Masters Theses

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Browsing Masters Theses by Author "Crees, Mark"

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    The Natural Phenomenon of Religious Faith and Human 'Depth of Meaning'
    (2009-05-08) Crees, Mark
    This thesis explores religious faith from an integrated interdisciplinary standpoint that draws heavily on Georges Bataille’s religious theory, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical framework (as distilled through the lens of Slavoj Žižek), and Pascal Boyer’s evolutionary model of cognitive inference systems, in order to recast Paul Tillich’s faith dynamics in terms of a contemporary critical theory of religion. Focusing on Tillich’s understanding of faith as engaging with a depth of meaning, a hypothesis is presented that casts religious faith as a complex natural human phenomenon that functions as a species of generative human ‘depth of meaning’ engagement within particular hermeneutical frameworks with a focus on the ‘Other’ (transcendence / the infinite) that were born from the communal symbolic-linguistic system of meaning making that arose with human evolutionary development as a by-product of several cognitive inference systems and as a result of a lost intimacy with immanence. This hypothesis is explicated throughout the thesis in defence of a non-religious analysis of religious faith which is non-reductive and which avoids caricature. Tillich’s understanding of faith as the central phenomenon in the personal life of human beings is recast as one form of human ‘depth of meaning’ engagement, with religious faith understood as providing a mechanism for accepting a certain intra-systematic coherence and a volitional (trust) commitment to an intra-systematic being (God) or principle deemed extra-systematic but inscribed within the particular symbolic universe in which the interpretive framework operates. The historical dialectical hypothesis developed throughout the thesis is tested against contemporary manifestations of religious faith, particularly of a violent geo-political nature, and various implications are drawn out that demonstrate the fecundity and importance of the hypothesis, particularly in terms of a point of departure for further research.