Person

Ninian Smart

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.

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:

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

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

Anchors the Atheism as 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.
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.
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).
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.