religious alternative. IRAS has gone farther than most others in this direction in its proposals for Religious Naturalism. These proposals have achieved widespread recognition. They are part of our contribution to the larger cultural discussion. Our Mission Statement ( http://www.iras.org/mission.html ) masks this effort, in my opinion, because it roots our efforts in an ambiguous desire “take the natural world seriously as a primary source of meaning” rather than a straightforward recognition that we are proposing an alternative to TR.

IRAS has been less successful, however, in integrating TR with scientific knowledge. In this, we have failed to deal with the really difficult issue facing our world culture. It is the TRs that have for millennia been interwoven with the foundations of the cultures of the world. Furthermore, several billion people adhere to TR today. Taking the measure of TR is surely the central “religion and science” issue of our time. We in IRAS have hardly made our contribution to the cultural discussion or discharged the mandate of our own 50-year history if we are not grappling in deep and meaningful ways with TR. The engagement with TR is certainly more demanding than any other we face—intellectually and spiritually.

IRAS’s founders made notable efforts on both of these fronts—re-conceiving religion while at the same time seeking to integrate traditional religious beliefs and practices into those re-conceptions. I believe that this two-pronged challenge — RRC and TR -- should be more prominent in our minds as we move forward.

It may be that IRAS faces a challenge in shaping its business plan. Our annual conferences have more recently followed a pattern of dealing with critical current practical issues (water, energy, food—as well as others) from both scientific and religious perspectives. Generally, this results in a fragmented view of religion which delivers insights that are more scientifically astute than they are religiously profound or helpful. Rather than showing religion to be a source of profound wisdom for the human experiment, they tend to cast religion in the instrumental role of supporting scientifically informed social movements.

The issues I have focused on may attract an audience different from our present constituency which in turn would greatly impact the annual conferences and perhaps also the membership profile. Further, the Mission Statement may well need re-casting. I propose this agenda out of my desire to see IRAS fulfill the important vision upon which it was founded—to make a genuinely profound contribution to world culture at this critical moment in history.

VISIONS FOR IRAS