# Ninian Smart

<!-- type: person -->

Roderick Ninian Smart (1927-2001), Scottish scholar of religion, founding figure of the academic discipline of religious studies in the English-speaking world, and the architect of the **seven-dimensional model of religion** that is now the standard functional-classification framework in comparative-religion scholarship. Smart's framework is load-bearing for the Christian apologetic argument that committed atheism, particularly the post-2004 New Atheist movement, is itself a religion by the operative scholarly definition. See [Atheism as Religion](/codex/is-atheism-a-religion/).

## Biographical sketch

- **Born** May 6, 1927, Cambridge, England, into a Scottish academic family.
- **Education**, RAF service (Mandate-era intelligence work in Sri Lanka exposed him to Theravada Buddhism); Oxford (Queen's College), reading philosophy and Sanskrit / Pali under H.H. Price and others.
- **First chair**, University of Birmingham (1961), where he made the case that "theology" as a confessional Christian discipline should be supplemented by **religious studies** as a non-confessional comparative discipline.
- **Lancaster** (1967-82), founded the Department of Religious Studies at the new University of Lancaster, the first such department in the United Kingdom organized on the non-confessional comparative model; widely imitated and now the standard British / American structure.
- **University of California, Santa Barbara** (1976-98), J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions; transatlantic dual appointment for much of the period.
- **President**, American Academy of Religion (2000), the principal North American scholarly association in the field.
- **Died** January 29, 2001, Lancaster, England, age 73.

## The seven-dimensional model

Smart's enduring contribution. First sketched in *The Religious Experience of Mankind* (1969), refined in *Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs* (1983), and given its final form in *Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs* (1996). The framework holds that worldviews qualify as religious to the extent they exhibit the following dimensions:

1. **Doctrinal / philosophical**, articulated metaphysical claims about ultimate reality (God, the world, the human person, salvation / liberation).
2. **Mythic / narrative**, foundational origin-and-destiny stories that the community treats as canonical.
3. **Ethical / legal**, moral framework grounded in the doctrinal commitments; rules for personal and communal life.
4. **Ritual / practical**, repeated identity-reinforcing actions (worship, festivals, rites of passage, commemorative observances).
5. **Experiential / emotional**, characteristic existential / numinous states the worldview produces and validates (awe, conviction, ecstasy, conversion-affect).
6. **Social / institutional**, community, in-group identity, authority structure, leadership offices.
7. **Material**, sacred symbols, sacred spaces, sacred figures, sacred texts, art and architecture.

**Why the model matters apologetically.** Smart developed the framework precisely to *displace* the substantive (deity-requiring) definition of religion that had been used in 19th-century comparative religion. He argued, correctly, that the substantive definition failed on uncontroversial cases (Theravada Buddhism does not posit a creator deity; Jainism explicitly denies one; Confucianism in its functional form is non-theistic), and that a functional / structural definition matched scholarly practice. The framework is the standard diagnostic kit in religious-studies departments worldwide.

The Christian-apologetic use is straightforward: when Smart's diagnostic is run on contemporary committed atheism (the New Atheism, secular humanism, organized atheist movements), the worldview scores high on all seven dimensions. The implication, that atheism is *itself* a religion in the operative scholarly sense, removes atheism's rhetorical immunity to religion-criticism. See the full argument at [Atheism as Religion](/codex/is-atheism-a-religion/).

## Major works

- *Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and non-Christian* (Routledge, 1958)
- *The Religious Experience of Mankind* (Scribner / Collins, 1969; rev. eds.), introductory text in which the dimensions first appear
- *The Phenomenon of Religion* (Macmillan, 1973), phenomenological methodology
- *Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs* (Scribner, 1983), programmatic statement of the seven-dimensional framework
- *The World's Religions* (Cambridge UP, 1989; 2nd ed. 1998), the standard textbook in the field for decades
- *Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs* (HarperCollins, 1996), Smart's mature systematic treatment of the seven dimensions

## Methodological commitments

Smart's project rested on a few methodological commitments worth distinguishing:

- **Non-confessional but not anti-confessional.** Smart did not treat religious studies as a project of debunking religion; he treated it as a project of *describing and comparing* religions. He was an Anglican lay communicant throughout most of his career.
- **Phenomenological-empathetic.** Smart drew on Husserl and Otto: the scholar must *bracket* his own commitments and seek to grasp the religion *from inside* before judging it from outside. This *epoché* commitment is foundational for fair comparative work.
- **Polymethodic.** Smart insisted that no single methodology (philological, historical, sociological, theological) was sufficient; religious studies needed to integrate all of them, with no one approach colonizing the discipline.
- **Worldview-analytic.** Late in his career, Smart extended the framework from "religions" to "worldviews" (his preferred term in *Worldviews*, 1983), explicitly opening the analysis to secular ideologies (Marxism, nationalism, scientific naturalism). This extension is what licenses the contemporary atheism-as-religion argument.

## Significance for Christian apologetics

1. **Anchors the [Atheism as Religion](/codex/is-atheism-a-religion/) argument.** Smart's framework is the central scholarly authority cited for the functional classification of committed atheism as religion. The argument is *not* a parochial Christian invention; it follows from applying the standard religious-studies diagnostic.
2. **Legitimates worldview-comparison apologetics.** Smart's extension to "worldviews" provides scholarly cover for the comparative-apologetic move that places Christianity alongside naturalism / Buddhism / Islam / secular humanism *as worldviews on the same footing*, to be assessed by the same criteria (coherence, explanatory scope, lived adequacy). The popular-apologetic comparative-worldview frame (Sire's *The Universe Next Door*; Geisler-Watkins; Ravi Zacharias's "four key questions") is structurally Smart's frame applied confessionally.
3. **Defeats the substantive-definition retreat.** When atheists try to retreat from the seven-dimension diagnostic by re-asserting a deity-requiring definition of religion, the failure-mode is fatal: their definition has to exclude Theravada Buddhism, which contradicts uniform academic and popular usage. Smart's case for the functional definition was made *against* exactly this substantive-deity definition, and the field has agreed with Smart.

## Limits to the apologetic deployment

- **Smart is not a Christian apologist.** He was a comparative-religion scholar working on his own (broadly Anglican but non-confessional) terms. The argument deploys his framework; it does not enlist Smart's *theological* commitments.
- **The classification is dialectical, not truth-evaluative.** Showing that atheism is a religion by Smart's standard does not falsify atheism. It removes a rhetorical immunity. The further first-order question, is atheism true?, has to be engaged on its own (see [Cumulative Case for Christian Theism](/codex/cumulative-case-for-christian-theism/)).
- **The argument targets *committed* atheism.** Smart's seven dimensions track the *practice* of a worldview-community; a passive non-thinker who has never engaged the God-question doesn't yet have the seven-dimensional profile. The diagnostic targets the New-Atheist-movement type of atheism, not bare-proposition atheism.

## See also

- [Atheism as Religion](/codex/is-atheism-a-religion/), the load-bearing defeater argument deploying Smart's framework
- [Atheism is a Belief](/codex/argument-from-science-as-faith-based-guillen/), companion etymology / definitional argument
- [Atheism](/codex/atheism/), concept hub
- Atheism Roadmap, single-page super-index
- [New Atheism](/codex/new-atheism/), the principal target of the seven-dimensional diagnostic
- [Secular Humanism](/codex/secular-humanism/), the movement that scored Smart-high in *Torcaso v. Watkins* (1961)
- [Naturalism](/codex/naturalism/), the metaphysical content of committed atheism