"Not God, but life"

"I turn now to the question of how this view of religious belief accords with the views of James and Dewey. It would not, I think, have been congenial to James. But I think it might have suited Dewey. So I shall argue that it is Dewey’s rather unambitious and half-hearted A Common Faith, rather than James’s brave and exuberant “Conclusion” to Varieties of Religious Experience, that coheres best with the romantic utilitarianism which both accepted. James says, in that chapter of Varieties, that “the pivot round which the religious life revolves … is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.” Science, however, “repudiating the personal point of view,” gives us a picture of nature which “has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy.” The “driftings of the cosmic atoms” are “a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result” (VRE, 387–388).y On the view I have just outlined, he should have followed this up by saying, “But we are free to describe the universe in many different ways. Describing it as the drifting of cosmic atoms is useful for the social project of working together to control our environment and improve man’s estate. But that description leaves us entirely free to say, for example, that the Heavens proclaim the glory of God.” Sometimes James seems to take this line, as when, with obvious approval, he quotes James Henry Leuba as saying, “God is not known, he is not understood, he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometime as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness can ask no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.” (VRE, 398)"

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom: https://a.co/f3uRbVW