Since I'm talking about the challenge of defining "God" in my philosophy of religion class this week, I thought I'd reprint this post, from an earlier occasion when I covered the same material.
This week in my philosophy of religion class we are talking about the concept of God. Since I have already expressed my views on how "God" should be defined in Is God a Delusion?, I don't intend to simply repeat myself here. But I do want to say a few words about some common challenges to the coherence of the traditional Western theological understanding of God--which, in the language I use in my book, is a "substantive definition" (one that defines God in terms of a set of properties) as opposed to an ostensive definition (which would define God by metaphorically "pointing," as Schleiermacher does when he defines God as the "Whence" of our feeling of absolute dependence) or a formal one (which sets out a procedure for arriving at divine properties, as Anselm does) or a functional one (which is what I tend to favor).
As I worded it in class, the dominant substantive definition of God in Western theology takes God to be "the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator of the world who is transcendent, eternal, and self-existent."
One common challenge to God thus conceived targets the property of omnipotence, arguing that it is incoherent to attribute this property to anything. Another challenges the co-possibility of divine omniscience and creaturely freedom. Of course, the most historically important objection to theism is the argument from evil, which in some of its forms challenges the possibility of there existing a being characterized by omnipotence and omnibenevolence in a world with the amount and kind of evil we find in this one (I won't consider this challenge here, since I will be devoting considerable attention to it later in the semester).
The main thing I want to consider here is what significance such challenges have for the devoted religious believer. For this purpose, let me focus on the challenge to divine omnipotence. In its most common form, this challenge starts with the so-called Paradox of the Stone, which asks, "Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?" The argument, roughly, is that however one answers this question one must reject divine omnipotence. Either God can create such a stone, in which case there is something He cannot do, namely lift said stone; or God cannot create such a stone, in which case there is again something God cannot do.
The traditional response to this argument is to define omnipotence in terms of the capacity to do whatever is logically possible--and then to note that it is not logically possible to create a stone so heavy that it cannot be lifted by a being that has the power to lift every possible stone. As such, on the assumption that God is omnipotent, God creating a stone God cannot lift is logically impossible--and since omnipotence is defined as the ability to do whatever is logically possible, the inability for God to create said stone is no restriction on God's omnipotence. It would be like saying that God cannot create a round square or make it true that two plus two equals seventeen.
Of course, if we define omnipotence as the capacity to do even what is logically impossible, then the paradox of the stone is a non-starter. If logical consistency is of no consequence to God, then God could do the logically impossible thing of creating a stone so heavy God could not lift it...and then lifting it (while it remaining true that God could not do so).
But while this solution to the Paradox of the Stone strikes me as sound insofar as it goes, it obscures what I find to be a deeper and more profound question raised by the paradox: Can an omnipotent being limit its power so that it ceases to be omnipotent? And if it can, would a God who did so thereby cease to be God?
How one answers these questions has some very interesting implications. First of all, it has implications for what one thinks about about the idea of "kenosis" that has been proposed (and vigorously debated) by some Christian theologians. "Kenosis" refers to a kind of divine "emptying" that some theologians invoked to help to make sense of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. The question at issue has to do with how Jesus' humanity is to be understood in relation to His divinity. If God is all-knowing, and if Jesus is God, does that mean the baby Jesus was born with a full knowledge of 21st Century string theory and could have explained it at three weeks of age to anyone who might have understood what He was saying?
Some theologians have thought that to answer "yes" to questions of this kind is to strip Jesus of his humanity. To be human involves living a human life--and to be born possessing all the infinite knowledge of the universe pretty much precludes that. Such a being would be a divine being wearing human skin, not a human being at all. But Jesus is supposed to be both fully human and fully God. Is there a way to make sense of this?
Some theologians, inspired in part by Phillipians 2:6-8, suggested that the solution was to suppose that in order to be truly human, the incarnate God "emptied" Himself of at least some divine attributes--in effect becoming limited in knowledge and power, etc. That is, in order to authentically share in the human condition and live in solidarity with God's finite creatures, God didn't just pretend to be a finite creature alongside us but actually took on real finitude.
This idea of kinosis took on different forms among its advocates. Some thought it involved a total abandonment of the divine nature while others distinguished among divine properties--distinguishing God's moral attributes from God's "physical" ones (such things as omnipotence, omniscience, and timelessness) and arguing that the incarnate God preserved the former while abandoning the latter.
What is important to note for my purposes here is that this kenotic theory has implications for how we are to understand divinity. Marilyn McCord Adams, in Christ and Horrors, puts the point in these terms:
If partial absolute kenosis (the theory that Jesus is emptied of God's "physical" attributes but not the moral ones) retains the traditional claim that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could not exist without being God, it insists that not all the perfections formerly thought to be essential to Godhead were genuinely necessary to It. So-called physical attributes are allegedly the permanent but contingent possession of the Father and the Holy Spirit, and are contingently had, then abandoned, then repossessed by the Son. Thus, it seems, with respect to some perfections, Godhead essentially includes a capacity for them but not their actuality. (Italics in original)
Here we have a theology which, metaphorically speaking, maintains that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it--that, in other words, it is in the power of God to impose real limits on God's capacity to exercise power (as well as on God's knowledge, eternity, immunity from harm, etc.) but that the God so limited remains God.
Another variant of kenosis can be and has been posited apart from the uniquely Christian concern with making sense of the incarnation. Specifically, some have argued that the very act of creation is an act of the divine imposing limits on itself--that a divine withdrawal and abdication of power is essential for establishing the "otherness" of the created world, thus preserving its status as a reality distinct from God that can evolve on its own terms and eventually acquire (in accord with its own rules) the capacity to autonomously enter into a self-other relationship with God. This is an idea articulated, for example, in the kabbalistic notion of Tzimtzum, and it is also expressed in the writing of Simone Weil. Put simply, the idea is that the existence of a universe that isn't simply swallowed up into God requires the establishment of a kind of boundary or demarcation between God and the created world, one which implies limits on what God can do in relation to that world. On this view, in effect, the act of creating the universe is an act of creating a stone that God cannot lift.
The question then becomes, does God remain God after creation if the act of creation necessitates divine limitation? Or, perhaps better, do those who ascribe to theological views like Tzimtzum have to give up calling the object of their religious devotion God? I don't think so, but if not it makes little sense to insist that "God" just means what is expressed in the traditional substantive definition above. The fact is that people who believe in God can disagree about just how essential the various properties ascribed to God in this definition really are.
And someone who thinks God in fact possesses all of the properties identified in the traditional definition may well agree that these properties do not define God. For example, you might well think that my eyes are a particular shade of blue. But suppose someone demonstrated to you that it was physiologically impossible for human eyes to possess that specific shade, given the manner in which eye color arises. Would you conclude that I don't exist? Surely not--because, although you thought I possessed this specific property, it was never a property that you took to be definitive of me.
Likewise, there is presumably room to accept that a certain property you had formerly attributed to God is one you must give up on, without thereby being forced to give up on the claim that there is a God. But this raises in a new way the question of what, precisely, a theist is asserting when they assert that God exists. If someone ceases to be a theist--what, specifically, are they denying that they had once believed? And why is it that some undergo radical reconceptions in their beliefs while still professing to be theists? What is it that they still believe that warrants holding onto the "theist" label?
This is what I think a functional definition--a definition in terms of the role or function God fills in the life of the devoted theist--is helpful for. In class the other day, a student defined God, roughly, as that in which he could place his hope in times that otherwise would call for despair. This is a functional definition. Given this understanding of God, the believer might radically change their idea of God--but so long as God, thus characterized, could be a source of hope in the midst of despair for those who believed in it, it would still qualify as "God."
Showing posts with label concept of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label concept of God. Show all posts
Monday, August 25, 2014
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
From the Archives: The Gods of September 11
The following is a repost of an essay I posted here on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Over the last week or so I’ve heard more than one person say that September 11 has served our generation as a vivid reminder of the reality of evil, of the gravity of the problem of sin—in Christian terms, of what it means to exist in alienation from our creator.
I don't disagree. There is no question in my mind that what we witnessed on that day was evil—not that the agents of the attacks were essentially evil (as so many claimed), or that their religion was evil (as too many still insist), or that religion as such was evil (as Sam Harris boldly declared in The End of Faith). But what was done, the indifference to life, the deliberate pursuit of atrocity followed by its celebration…if there is anything that deserves the label “sin,” surely this qualifies.
But when Americans point to September 11 and say, “Here is sin,” their fingers are pointing away from themselves.
Let me say this again, more inclusively: When any one of us who has not personally presided over the extermination of human life points at the September 11 attacks and says, “Here is sin,” we are pointing away from ourselves.
And when sin becomes about pointing fingers, rather than about self-transformation and transcendence, the invocation of "sin" becomes part of the problem of sin.
To be transformative, "sin" must be an inner recognition, not an outer judgment. It must be seen, not as a positive reality that has claimed the wicked Other, but as something in ourselves—not something that calls for a response of self-loathing, but an absence that cries out to be filled. As such, sin is like hunger: a symptom of our need to reach beyond ourselves for sustenance. When we are hungry, we do not hate ourselves. When we are hungry we look for food.
And what will feed us? “God,” comes the answer. But what does that mean? For Fred Phelps it means a steady diet of hate. Is that God? Is that what fills the absence, what completes us?
As we confront the horror of September 11, we feel, urgently, the need to be filled. What do we turn to? When confronted with atrocity, where do we look for God?
Some look for vengeance, convinced that it will satisfy. Is their God the one who casts sinners into a fiery hell? Will vengeance fill the emptiness we call sin?
Some link arms and sing patriotic songs, and wave their flags and insist on unity, but it becomes more than just solidarity. They seek to be filled by national pride, by standing up with the tribe that has been struck, by standing together against the enemy, by retooling the very same us/them ideology that allows whole communities to be legitimately targeted in the chosen people’s holy war against its enemies. Is our God a tribal God?
Some scramble for security, taking every possible step to make certain it never happens again—as if, in Stanley Hauerwas’s provocative terms, they can thereby manage to get out of this life alive. Is that the answer? Will sin be defeated if principle gives way to fear, if in the name of security we are prepared to extract information under torture, or let the hungry starve so that our bank accounts are comfortably padded?
Some are like that alpha boy on the playground when he finds himself hurt. Others feel his pain and reach out. But compassion strikes him as pity, and pity is for the weak. And so he sets out to prove that he doesn’t need anyone. The community of mutuality, of interdependence, of shared vulnerability and strength, this community that is suddenly trembling on the tongue of that strange girl leaning down to ask if he’s alright—it terrifies him, and he bats it way.
Is self-reliance our God?
Some, when confronting tragedy, look for ways to fit it into all their old patterns of thinking, rather than allow the enormity of the moment to inspire silence. Some use what happened opportunistically, to pursue the same agendas they’ve always had, rather than let the cracks in their world inspire the humility to ask what their agendas ought to be.
Some seek to use the tragedy—and all the confused fears and longings it inspires—to manipulate their way into power or privilege. They represent themselves as having the answers, if only others will follow where they lead. If they become the thing that feeds the emptiness in others, perhaps their own will disappear. But emptiness cannot feed emptiness.
Some look at the September 11 terrorist attacks and say, “Where is God? Where is God in this horror?” They mean it as rhetorical, but the question doesn’t strike me as rhetorical at all. We all have our answers. But which one will fill us?
"Christ has bidden us," said Simone Weil in a letter to her friend and confidante Father Perrin, "to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light....Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God's creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love into his with regard to all things here below." And when we love as God loves, when we cast out this web of indiscriminate love, we become "the bird with golden wings" who pierces the shell of the world.
Perhaps sin, in the end, is about all the futile answers we choose, all the absurd alternatives to love.
Over the last week or so I’ve heard more than one person say that September 11 has served our generation as a vivid reminder of the reality of evil, of the gravity of the problem of sin—in Christian terms, of what it means to exist in alienation from our creator.
I don't disagree. There is no question in my mind that what we witnessed on that day was evil—not that the agents of the attacks were essentially evil (as so many claimed), or that their religion was evil (as too many still insist), or that religion as such was evil (as Sam Harris boldly declared in The End of Faith). But what was done, the indifference to life, the deliberate pursuit of atrocity followed by its celebration…if there is anything that deserves the label “sin,” surely this qualifies.
But when Americans point to September 11 and say, “Here is sin,” their fingers are pointing away from themselves.
Let me say this again, more inclusively: When any one of us who has not personally presided over the extermination of human life points at the September 11 attacks and says, “Here is sin,” we are pointing away from ourselves.
And when sin becomes about pointing fingers, rather than about self-transformation and transcendence, the invocation of "sin" becomes part of the problem of sin.
To be transformative, "sin" must be an inner recognition, not an outer judgment. It must be seen, not as a positive reality that has claimed the wicked Other, but as something in ourselves—not something that calls for a response of self-loathing, but an absence that cries out to be filled. As such, sin is like hunger: a symptom of our need to reach beyond ourselves for sustenance. When we are hungry, we do not hate ourselves. When we are hungry we look for food.
And what will feed us? “God,” comes the answer. But what does that mean? For Fred Phelps it means a steady diet of hate. Is that God? Is that what fills the absence, what completes us?
As we confront the horror of September 11, we feel, urgently, the need to be filled. What do we turn to? When confronted with atrocity, where do we look for God?
Some look for vengeance, convinced that it will satisfy. Is their God the one who casts sinners into a fiery hell? Will vengeance fill the emptiness we call sin?
Some link arms and sing patriotic songs, and wave their flags and insist on unity, but it becomes more than just solidarity. They seek to be filled by national pride, by standing up with the tribe that has been struck, by standing together against the enemy, by retooling the very same us/them ideology that allows whole communities to be legitimately targeted in the chosen people’s holy war against its enemies. Is our God a tribal God?
Some scramble for security, taking every possible step to make certain it never happens again—as if, in Stanley Hauerwas’s provocative terms, they can thereby manage to get out of this life alive. Is that the answer? Will sin be defeated if principle gives way to fear, if in the name of security we are prepared to extract information under torture, or let the hungry starve so that our bank accounts are comfortably padded?
Some are like that alpha boy on the playground when he finds himself hurt. Others feel his pain and reach out. But compassion strikes him as pity, and pity is for the weak. And so he sets out to prove that he doesn’t need anyone. The community of mutuality, of interdependence, of shared vulnerability and strength, this community that is suddenly trembling on the tongue of that strange girl leaning down to ask if he’s alright—it terrifies him, and he bats it way.
Is self-reliance our God?
Some, when confronting tragedy, look for ways to fit it into all their old patterns of thinking, rather than allow the enormity of the moment to inspire silence. Some use what happened opportunistically, to pursue the same agendas they’ve always had, rather than let the cracks in their world inspire the humility to ask what their agendas ought to be.
Some seek to use the tragedy—and all the confused fears and longings it inspires—to manipulate their way into power or privilege. They represent themselves as having the answers, if only others will follow where they lead. If they become the thing that feeds the emptiness in others, perhaps their own will disappear. But emptiness cannot feed emptiness.
Some look at the September 11 terrorist attacks and say, “Where is God? Where is God in this horror?” They mean it as rhetorical, but the question doesn’t strike me as rhetorical at all. We all have our answers. But which one will fill us?
"Christ has bidden us," said Simone Weil in a letter to her friend and confidante Father Perrin, "to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light....Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God's creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love into his with regard to all things here below." And when we love as God loves, when we cast out this web of indiscriminate love, we become "the bird with golden wings" who pierces the shell of the world.
Perhaps sin, in the end, is about all the futile answers we choose, all the absurd alternatives to love.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Paradox of the Stone and the Challenge of Defining "God"
This week in my philosophy of religion class we are talking about the concept of God. Since I have already expressed my views on how "God" should be defined in Is God a Delusion?, I don't intend to simply repeat myself here. But I do want to say a few words about some common challenges to the coherence of the traditional Western theological understanding of God--which, in the language I use in my book, is a "substantive definition" (one that defines God in terms of a set of properties) as opposed to an ostensive definition (which would define God by metaphorically "pointing," as Schleiermacher does when he defines God as the "Whence" of our feeling of absolute dependence) or a formal one (which sets out a procedure for arriving at divine properties, as Anselm does) or a functional one (which is what I tend to favor).
As I worded it in class, the dominant substantive definition of God in Western theology takes God to be "the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator of the world who is a transcendent, eternal, and self-existent person."
One common challenge to God thus conceived targets the property of omnipotence, arguing that it is incoherent to attribute this property to anything. Another challenges the co-possibility of divine omniscience and creaturely freedom. Of course, the most historically important objection to theism is the argument from evil, which in some of its forms challenges the possibility of there existing a being characterized by omnipotence and omnibenevolence in a world with the amount and kind of evil we find in this one (I won't consider this challenge here, since I will be devoting considerable attention to it later in the semester).
The main thing I want to consider here is what significance such challenges have for the devoted religious believer. For this purpose, let me focus on the challenge to divine omnipotence. In its most common form, this challenge starts with the so-called Paradox of the Stone, which asks, "Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?" The argument, roughly, is that however one answers this question one must reject divine omnipotence. Either God can create such a stone, in which case there is something He cannot do, namely lift said stone; or God cannot create such a stone, in which case there is again something God cannot do.
The traditional response to this argument is to define omnipotence in terms of the capacity to do whatever is logically possible--and then to note that it is not logically possible to create a stone so heavy that it cannot be lifted by a being that has the power to lift every possible stone. As such, on the assumption that God is omnipotent, God creating a stone God cannot lift is logically impossible--and since omnipotence is defined as the ability to do whatever is logically possible, the inability for God to create said stone is no restriction on God's omnipotence. It would be like saying that God cannot create a round square or make it true that two plus two equals seventeen.
Of course, if we define omnipotence as the capacity to do even what is logically impossible, then the paradox of the stone is a non-starter. If logical consistency is of no consequence to God, then God could do the logically impossible thing of creating a stone so heavy God could not lift it...and then lifting it (while it remaining true that God could not do so).
But while this solution to the Paradox of the Stone strikes me as sound insofar as it goes, it obscures what I find to be a deeper and more profound question raised by the paradox: Can an omnipotent being limit its power so that it ceases to be omnipotent? And if it can, would a God who did so thereby cease to be God?
How one answers these questions has some very interesting implications. First of all, it has implications for what one thinks about about the idea of "kenosis" that has been proposed (and vigorously debated) by some Christian theologians. "Kenosis" refers to a kind of divine "emptying" that some theologians invoked to help to make sense of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. The question at issue has to do with how Jesus' humanity is to be understood in relation to His divinity. If God is all-knowing, and if Jesus is God, does that mean the baby Jesus was born with a full knowledge of 21st Century string theory and could have explained it at three weeks of age to anyone who might have understood what He was saying?
Some theologians have thought that to answer "yes" to questions of this kind is to strip Jesus of his humanity. To be human involves living a human life--and to be born possessing all the infinite knowledge of the universe pretty much precludes that. Such a being would be a divine being wearing human skin, not a human being at all. But Jesus is supposed to be both fully human and fully God. Is there a way to make sense of this?
Some theologians, inspired in part by Phillipians 2:6-8, suggested that the solution was to suppose that in order to be truly human, the incarnate God "emptied" Himself of at least some divine attributes--in effect becoming limited in knowledge and power, etc. That is, in order to authentically share in the human condition and live in solidarity with God's finite creatures, God didn't just pretend to be a finite creature alongside us but actually took on real finitude.
This idea of kinosis took on different forms among its advocates. Some thought it involved a total abandonment of the divine nature while others distinguished among divine properties--distinguishing God's moral attributes from God's "physical" ones (such things as omnipotence, omniscience, and timelessness) and arguing that the incarnate God preserved the former while abandoning the latter.
What is important to note for my purposes here is that this kenotic theory has implications for how we are to understand divinity. Marilyn McCord Adams, in Christ and Horrors, puts the point in these terms:
Another variant of kenosis can be and has been posited apart from the uniquely Christian concern with making sense of the incarnation. Specifically, some have argued that the very act of creation is an act of the divine imposing limits on itself--that a divine withdrawal and abdication of power is essential for establishing the "otherness" of the created world, thus preserving its status as a reality distinct from God that can evolve on its own terms and eventually acquire (in accord with its own rules) the capacity to autonomously enter into a self-other relationship with God. This is an idea articulated, for example, in the kabbalistic notion of Tzimtzum, and it is also expressed in the writing of Simone Weil. Put simply, the idea is that the existence of a universe that isn't simply swallowed up into God requires the establishment of a kind of boundary or demarcation between God and the created world, one which implies limits on what God can do in relation to that world. On this view, in effect, the act of creating the universe is an act of creating a stone that God cannot lift.
The question then becomes, does God remain God after creation if the act of creation necessitates divine limitation? Or, perhaps better, do those who ascribe to theological views like Tzimtzum have to give up calling the object of their religious devotion God? I don't think so, but if not it makes little sense to insist that "God" just means what is expressed in the traditional substantive definition above. The fact is that people who believe in God can disagree about just how essential the various properties ascribed to God in this definition really are.
And someone who thinks God in fact possesses all of the properties identified in the traditional definition may well agree that these properties do not define God. For example, you might well think that my eyes are a particular shade of blue. But suppose someone demonstrated to you that it was physiologically impossible for human eyes to possess that specific shade, given the manner in which eye color arises. Would you conclude that I don't exist? Surely not--because, although you thought I possessed this specific property, it was never a property that you took to be definitive of me.
Likewise, there is presumably room to accept that a certain property you had formerly attributed to God is one you must give up on, without thereby being forced to give up on the claim that there is a God. But this raises in a new way the question of what, precisely, a theist is asserting when they assert that God exists. If someone ceases to be a theist--what, specifically, are they denying that they had once believed? And why is it that some undergo radical reconceptions in their beliefs while still professing to be theists? What is it that they still believe that warrants holding onto the "theist" label?
This is what I think a functional definition--a definition in terms of the role or function God fills in the life of the devoted theist--is helpful for. In class the other day, a student defined God, roughly, as that in which he could place his hope in times that otherwise would call for despair. This is a functional definition. Given this understanding of God, the believer might radically change their idea of God--but so long as God, thus characterized, could be a source of hope in the midst of despair for those who believed in it, it would still qualify as "God."
As I worded it in class, the dominant substantive definition of God in Western theology takes God to be "the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator of the world who is a transcendent, eternal, and self-existent person."
One common challenge to God thus conceived targets the property of omnipotence, arguing that it is incoherent to attribute this property to anything. Another challenges the co-possibility of divine omniscience and creaturely freedom. Of course, the most historically important objection to theism is the argument from evil, which in some of its forms challenges the possibility of there existing a being characterized by omnipotence and omnibenevolence in a world with the amount and kind of evil we find in this one (I won't consider this challenge here, since I will be devoting considerable attention to it later in the semester).
The main thing I want to consider here is what significance such challenges have for the devoted religious believer. For this purpose, let me focus on the challenge to divine omnipotence. In its most common form, this challenge starts with the so-called Paradox of the Stone, which asks, "Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?" The argument, roughly, is that however one answers this question one must reject divine omnipotence. Either God can create such a stone, in which case there is something He cannot do, namely lift said stone; or God cannot create such a stone, in which case there is again something God cannot do.
The traditional response to this argument is to define omnipotence in terms of the capacity to do whatever is logically possible--and then to note that it is not logically possible to create a stone so heavy that it cannot be lifted by a being that has the power to lift every possible stone. As such, on the assumption that God is omnipotent, God creating a stone God cannot lift is logically impossible--and since omnipotence is defined as the ability to do whatever is logically possible, the inability for God to create said stone is no restriction on God's omnipotence. It would be like saying that God cannot create a round square or make it true that two plus two equals seventeen.
Of course, if we define omnipotence as the capacity to do even what is logically impossible, then the paradox of the stone is a non-starter. If logical consistency is of no consequence to God, then God could do the logically impossible thing of creating a stone so heavy God could not lift it...and then lifting it (while it remaining true that God could not do so).
But while this solution to the Paradox of the Stone strikes me as sound insofar as it goes, it obscures what I find to be a deeper and more profound question raised by the paradox: Can an omnipotent being limit its power so that it ceases to be omnipotent? And if it can, would a God who did so thereby cease to be God?
How one answers these questions has some very interesting implications. First of all, it has implications for what one thinks about about the idea of "kenosis" that has been proposed (and vigorously debated) by some Christian theologians. "Kenosis" refers to a kind of divine "emptying" that some theologians invoked to help to make sense of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. The question at issue has to do with how Jesus' humanity is to be understood in relation to His divinity. If God is all-knowing, and if Jesus is God, does that mean the baby Jesus was born with a full knowledge of 21st Century string theory and could have explained it at three weeks of age to anyone who might have understood what He was saying?
Some theologians have thought that to answer "yes" to questions of this kind is to strip Jesus of his humanity. To be human involves living a human life--and to be born possessing all the infinite knowledge of the universe pretty much precludes that. Such a being would be a divine being wearing human skin, not a human being at all. But Jesus is supposed to be both fully human and fully God. Is there a way to make sense of this?
Some theologians, inspired in part by Phillipians 2:6-8, suggested that the solution was to suppose that in order to be truly human, the incarnate God "emptied" Himself of at least some divine attributes--in effect becoming limited in knowledge and power, etc. That is, in order to authentically share in the human condition and live in solidarity with God's finite creatures, God didn't just pretend to be a finite creature alongside us but actually took on real finitude.
This idea of kinosis took on different forms among its advocates. Some thought it involved a total abandonment of the divine nature while others distinguished among divine properties--distinguishing God's moral attributes from God's "physical" ones (such things as omnipotence, omniscience, and timelessness) and arguing that the incarnate God preserved the former while abandoning the latter.
What is important to note for my purposes here is that this kenotic theory has implications for how we are to understand divinity. Marilyn McCord Adams, in Christ and Horrors, puts the point in these terms:
If partial absolute kenosis (the theory that Jesus is emptied of God's "physical" attributes but not the moral ones) retains the traditional claim that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could not exist without being God, it insists that not all the perfections formerly thought to be essential to Godhead were genuinely necessary to It. So-called physical attributes are allegedly the permanent but contingent possession of the Father and the Holy Spirit, and are contingently had, then abandoned, then repossessed by the Son. Thus, it seems, with respect to some perfections, Godhead essentially includes a capacity for them but not their actuality. (Italics in original)Here we have a theology which, metaphorically speaking, maintains that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it--that, in other words, it is in the power of God to impose real limits on God's capacity to exercise power (as well as on God's knowledge, eternity, immunity from harm, etc.) but that the God so limited remains God.
Another variant of kenosis can be and has been posited apart from the uniquely Christian concern with making sense of the incarnation. Specifically, some have argued that the very act of creation is an act of the divine imposing limits on itself--that a divine withdrawal and abdication of power is essential for establishing the "otherness" of the created world, thus preserving its status as a reality distinct from God that can evolve on its own terms and eventually acquire (in accord with its own rules) the capacity to autonomously enter into a self-other relationship with God. This is an idea articulated, for example, in the kabbalistic notion of Tzimtzum, and it is also expressed in the writing of Simone Weil. Put simply, the idea is that the existence of a universe that isn't simply swallowed up into God requires the establishment of a kind of boundary or demarcation between God and the created world, one which implies limits on what God can do in relation to that world. On this view, in effect, the act of creating the universe is an act of creating a stone that God cannot lift.
The question then becomes, does God remain God after creation if the act of creation necessitates divine limitation? Or, perhaps better, do those who ascribe to theological views like Tzimtzum have to give up calling the object of their religious devotion God? I don't think so, but if not it makes little sense to insist that "God" just means what is expressed in the traditional substantive definition above. The fact is that people who believe in God can disagree about just how essential the various properties ascribed to God in this definition really are.
And someone who thinks God in fact possesses all of the properties identified in the traditional definition may well agree that these properties do not define God. For example, you might well think that my eyes are a particular shade of blue. But suppose someone demonstrated to you that it was physiologically impossible for human eyes to possess that specific shade, given the manner in which eye color arises. Would you conclude that I don't exist? Surely not--because, although you thought I possessed this specific property, it was never a property that you took to be definitive of me.
Likewise, there is presumably room to accept that a certain property you had formerly attributed to God is one you must give up on, without thereby being forced to give up on the claim that there is a God. But this raises in a new way the question of what, precisely, a theist is asserting when they assert that God exists. If someone ceases to be a theist--what, specifically, are they denying that they had once believed? And why is it that some undergo radical reconceptions in their beliefs while still professing to be theists? What is it that they still believe that warrants holding onto the "theist" label?
This is what I think a functional definition--a definition in terms of the role or function God fills in the life of the devoted theist--is helpful for. In class the other day, a student defined God, roughly, as that in which he could place his hope in times that otherwise would call for despair. This is a functional definition. Given this understanding of God, the believer might radically change their idea of God--but so long as God, thus characterized, could be a source of hope in the midst of despair for those who believed in it, it would still qualify as "God."
Friday, December 11, 2009
Divine Mystery and Divine Goodness
In a comment on my previous post, “Gods of the Imagination,” Speaker for the Dead raised an important issue: if one takes God to be entirely outside the sphere of rational conceptualization, we’re afforded no basis for being critical of claims that are made about God.
Consider hellists—by which I mean those who think that God consigns some of the creatures He loves to an eternity of excruciating torment, torment that does them absolutely no good. While some hellists seek to offer a “theodicy” of hell—that is, an account of why such divine activity is compatible with the goodness of God—others retreat behind the cloak of divine mystery. They point out that God’s ways are not our ways, that divine goodness transcends our comprehension, and that it is therefore simply presumptuous for anyone to question the (supposedly clear) biblical teaching that God expresses his perfect goodness in part by subjecting some creatures to unremitting anguish more extreme than we can possibly fathom.
And the same strategy is, of course, available to anyone who wants to reconcile God’s goodness with their pet views, no matter how horrific: In some mysterious and inexplicable way, God’s perfect benevolence is compatible with commanding genocide, or endorsing the patriarchal subordination of women (or the social marginalization of gays and lesbians), or calling for a terrorist strike on the Twin Towers, etc.
In short, if we shroud God in total mystery, the claim the God is good becomes compatible with any motives or behaviors or commandments we might possibly attribute to God. But if that is right, what are we saying when we say God is good? If saying this about God is compatible with asserting simply anything else about God--if nothing is either implied or excluded when we say it--are we really saying anything at all?
This is an important concern, and one that becomes very real if we fail to make some crucial distinctions. While I think it is important to stress that God is, in many ways, a transcendent mystery, it should be clear to all who have read my work that I do not want to cloak the divine in such a shroud of mystery that “anything goes” in what we attribute to God.
Let me begin by clarifying what I mean when I say that the God who is the proper object of religious devotion defies the imagination. When I speak of the imagination, I mean that faculty which takes concepts and ideas derived from empirical experience—from our engagement with the physical world of matter and energy—and recombines them in ways not seen in empirical experience, producing “pictures” of possible states of affairs and entities that we have never actually encountered in experience.
Using this faculty of imagination, we can come up with sea serpents and unicorns and screaming banshees—things we have never experienced, but which are, in a sense, possible objects of experience insofar as they are made up of more basic elements which we have experienced. Any God constructed in this way would be a spatio-temporal God, a God who is a part of the physical world and a possible object of scientific study. Zeus and Odin are examples.
When I say that God defies imagination, I mean that the kind of entity I refer to with the term “God” is not something that can be depicted imaginatively in this way. More significantly, if the numinous experience which seems to be at the foundation of so much religious life cannot be adequately described in terms derived from empirical experience, it follows that the object of such experience cannot be a construct of the empirical imagination. Why? Because the empirical imagination lacks the building blocks to construct an experience of that.
In this sense, there is an enormous difference between someone who claims to have encountered a pink elephant in the kitchen or a golden dragon in the woods, and someone who claims to have encountered God in the way that mystics claims to have encountered God.
But if no God-concept constructed by the imagination will track onto the object of numinous experience, on what basis is the mystic even justified in using the term “God” to name the object of that experience? The answer comes when we admit that there are non-empirical concepts, and that the mystic’s understanding of God is primarily in terms of such concepts (even if the mystic's experience of God exceeds this understanding).
Although Hume would deny this (insofar as he insisted that all concepts are empirically derived), I am convinced that there is a difference between saying that God cannot be conceptualized at all and saying that God defies imagination. One of the points I made in the previous post, but failed to elaborate on, is that I believe in non-empirical concepts and that “goodness” is one such concept. This point, I think, is crucial for avoiding the kind of “anything goes” approach to theism that Speaker for the Dead is worried about.
As anyone who has read my book will tell you, I define God primarily in moral terms—as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope,” that is, the hope that the universe is in some ultimate or fundamental way on the side of the good. The object of Simone Weil’s experience can justifiably be called “God,” on this definition, because among other things it is experienced to be fundamental (a non-empirical concept, I think) and good (another non-empirical concept).
I want to focus my comments here on the latter: goodness. Goodness is not the object of ordinary empirical experience (no scientific instrument can measure it), but seems rather to be a concept we have from some other source and bring to bear on the objects of empirical experience—a fact which has led some to treat it as nothing more than a projection of psychological preferences (more about this in a moment). Put another way, although we recognize a good act and are prepared to call it good, goodness isn't some feature of the act that we see or smell or taste or touch (or detect through sophisticates scientific equipment). So if it's an actual property of the act, it's not an empirical one, and our concept of it isn't derived from empirical observation.
But I want to endorse the idea that “goodness” is and actual, objective property of things, even if it's not an empirical one. It is true of a certain action that it is good, even though this goodness is not reducible to any empirical fact about it.
That the latter is true is clear enough. A scientist could exhaustively study all the empirical properties associated with my son’s act of giving the entire contents of his piggy bank to the Salvation Army bell ringer outside Walmart (it was his idea to do this, by the way)—but the goodness of the act would not be included in the description.
Logical positivists, of course, conclude on the basis of this that “goodness” is nothing but a projection of our attitudes onto the field of experience. Based on their prior commitment to the view that all objective properties are empirical, they’re forced to subjectivize the wickedness of child rape and the goodness of a generous gesture. These things aren’t real features of the acts in question, but just attitudinal responses to them. The effect, in my judgment, is that logical positivists are forced to impose on moral claims a meaning that is entirely at odds with what actual people actually mean to say when they use moral language.
I can only sketch out my reasoning here, but a sketch is better than nothing, so here goes: When we say that child-rape is evil, we’re not merely expressing out attitude of disapproval. We mean to be saying something about child-rape, something that is true of it. And when we say this, our utterance is intended to imply that any who deny the wrongness of child-rape are failing to recognize something that is true of it. In short, when we call something “good” or “bad,” we mean to attribute to that something a property which (we think) it actually possesses--but a non-empirical property.
The ethical subjectivism of logical positivists does not permit us to do so. As such, this subjectivism implies that when we make claims to the effect that child-rape possesses this property of wrongness, we are attributing to child-rape a property that nothing can possess, since there are no non-empirical properties and wrongness is clearly not an empirical one. In other words, ethical subjectivists are really saying that all moral utterances are false, at least when these utterances are given the meaning that we intend them to have when we use moral language in the ordinary way.
Put more simply, ethical subjectivism is really moral nihilism in disguise. It claims to offer an account of morality (to the effect that it's nothing but a projection of our attitudes); but this account attaches to our moral utterances a meaning at odds with what we intend when we make such utterances, and denies that what we do intend to say can ever be truthfully said. Sounds like nihilism to me.
Notice that universalizing subjective dispositions does not solve this problem. If all of us happen to have the same subjective reaction to child rape, this is a collective fact about us, not a property of child rape. And so, universal horror at child rape is not the same as child rape having the property of being wrong. The latter would entail that horror is fitting, not merely a fact. What would make horror fitting is that child-rape possesses the (non-empirical) property of being morally horrible. And if it has that property, then horror is fitting whether it’s universally felt or not. And we are justified in condemning the attitudes of those who fail to feel horror.
(I should point out here in passing that one of the big problems with Dawkins’ effort to ground morality in evolutionary theory is the fact that all he can do is show how natural selection might generate a general disposition to feel horror at child-rape. Evolutionary theory cannot show why it is true that child-rape is horrible, and hence why it is true that evolution in this case has generated in us responses which fit with morality).
To avoid moral nihilism, I'm convinced we must treat goodness as a non-empirical property. In fact, I would go further (although I cannot make the case for this here) and say that we need to adopt a metaphysics according to which the good has a foundation in reality that is not reducible to any set of empirical facts. But if we do so, then our grasp of goodness cannot be somehow derived from our engagement with the empirical world, but will be something drawn from something that "transcends" the field of empirical experience (even if it may very well be part of the same reality that we encounter in empirical experience).
Put simply, our concept of the good will be drawn from a “transcendent” source--in the technical sense according to which “transcendent” refers to empirically inaccessible dimensions of reality, that is, dimensions of things-as-they-are-in-themselves that we cannot see, hear, smell, or taste, but which remain real. And if our concept of the good is to have such a source, it must be the case that we, as moral beings, are somehow in touch with this transcendent source from which the concept of goodness immediately derives, even if our connection to it is not empirical.
And so, to say that God defies imagining (to say that any construct of the empirically derived imagination will not map onto God) is not to say that our concept of the good cannot be invoked to assess claims about God. Because our concept of the good might apply to God even if no empirical concept does.
The concept to which Weil refers when she uses the term “God” is not one constructed from empirically derived concepts but is, rather, the object of an experience that cannot be adequately conceptualized…except in this crucial respect: there is a pure, unvarnished sense of goodness that attaches to the otherwise ineffable object of experience.
Of course, the sense of goodness isn’t the whole story. There is also the sense (well-documented by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience) that the experience is of something vastly more real or “fundamental” than what we encounter in ordinary empirical experience, as if we have seen past the surface of things and are in direct touch with the source of reality. In any event, it is these features of the experience—the conformity of it to these non-empirical concepts—which justifies the appellation “God.” We have the immediate sense of our relatedness to something fundamental and good, and so the immediate sense that our ethico-religious hope is indeed fulfilled.
By contrast, were the object of experience every bit as ineffable but shrouded in an aura of malevolence, the mystic wouldn’t be justified in calling it God--because this wouldn't be an experience of encountering something whose existence fulfills the ethico-religious hope.
My own view here is that our ordinary moral sense is the immediate intellectual appropriation of the transcendent insofar as it has implications for how we engage with the empirical world, whereas numinous experience is “the immediate awareness of an existential relation” (to quote Schleiermacher) with that same transcendent. Moral sense and numinous religious experience are thus different ways of relating to the same thing. And I think that both the substance of numinous experience and its pragmatic effects in terms of character transformation support this view. While goodness isn't something we can see, hear, smell, or touch, in mystical moments we seem to do something very like this: goodness seems to become the direct object of experience in something like the way that blueness is the direct object of a visual experience of the sky.
The result of all of this is that even though God is unimaginable in the sense of being impossible to reconstruct in terms of empirically-derived concepts, moral concepts can be properly (if fallibly) attributed to God—in fact, it is these moral concepts that provide the conceptual parameters for what counts as “God” in the first place. The reason why Weil is justified in calling the object of her experience “God” is precisely because, despite being ineffable, despite defying all attempts to define it in terms of empirically-derived concepts, it is experienced as good in a profound way. Empirically-derived concepts don’t fit with the experience except in metaphoric or poetic terms…but the concept of “goodness” not only fits the experience but is enlivened by it. It’s as if numinous experience deepens our understanding of the good.
A being that is said to behave in ways radically at odds with the good is, therefore, a being that falls outside the conceptual parameters for what counts as “God.” And our conceptual grasp of the good is not to be dismissed as inapplicable to God in the way that empirical concepts are to be dismissed. Rather, we should presumptively trust our moral sense (or at least its clearest and deepest urgings) when it comes to claims about the transcendent.
As such, we should presumptively trust that if a claim about God flies in the face of the clearest and most vivid urgings of our moral sense, this claim should be rejected. In other words, moral concerns pertaining to religious doctrine cannot be dismissed by a hand-waving invocation of mystery.
It is for this reason, by the way, that I think the problem of evil poses the most substantial challenge to theism and must be wrestled with seriously by theists. While it is not impertinent to note that God may have morally good reasons for allowing evils, reasons which are inaccessible to us, I believe that more than this is called for in response to the reality of evil. Theists cannot ignore the project of attempting to account for why a good God would permit evil—what is called the project of “theodicy.”
But neither does the legitimacy of theistic belief hinge upon a fully adequate theodicy that completely explains why God permits every evil that there is. What the credibility of theism requires, I think, is that the project of theodicy offers a framework within which it makes sense to say that God is not on the side of the evil found in the world despite God’s unique relation to the world as its creative principle. My problem with the classical doctrine of hell is that it attributes something to God that my moral sense finds repugnant. Likewise, if it were maintained that God endorsed the Holocaust or regarded its occurence as ultimately a good thing, my moral sense would revolt. As such, my moral sense revolts against certain theodicies because they attribute to God horrific motivations and intentions.
There is a difference between doing that and attributing to God nothing but motivations and intentions in keeping with my deepest and most stable moral sense of good and evil, but then puzzling over why, if such a being is the fundamental reality, there is so much evil in the world of a sort that would horrify such a being. It seems to me that a crucial part of the task of theodicy is to listen to our moral sense in these things, and to reject any account of why God permits evil which makes horrors out to be anything less than horrors.
The crucial question then becomes this: Can one reasonably believe that the most fundamental reality is on the side of goodness given that there really are genuine horrors in the world, monstrous evils that would make any being on the side of goodness weep? If there is a God who is on the side of goodness, why wouldn’t He act? Why wouldn’t such a God stop these horrors? That is the anguished cry that demands an answer.
Theists cannot hide from that cry. They must, instead, honor it. The deep question is how best to do so. While some atheists will glibly say, “You honor it by abandoning belief in God,” the problem with that response is that the very same anguished voice that cries out for an explanation also cries out for redemption. And the atheist’s response takes the hope of redemption off the table.
I do not think that the human experience, taken as a whole, either forces such a move or is best made sense of in terms of a worldview in which the hope of redemption is lost. And while I think much of the answer to the anguished cry—“Why, God? Why?”—will inevitably be shrouded in mystery, the mystery does not extend to whether genocidal campaigns are really evil. They are. And so, even if it remains a mystery why God is prevented from acting, given the horrors in the world we must believe in a God that weeps.
Consider hellists—by which I mean those who think that God consigns some of the creatures He loves to an eternity of excruciating torment, torment that does them absolutely no good. While some hellists seek to offer a “theodicy” of hell—that is, an account of why such divine activity is compatible with the goodness of God—others retreat behind the cloak of divine mystery. They point out that God’s ways are not our ways, that divine goodness transcends our comprehension, and that it is therefore simply presumptuous for anyone to question the (supposedly clear) biblical teaching that God expresses his perfect goodness in part by subjecting some creatures to unremitting anguish more extreme than we can possibly fathom.
And the same strategy is, of course, available to anyone who wants to reconcile God’s goodness with their pet views, no matter how horrific: In some mysterious and inexplicable way, God’s perfect benevolence is compatible with commanding genocide, or endorsing the patriarchal subordination of women (or the social marginalization of gays and lesbians), or calling for a terrorist strike on the Twin Towers, etc.
In short, if we shroud God in total mystery, the claim the God is good becomes compatible with any motives or behaviors or commandments we might possibly attribute to God. But if that is right, what are we saying when we say God is good? If saying this about God is compatible with asserting simply anything else about God--if nothing is either implied or excluded when we say it--are we really saying anything at all?
This is an important concern, and one that becomes very real if we fail to make some crucial distinctions. While I think it is important to stress that God is, in many ways, a transcendent mystery, it should be clear to all who have read my work that I do not want to cloak the divine in such a shroud of mystery that “anything goes” in what we attribute to God.
Let me begin by clarifying what I mean when I say that the God who is the proper object of religious devotion defies the imagination. When I speak of the imagination, I mean that faculty which takes concepts and ideas derived from empirical experience—from our engagement with the physical world of matter and energy—and recombines them in ways not seen in empirical experience, producing “pictures” of possible states of affairs and entities that we have never actually encountered in experience.
Using this faculty of imagination, we can come up with sea serpents and unicorns and screaming banshees—things we have never experienced, but which are, in a sense, possible objects of experience insofar as they are made up of more basic elements which we have experienced. Any God constructed in this way would be a spatio-temporal God, a God who is a part of the physical world and a possible object of scientific study. Zeus and Odin are examples.
When I say that God defies imagination, I mean that the kind of entity I refer to with the term “God” is not something that can be depicted imaginatively in this way. More significantly, if the numinous experience which seems to be at the foundation of so much religious life cannot be adequately described in terms derived from empirical experience, it follows that the object of such experience cannot be a construct of the empirical imagination. Why? Because the empirical imagination lacks the building blocks to construct an experience of that.
In this sense, there is an enormous difference between someone who claims to have encountered a pink elephant in the kitchen or a golden dragon in the woods, and someone who claims to have encountered God in the way that mystics claims to have encountered God.
But if no God-concept constructed by the imagination will track onto the object of numinous experience, on what basis is the mystic even justified in using the term “God” to name the object of that experience? The answer comes when we admit that there are non-empirical concepts, and that the mystic’s understanding of God is primarily in terms of such concepts (even if the mystic's experience of God exceeds this understanding).
Although Hume would deny this (insofar as he insisted that all concepts are empirically derived), I am convinced that there is a difference between saying that God cannot be conceptualized at all and saying that God defies imagination. One of the points I made in the previous post, but failed to elaborate on, is that I believe in non-empirical concepts and that “goodness” is one such concept. This point, I think, is crucial for avoiding the kind of “anything goes” approach to theism that Speaker for the Dead is worried about.
As anyone who has read my book will tell you, I define God primarily in moral terms—as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope,” that is, the hope that the universe is in some ultimate or fundamental way on the side of the good. The object of Simone Weil’s experience can justifiably be called “God,” on this definition, because among other things it is experienced to be fundamental (a non-empirical concept, I think) and good (another non-empirical concept).
I want to focus my comments here on the latter: goodness. Goodness is not the object of ordinary empirical experience (no scientific instrument can measure it), but seems rather to be a concept we have from some other source and bring to bear on the objects of empirical experience—a fact which has led some to treat it as nothing more than a projection of psychological preferences (more about this in a moment). Put another way, although we recognize a good act and are prepared to call it good, goodness isn't some feature of the act that we see or smell or taste or touch (or detect through sophisticates scientific equipment). So if it's an actual property of the act, it's not an empirical one, and our concept of it isn't derived from empirical observation.
But I want to endorse the idea that “goodness” is and actual, objective property of things, even if it's not an empirical one. It is true of a certain action that it is good, even though this goodness is not reducible to any empirical fact about it.
That the latter is true is clear enough. A scientist could exhaustively study all the empirical properties associated with my son’s act of giving the entire contents of his piggy bank to the Salvation Army bell ringer outside Walmart (it was his idea to do this, by the way)—but the goodness of the act would not be included in the description.
Logical positivists, of course, conclude on the basis of this that “goodness” is nothing but a projection of our attitudes onto the field of experience. Based on their prior commitment to the view that all objective properties are empirical, they’re forced to subjectivize the wickedness of child rape and the goodness of a generous gesture. These things aren’t real features of the acts in question, but just attitudinal responses to them. The effect, in my judgment, is that logical positivists are forced to impose on moral claims a meaning that is entirely at odds with what actual people actually mean to say when they use moral language.
I can only sketch out my reasoning here, but a sketch is better than nothing, so here goes: When we say that child-rape is evil, we’re not merely expressing out attitude of disapproval. We mean to be saying something about child-rape, something that is true of it. And when we say this, our utterance is intended to imply that any who deny the wrongness of child-rape are failing to recognize something that is true of it. In short, when we call something “good” or “bad,” we mean to attribute to that something a property which (we think) it actually possesses--but a non-empirical property.
The ethical subjectivism of logical positivists does not permit us to do so. As such, this subjectivism implies that when we make claims to the effect that child-rape possesses this property of wrongness, we are attributing to child-rape a property that nothing can possess, since there are no non-empirical properties and wrongness is clearly not an empirical one. In other words, ethical subjectivists are really saying that all moral utterances are false, at least when these utterances are given the meaning that we intend them to have when we use moral language in the ordinary way.
Put more simply, ethical subjectivism is really moral nihilism in disguise. It claims to offer an account of morality (to the effect that it's nothing but a projection of our attitudes); but this account attaches to our moral utterances a meaning at odds with what we intend when we make such utterances, and denies that what we do intend to say can ever be truthfully said. Sounds like nihilism to me.
Notice that universalizing subjective dispositions does not solve this problem. If all of us happen to have the same subjective reaction to child rape, this is a collective fact about us, not a property of child rape. And so, universal horror at child rape is not the same as child rape having the property of being wrong. The latter would entail that horror is fitting, not merely a fact. What would make horror fitting is that child-rape possesses the (non-empirical) property of being morally horrible. And if it has that property, then horror is fitting whether it’s universally felt or not. And we are justified in condemning the attitudes of those who fail to feel horror.
(I should point out here in passing that one of the big problems with Dawkins’ effort to ground morality in evolutionary theory is the fact that all he can do is show how natural selection might generate a general disposition to feel horror at child-rape. Evolutionary theory cannot show why it is true that child-rape is horrible, and hence why it is true that evolution in this case has generated in us responses which fit with morality).
To avoid moral nihilism, I'm convinced we must treat goodness as a non-empirical property. In fact, I would go further (although I cannot make the case for this here) and say that we need to adopt a metaphysics according to which the good has a foundation in reality that is not reducible to any set of empirical facts. But if we do so, then our grasp of goodness cannot be somehow derived from our engagement with the empirical world, but will be something drawn from something that "transcends" the field of empirical experience (even if it may very well be part of the same reality that we encounter in empirical experience).
Put simply, our concept of the good will be drawn from a “transcendent” source--in the technical sense according to which “transcendent” refers to empirically inaccessible dimensions of reality, that is, dimensions of things-as-they-are-in-themselves that we cannot see, hear, smell, or taste, but which remain real. And if our concept of the good is to have such a source, it must be the case that we, as moral beings, are somehow in touch with this transcendent source from which the concept of goodness immediately derives, even if our connection to it is not empirical.
And so, to say that God defies imagining (to say that any construct of the empirically derived imagination will not map onto God) is not to say that our concept of the good cannot be invoked to assess claims about God. Because our concept of the good might apply to God even if no empirical concept does.
The concept to which Weil refers when she uses the term “God” is not one constructed from empirically derived concepts but is, rather, the object of an experience that cannot be adequately conceptualized…except in this crucial respect: there is a pure, unvarnished sense of goodness that attaches to the otherwise ineffable object of experience.
Of course, the sense of goodness isn’t the whole story. There is also the sense (well-documented by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience) that the experience is of something vastly more real or “fundamental” than what we encounter in ordinary empirical experience, as if we have seen past the surface of things and are in direct touch with the source of reality. In any event, it is these features of the experience—the conformity of it to these non-empirical concepts—which justifies the appellation “God.” We have the immediate sense of our relatedness to something fundamental and good, and so the immediate sense that our ethico-religious hope is indeed fulfilled.
By contrast, were the object of experience every bit as ineffable but shrouded in an aura of malevolence, the mystic wouldn’t be justified in calling it God--because this wouldn't be an experience of encountering something whose existence fulfills the ethico-religious hope.
My own view here is that our ordinary moral sense is the immediate intellectual appropriation of the transcendent insofar as it has implications for how we engage with the empirical world, whereas numinous experience is “the immediate awareness of an existential relation” (to quote Schleiermacher) with that same transcendent. Moral sense and numinous religious experience are thus different ways of relating to the same thing. And I think that both the substance of numinous experience and its pragmatic effects in terms of character transformation support this view. While goodness isn't something we can see, hear, smell, or touch, in mystical moments we seem to do something very like this: goodness seems to become the direct object of experience in something like the way that blueness is the direct object of a visual experience of the sky.
The result of all of this is that even though God is unimaginable in the sense of being impossible to reconstruct in terms of empirically-derived concepts, moral concepts can be properly (if fallibly) attributed to God—in fact, it is these moral concepts that provide the conceptual parameters for what counts as “God” in the first place. The reason why Weil is justified in calling the object of her experience “God” is precisely because, despite being ineffable, despite defying all attempts to define it in terms of empirically-derived concepts, it is experienced as good in a profound way. Empirically-derived concepts don’t fit with the experience except in metaphoric or poetic terms…but the concept of “goodness” not only fits the experience but is enlivened by it. It’s as if numinous experience deepens our understanding of the good.
A being that is said to behave in ways radically at odds with the good is, therefore, a being that falls outside the conceptual parameters for what counts as “God.” And our conceptual grasp of the good is not to be dismissed as inapplicable to God in the way that empirical concepts are to be dismissed. Rather, we should presumptively trust our moral sense (or at least its clearest and deepest urgings) when it comes to claims about the transcendent.
As such, we should presumptively trust that if a claim about God flies in the face of the clearest and most vivid urgings of our moral sense, this claim should be rejected. In other words, moral concerns pertaining to religious doctrine cannot be dismissed by a hand-waving invocation of mystery.
It is for this reason, by the way, that I think the problem of evil poses the most substantial challenge to theism and must be wrestled with seriously by theists. While it is not impertinent to note that God may have morally good reasons for allowing evils, reasons which are inaccessible to us, I believe that more than this is called for in response to the reality of evil. Theists cannot ignore the project of attempting to account for why a good God would permit evil—what is called the project of “theodicy.”
But neither does the legitimacy of theistic belief hinge upon a fully adequate theodicy that completely explains why God permits every evil that there is. What the credibility of theism requires, I think, is that the project of theodicy offers a framework within which it makes sense to say that God is not on the side of the evil found in the world despite God’s unique relation to the world as its creative principle. My problem with the classical doctrine of hell is that it attributes something to God that my moral sense finds repugnant. Likewise, if it were maintained that God endorsed the Holocaust or regarded its occurence as ultimately a good thing, my moral sense would revolt. As such, my moral sense revolts against certain theodicies because they attribute to God horrific motivations and intentions.
There is a difference between doing that and attributing to God nothing but motivations and intentions in keeping with my deepest and most stable moral sense of good and evil, but then puzzling over why, if such a being is the fundamental reality, there is so much evil in the world of a sort that would horrify such a being. It seems to me that a crucial part of the task of theodicy is to listen to our moral sense in these things, and to reject any account of why God permits evil which makes horrors out to be anything less than horrors.
The crucial question then becomes this: Can one reasonably believe that the most fundamental reality is on the side of goodness given that there really are genuine horrors in the world, monstrous evils that would make any being on the side of goodness weep? If there is a God who is on the side of goodness, why wouldn’t He act? Why wouldn’t such a God stop these horrors? That is the anguished cry that demands an answer.
Theists cannot hide from that cry. They must, instead, honor it. The deep question is how best to do so. While some atheists will glibly say, “You honor it by abandoning belief in God,” the problem with that response is that the very same anguished voice that cries out for an explanation also cries out for redemption. And the atheist’s response takes the hope of redemption off the table.
I do not think that the human experience, taken as a whole, either forces such a move or is best made sense of in terms of a worldview in which the hope of redemption is lost. And while I think much of the answer to the anguished cry—“Why, God? Why?”—will inevitably be shrouded in mystery, the mystery does not extend to whether genocidal campaigns are really evil. They are. And so, even if it remains a mystery why God is prevented from acting, given the horrors in the world we must believe in a God that weeps.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Reflections on the Argument from Design
A number of readers of my book have asked me why I’m as dismissive of the argument from design as I seem to be. My best friend is among them. He finds considerable power in several formulations of the argument, including Indian versions which, based on his descriptions of them, I think I probably need to study.
I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.
Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”
But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.
To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.
Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.
For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”
The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.
This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.
But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).
My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.
This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.
I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?
I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.
I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.
In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.
Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.
And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.
I am open to being convinced. But there are several reasons why I’m hesitant to give the argument from design too much evidentiary weight in my thinking about theism. First of all, in many if not most of it formulations, the argument’s soundness depends on the scientific facts. Since I am not a scientist, I don’t feel sufficiently qualified to weigh in on the scientific disagreements over which these versions of the argument turn.
Secondly, “God” names something transcendent, that is, a being that exists beyond the empirical world that science studies. As I’ve said before, science simply cannot discern whether there is more to reality than science can discern. Now many defenders of the argument from design in effect deny this, at least in one sense. They proclaim that there are empirical facts about the physical world, facts which have been or can be uncovered and described by science, that are like sign posts pointing to some cause beyond the physical world. Their view is that science can discern that there must be something more to reality than what science studies, even if it can’t actually study this “something more.”
But what this thinking ignores, on my view, is how the scientific method works. Science is methodologically naturalistic. That is, it confronts every empirical phenomenon by looking for a naturalistic explanation of it. This means that scientists, in their role as scientists, will always treat phenomena that haven’t been explained in naturalistic terms, not as signposts pointing towards the supernatural, but as research projects. The majority of scientists will therefore view those who explain these phenomena by appealing to the transcendent as jumping ship from the scientific project.
To propose supernatural explanations before science has finished pursuing naturalistic ones strikes many scientists as not giving science a chance to do its work. And since science can in principle always keep looking for naturalistic explanations, there never comes a point at which it becomes appropriate to say that “science has shown” that a supernatural explanation is best. Instead, from a scientific standpoint the only conclusion to reach is that science hasn’t explained this phenomenon…yet.
Now I don't think that any of this means one can’t or shouldn’t embrace supernatural explanations. What it means is that when you do so, you’re no longer pursuing the scientific project.
For those who doubt the ability of scientists to explain the newest mystery in naturalistic terms, scientists can point to past mysteries, once invoked as reasons to believe in God but since explained in naturalistic terms. They might say, “Give us time. We’ll eventually pull the rug out from under you again.”
The result is an image of theologians in constant retreat, staking their claim on a shrinking island of mysteries and defending the mysteries that remain against the forces of scientific progress. Their God becomes the “God of the gaps” that theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warned against—the God that we introduce as a quasi-scientific hypothesis to explain the mysteries that the ordinary work of science has so far failed to solve. And as the “gaps” get smaller, it begins to seem to many observers as if scientists are explaining God out of existence.
This image is not wholly unwarranted if one's case for God's existence depends on the existence of such mysteries. And if, furthermore, your religious faith hinges upon some phenomenon remaining inexplicable in scientific terms, you will fight tooth and nail to keep the phenomenon scientifically inexplicable. In other words, you will fight against the efforts of scientists to do what scientists do. You will thus become an enemy of science. And in your efforts to keep science from de-mystifying the ground on which you make your religious stand, you may be led to intellectual dishonesty, or towards bizarre maneuvers to explain away the empirical facts, or even (in the last gasps of resistance) to rejecting the scientific enterprise altogether. When the case for theism is made on this turf, science and religion become enemies in a way that benefits neither.
But the “God of the gaps” defended in this particular turf war is not the God in which I believe. My God is not first and foremost an “empirical phenomenon-explainer” (certainly not in anything like the sense in which the theoretic entities invoked in science are “empirical-phenomenon explainers”).
My God is invoked to explain my religious experience. But when I invoke God in these terms, it's as an alternative to something else I might do with my religious experience—namely, explain it away. By “religious experience,” I mean an essentially non-empirical experience, a deep sense that there is something fundamental lurking behind the ordinary appearances of things, something that is truer than the mechanistic and chance-governed universe uncovered by science, something that transcends my conceptual grasp but feels enormous and inexpressibly good. To borrow Rudolf Otto’s term, it is the feeling of the numinous.
This is a feeling that comes at me from a variety of directions—sometimes all by itself, and sometimes in conjunction with other powerful experiences. I’m talking about those occasions of wonder when I witness love or beauty or tenderness and think, “This is good.” And this sense of goodness transcends the empirical facts in front of me, seeming to reach into a deeper well of reality than what my eyes can see. I can’t reduce this sense of goodness to any empirical property of the world, at least not without, in the same gesture, stripping it of its significance.
I could, of course, appeal to the side-effects of evolutionary forces on the development of the human brain to explain this experience away, rather than invoke some transcendent good in order to explain it. Why do the latter rather than the former?
I do it out of hope. I do it because it confers a special meaning on the world encountered in experience, the world that science seeks to describe. I do it because it also helps make sense of certain other non-empirical experiences without explaining them away (such as my intimate experience of myself as a conscious agent, and my experience of beauty, and my sense of the intrinsic value of persons as persons). I do it because the complex world of living things, which could be nothing but the product of chance and natural selection, thereby acquires a deeper significance: it becomes something intended by love.
I don’t choose this interpretation because the science demands it, but because my moral nature seems to demand it of me. This moral voice inside me calls me to live in hope: the hope that the universe on some fundamental level is not “pitilessly indifferent to the good” as Dawkins maintains; the hope that the universe is better than it would be if the objects of scientific study exhausted what was real. When I encounter rival worldviews which all meet a basic standard of rationality—internally coherent as well as consistent with the entire field of human experience, including the facts discerned by science—my moral voice urges me to favor that worldview which invests greater moral meaning into those same experiences and facts.
In short, my God is not ultimately an “empirical phenomenon explainer” but, rather, a “hope-fulfiller” and a “meaning-bestower.” Belief in this God does involve reading design into an empirical world which allows for such a reading even if it does not demand it. But belief in this God does not in any way hinge upon the existence of empirical phenomena that simply cannot be explained in naturalistic terms.
Belief in a transcendent benevolence, something that would fulfill our hope that the universe is on the side of goodness, does not depend upon science being finally and permanently “stumped” in its efforts to provide naturalistic explanations. Theistic religion in this sense therefore doesn’t see scientific progress as a threat. Because it’s not.
And while I think there are ways to formulate and develop the argument from design which don’t put such reasoning on a collision course with scientific progress, the history of this argument, in terms of its tendency to foment conflict along these lines, makes me wary of it.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Atheism on the Bus
About a decade ago, while I was living in the Puget Sound area, I entered the “Poetry on the Buses” competition—an annual event in which poets and would-be poets compete to have their poems posted in and on Seattle buses. My poem, “Lilac Festival,” was among the winners, and so for a time it could be read by commuters on their way home from work. The poem, which I’m still rather pleased with, was an attempt to capture my memories of the Rochester lilac festival, which I attended every spring as an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester. It runs as follows:
In spring, at a carnival of lilacs and balloons,
of purple-peppered hills and pollens
that glisten on the tail of the bumblebee,
a sun-blond boy with ice cream lips watches
lovers who walk with steps that make the widows nod,
and girls in college jerseys
who flash their smiles in passing, over their shoulders
like petals tossed by children playing love-me-not.
The Poetry on the Buses project has always struck me as a great alternative to using bus walls—a kind of public space—for paid advertising. As a commuter, I’d much rather read a contest-wining poem than a soda slogan. Or worse, a religious ad.
Living where I now live, I don’t get much of a chance to see bus advertising (the bus system in Stillwater is run by the university and is advertisement-free), but I do see billboard ads often enough—and with some frequency the billboard space has been leased by one religious organization or another. One popular campaign (which apparently also does run on the sides of buses) features an all-black billboard with white lettering, the message signed by “God.”
The presumptuousness of this is only matched by the banality of the messages themselves—things such as “Have you read my #1 bestseller? There will be a test,” and “Think it’s hot here?” and “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game.” I can only imagine what God thinks of a bunch of religious slogan writers more influenced by Madison Avenue than by any deep sense of the divine, attributing their pithy messages to the infinite and transcendent mystery that lies at the heart of reality.
Now atheists are in on the game. And rather than taking their cue from the Poetry on the Buses project, they are firmly aligned with the Madison Avenue approach: Come up with a pithy message that simply can’t do justice to the deep philosophical issues to which it gestures, and then slap it on a billboard or a bus. But at least they aren’t attributing the products of their merely human sloganeering to the divine. I suppose that’s an improvement.
Thanks to a good family friend, I have a New York Times clipping about the atheist bus campaign in front of me, featuring a picture of a London double-decker bus with the world’s best-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, posed in front of it—trying (it seems) to look dapper. The atheist message on the bus reads as follows: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
The picture and the message were the first things I saw as I unfolded the clipping. And this fact gave me an opportunity to really experience first-hand the importance of context. Before reading the article itself, before coming to see the slogan in terms of the context out of which its creators were writing, I responded to it in terms of my own context.
My context is a progressive religious one. I live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, rather than being “pitilessly indifferent” to it as Dawkins maintains. And I see, in my inner spiritual experience, evidence that this hope is not in vain despite all the horrors in the world.
What does the atheist slogan on this bus mean to someone like me? As I read it, I find it jarring. Not because it’s offensive, but because the first sentence is so incongruent with the second. Given what I mean by “God,” I wouldn’t follow up the first sentence with “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I’d follow it up, instead, with something like the following: “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”
Not that this would fit on the side of a bus.
But, of course, for me “God” refers to that reality which, if it existed, would fulfill what I call in my book “the ethico-religious hope”—that is, the hope that the universe in some fundamental way is on the side of the good, so that when we live out lives lovingly we are actually becoming attuned to the deepest reality of all.
Perhaps the most important exponent of this hope in American history was Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated it in terms of his conviction that “the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.”
In fact, King believed that embracing this hope was essential for practitioners of nonviolence. “I am quite aware,” he said in a 1957 speech, “that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God….And this was one of the things that kept people together (during the Montgomery bus boycott), the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.”
And so, when I read the atheist slogan on the side of the bus, here is what I read: “The universe probably isn’t on the side of justice. It’s just as pitilessly indifferent to the good as Dawkins claims in his book, River Out of Eden. When evil shatters human lives in Rwanda, leaving people utterly broken until death, there will never be for them any redemption. It will be permanently true that it would have been better had they never been born. And in the world in which we live, such life-shattering events can happen to anyone, including you. And if they do happen to you, don’t look to the transcendent for hope, because there is none to be had. Your life will be decisively stripped of meaning. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”
This absurd juxtaposition of messages might usefully be contrasted with one offered by philosopher Walter Stace, who before becoming interested in mystical experience was very much an atheist in Dawkins’ mold, but with an important difference. In his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness,” Stace discusses what he thinks is the demise of religion in the face of science, but he doesn’t present his atheist picture of the world as a reason to “stop worrying and enjoy life.” Instead, he presents it as a grim truth that we need to confront. It is, in effect, one of the painful discoveries of growing up as a human species.
In Stace’s view of things, the universe doesn’t care about us. Those of us who die in despair and hopelessness will have lived lives without meaning, and no cosmic redemption can be hoped for. The truth as Stace sees it this: There is no God. Now brace yourself and try to make the best of things.
But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a very good marketing campaign on the sides of buses. Too grim. If there’s anything Madison Avenue teaches, its this: you don’t sell a product by claiming that life will be more miserable with it than without it.
But here is where differences in context become relevant. According to the New York times article, “the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign” were sewn by a comedy writer named Ariane Sherine. Sherine saw a religious ad on a bus and, when she went to the associated web site, was informed in the materials there that she and her friends were doomed to an afterlife of eternal torment because they didn’t have the right beliefs about God.
When God is portrayed as a fierce tyrant in the sky who roasts those who don’t believe the right sorts of things, atheism can seem refreshing. It becomes a liberation of sorts. In fact, this point was made beautifully long ago by the Greek scholar Plutarch.
Plutarch argued, in an essay called “On Superstition,” that there’s a fundamental difference between belief in tyrannical gods that place harsh demands on human beings on pain of retribution, and belief in a transcendent benevolence that wishes us only good. He calls the former superstition, and reserves the term “religion” for the latter. And he thinks that atheism is far preferable to superstition. Better to think there are no gods at all than to live your life in terror that the gods will smite you unless you scurry to obey their every whim. The superstitious person sees every misfortune as an act of the gods, and is always looking for someone to blame: Who is it that failed to obey with sufficient alacrity? Is it the gays, the feminists, the ACLU—all those whom Jerry Falwell blamed for the 9/11 attacks?
Far better to be an atheist than to live in cowering submission, convinced that we’re all the slaves of some irresistible supernatural tyrant. This is probably at least part of what the mystic philosopher Simone Weil had in mind when she referred to atheism as “a purification.”
But Weil was not an atheist. For her, atheism served the import role of wiping away the gods of the imagination, the deities we invent out of fear and ignorance. She believed that in order to really experience God—the divine presence that appeared to her while she was in the grip of debilitating migraine headaches, and seemed to her “a presence, like the smile on a beloved face”—in order to experience this we needed to clear our minds, to make a space within our consciousness, a place of quiet waiting into which grace might then flood in. But our imagination is always filling up these spaces with deities of our own invention, leaving no room at all for God.
And for Plutarch, the deadliest and most sinister god of the imagination is the supernatural tyrant, the growling monarch who commands us to obey or pay the price. This is a god we must flee, for the sake of our very sanity. But fleeing this god of superstition does not require us to reject all transcendent hopes, to dismiss every mystical report, to scoff at Martin Luther King’s hope that the universe bends towards justice or at Simone Weil’s encounter with a tender presence on the far side of anguish.
And so Plutarch concludes his essay by noting how atheists, in fleeing superstition, end up “leaping right over piety, which lies between.” This message (which, by the way, gives this blog its name) still has resonance so many centuries later. The god that Ariane Sherine is rejecting ought to be rejected. It is the god of superstition. But it doesn’t follow that we ought likewise to reject the God of Martin Luther King.
Walter Stace was, in my judgment, wrong to think that science has decisively refuted the existence of such a God. While nothing in our experience proves that the God of religion exists, there are deep and potent intimations of such a God in the most profound of mystical experiences. And, as I argue in my book, there are philosophical reasons to believe in deeper orders of reality than we encounter in ordinary sense experience—reasons that mean we don’t need to dismiss profound religious experiences as mere delusion.
We are free, instead, to make a different choice: to live in hope, to live as if the reports of the mystics are true, to embrace a worldview in which the deepest of all human longings is satisfied: the longing that the universe, in some fundamental way, cares about the good.
If we do, then perhaps we really can stop worrying and enjoy our lives.
In spring, at a carnival of lilacs and balloons,
of purple-peppered hills and pollens
that glisten on the tail of the bumblebee,
a sun-blond boy with ice cream lips watches
lovers who walk with steps that make the widows nod,
and girls in college jerseys
who flash their smiles in passing, over their shoulders
like petals tossed by children playing love-me-not.
The Poetry on the Buses project has always struck me as a great alternative to using bus walls—a kind of public space—for paid advertising. As a commuter, I’d much rather read a contest-wining poem than a soda slogan. Or worse, a religious ad.
Living where I now live, I don’t get much of a chance to see bus advertising (the bus system in Stillwater is run by the university and is advertisement-free), but I do see billboard ads often enough—and with some frequency the billboard space has been leased by one religious organization or another. One popular campaign (which apparently also does run on the sides of buses) features an all-black billboard with white lettering, the message signed by “God.”
The presumptuousness of this is only matched by the banality of the messages themselves—things such as “Have you read my #1 bestseller? There will be a test,” and “Think it’s hot here?” and “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game.” I can only imagine what God thinks of a bunch of religious slogan writers more influenced by Madison Avenue than by any deep sense of the divine, attributing their pithy messages to the infinite and transcendent mystery that lies at the heart of reality.
Now atheists are in on the game. And rather than taking their cue from the Poetry on the Buses project, they are firmly aligned with the Madison Avenue approach: Come up with a pithy message that simply can’t do justice to the deep philosophical issues to which it gestures, and then slap it on a billboard or a bus. But at least they aren’t attributing the products of their merely human sloganeering to the divine. I suppose that’s an improvement.
Thanks to a good family friend, I have a New York Times clipping about the atheist bus campaign in front of me, featuring a picture of a London double-decker bus with the world’s best-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, posed in front of it—trying (it seems) to look dapper. The atheist message on the bus reads as follows: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
The picture and the message were the first things I saw as I unfolded the clipping. And this fact gave me an opportunity to really experience first-hand the importance of context. Before reading the article itself, before coming to see the slogan in terms of the context out of which its creators were writing, I responded to it in terms of my own context.
My context is a progressive religious one. I live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, rather than being “pitilessly indifferent” to it as Dawkins maintains. And I see, in my inner spiritual experience, evidence that this hope is not in vain despite all the horrors in the world.
What does the atheist slogan on this bus mean to someone like me? As I read it, I find it jarring. Not because it’s offensive, but because the first sentence is so incongruent with the second. Given what I mean by “God,” I wouldn’t follow up the first sentence with “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I’d follow it up, instead, with something like the following: “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”
Not that this would fit on the side of a bus.
But, of course, for me “God” refers to that reality which, if it existed, would fulfill what I call in my book “the ethico-religious hope”—that is, the hope that the universe in some fundamental way is on the side of the good, so that when we live out lives lovingly we are actually becoming attuned to the deepest reality of all.
Perhaps the most important exponent of this hope in American history was Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated it in terms of his conviction that “the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.”
In fact, King believed that embracing this hope was essential for practitioners of nonviolence. “I am quite aware,” he said in a 1957 speech, “that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God….And this was one of the things that kept people together (during the Montgomery bus boycott), the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.”
And so, when I read the atheist slogan on the side of the bus, here is what I read: “The universe probably isn’t on the side of justice. It’s just as pitilessly indifferent to the good as Dawkins claims in his book, River Out of Eden. When evil shatters human lives in Rwanda, leaving people utterly broken until death, there will never be for them any redemption. It will be permanently true that it would have been better had they never been born. And in the world in which we live, such life-shattering events can happen to anyone, including you. And if they do happen to you, don’t look to the transcendent for hope, because there is none to be had. Your life will be decisively stripped of meaning. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”
This absurd juxtaposition of messages might usefully be contrasted with one offered by philosopher Walter Stace, who before becoming interested in mystical experience was very much an atheist in Dawkins’ mold, but with an important difference. In his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness,” Stace discusses what he thinks is the demise of religion in the face of science, but he doesn’t present his atheist picture of the world as a reason to “stop worrying and enjoy life.” Instead, he presents it as a grim truth that we need to confront. It is, in effect, one of the painful discoveries of growing up as a human species.
In Stace’s view of things, the universe doesn’t care about us. Those of us who die in despair and hopelessness will have lived lives without meaning, and no cosmic redemption can be hoped for. The truth as Stace sees it this: There is no God. Now brace yourself and try to make the best of things.
But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a very good marketing campaign on the sides of buses. Too grim. If there’s anything Madison Avenue teaches, its this: you don’t sell a product by claiming that life will be more miserable with it than without it.
But here is where differences in context become relevant. According to the New York times article, “the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign” were sewn by a comedy writer named Ariane Sherine. Sherine saw a religious ad on a bus and, when she went to the associated web site, was informed in the materials there that she and her friends were doomed to an afterlife of eternal torment because they didn’t have the right beliefs about God.
When God is portrayed as a fierce tyrant in the sky who roasts those who don’t believe the right sorts of things, atheism can seem refreshing. It becomes a liberation of sorts. In fact, this point was made beautifully long ago by the Greek scholar Plutarch.
Plutarch argued, in an essay called “On Superstition,” that there’s a fundamental difference between belief in tyrannical gods that place harsh demands on human beings on pain of retribution, and belief in a transcendent benevolence that wishes us only good. He calls the former superstition, and reserves the term “religion” for the latter. And he thinks that atheism is far preferable to superstition. Better to think there are no gods at all than to live your life in terror that the gods will smite you unless you scurry to obey their every whim. The superstitious person sees every misfortune as an act of the gods, and is always looking for someone to blame: Who is it that failed to obey with sufficient alacrity? Is it the gays, the feminists, the ACLU—all those whom Jerry Falwell blamed for the 9/11 attacks?
Far better to be an atheist than to live in cowering submission, convinced that we’re all the slaves of some irresistible supernatural tyrant. This is probably at least part of what the mystic philosopher Simone Weil had in mind when she referred to atheism as “a purification.”
But Weil was not an atheist. For her, atheism served the import role of wiping away the gods of the imagination, the deities we invent out of fear and ignorance. She believed that in order to really experience God—the divine presence that appeared to her while she was in the grip of debilitating migraine headaches, and seemed to her “a presence, like the smile on a beloved face”—in order to experience this we needed to clear our minds, to make a space within our consciousness, a place of quiet waiting into which grace might then flood in. But our imagination is always filling up these spaces with deities of our own invention, leaving no room at all for God.
And for Plutarch, the deadliest and most sinister god of the imagination is the supernatural tyrant, the growling monarch who commands us to obey or pay the price. This is a god we must flee, for the sake of our very sanity. But fleeing this god of superstition does not require us to reject all transcendent hopes, to dismiss every mystical report, to scoff at Martin Luther King’s hope that the universe bends towards justice or at Simone Weil’s encounter with a tender presence on the far side of anguish.
And so Plutarch concludes his essay by noting how atheists, in fleeing superstition, end up “leaping right over piety, which lies between.” This message (which, by the way, gives this blog its name) still has resonance so many centuries later. The god that Ariane Sherine is rejecting ought to be rejected. It is the god of superstition. But it doesn’t follow that we ought likewise to reject the God of Martin Luther King.
Walter Stace was, in my judgment, wrong to think that science has decisively refuted the existence of such a God. While nothing in our experience proves that the God of religion exists, there are deep and potent intimations of such a God in the most profound of mystical experiences. And, as I argue in my book, there are philosophical reasons to believe in deeper orders of reality than we encounter in ordinary sense experience—reasons that mean we don’t need to dismiss profound religious experiences as mere delusion.
We are free, instead, to make a different choice: to live in hope, to live as if the reports of the mystics are true, to embrace a worldview in which the deepest of all human longings is satisfied: the longing that the universe, in some fundamental way, cares about the good.
If we do, then perhaps we really can stop worrying and enjoy our lives.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
An Uncharitable Review
I won’t make a habit of this, but I’ve decided to comment on an uncharitable review of Is God a Delusion? that appeared recently on Amazon. I do so in case other readers have misunderstood my arguments in the same ways that this “Hande Z” has.
For ease of reference, I will refer to the reviewer as HZ. Let me walk through HZ’s main points one by one. HZ writes:
Reitan begins with an attack against people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, calling them "New Atheists" without explaining why the adjective "new" was necessary and what he meant. Would he be a "New Apologist" then?
This is a minor point, but still deserves some reflection. Writing the kind of book I did, I needed a phrase to refer collectively to the authors of the atheist bestsellers I was addressing. Early on I borrowed Schleiermacher’s language and referred to them as “today’s cultured despisers of religion.” This proved to be an extremely clumsy phrase for repeated use. And so I chose “new atheists” for its brevity as well as for reasons mentioned on pp. 3-4 of the introduction.
It turns out I was hardly unique in finding this appellation appropriate. In fact, it’s become the common name for the species of atheism exemplified by Hitchens and Dawkins. Their kind of atheism is characterized by several features. First, it isn’t merely disdainful of religion, but hostile to it. Second, it’s not quietly hostile. In fact, Dawkins calls for atheists to “come out of the closet” and profess their atheism to the world, to express a kind of “atheist pride.” But the pride he advocates is not the sort that can comfortably coexist with respect for religious belief, because it involves taking pride in having avoided the supposed foolishness of religion. And this fact highlights the third distinctive feature of this species of atheism: it’s not just about disbelief in the supernatural. It asserts that to be religious is to exhibit a shortcoming in one’s intellect or moral character (or both). The view seems to be that, on this issue, reasonable people cannot disagree, because to disagree with atheism is unreasonable.
Is such atheism new? Not entirely. Bertrand Russell, for example, seemed to have been an atheist of this sort (at least in his more bellicose moments). But the prevalence of this species of “out” atheist hostility to religion appears to be on the rise in recent years. And so, to speak of the representatives of this brand of atheism as the “new” atheists seems apt.
Let’s move on to some of HZ’s more substantive criticisms. HZ writes:
He tried to garner support and sympathy by flattering people of all religions, but tripped up when he concluded his Introduction with this comment: "We must find ways, not to stamp out religion, but to let true religion loose upon the world." (Reitan's emphasis) Which was that true religion he had in mind? His own belief seems clearly to be Christian (but which model?); and that being so, was he then really empathetic to Sikhism, Islam, and all the other religions he fawned over? At page 61 he distinguishes "the god Hypothesis" from "the God Hypothesis". Who was his "God"? We won't find the answer in this book.
Here, HZ pounces on my use of the phrase “true religion,” but ignores the context which gives it meaning. In fact, two pages prior to the passage HZ quotes, I explicitly state what I mean by “true religion." It is religion that is “born out of a combination of rational insight, profound experiences of a distinctive kind, and morally laudable hope” and is then “refined and shaped by careful and humble reflection in open-minded discourse with others” (p. 9).
Throughout the book I develop these elements into an account of the parameters within which religion can be both intellectually respectable and morally benign, and I also discuss the corrupting forces that can push religion outside of these parameters. Any religion—Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu—that stays true to these parameters counts as “true religion” in my sense. Religion that loses touch with them is not.
And one way to lose touch with them is to lose touch with what Schleiermacher calls the “beautiful modesty” and “friendly, attractive forbearance” that naturally accompanies experience of the transcendent. Religion rooted in such experience cannot help but recognize that the subject matter of religion defies finite human efforts to describe it. This is why Schleiermacher insists that anyone whose religion is rooted in such experience “must be conscious that his religion is only part of the whole; that about the same circumstances there may be views and sentiments quite different from his, yet just as pious.”
In short, far from belying my propensity for religious inclusivism, my reference to letting true religion “loose upon the world” is an expression of that inclusivism. By “true religion,” I mean religion that (among other things) views other religious traditions as having something of value to say about the mysteries of the transcendent. Such inclusivism is not uncritical, but the criteria by which religions are judged are not those of doctrinal orthodoxy or allegiance to a single tradition or holy text, etc.
As for the reviewer’s mention of my distinction between “the god of superstition” and “the God of religion,” it is astonishing when he says that “we won’t find any answers in this book”—since developing and discussing the significance of this distinction is one of the book's chief aims.
In briefest terms, my point (piggy-backing on Plutarch) is this: There is a profound difference between believing in a supernatural tyrant who needs to be appeased on pain of harsh retribution, and living in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness. Religions that affirm the supernatural tyrant are what Plutarch called superstition. And belief in this god of superstition inspires the same kind of frenzied efforts at appeasement that an abusive spouse so often inspires, producing a supernatural variant of battered wife syndrome. Such belief is harmful—and atheism in the face of such a god is like a healthy divorce with a lifetime restraining order attached.
But it doesn’t follow that it is likewise harmful to live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, that when we act with moral integrity we are aligning ourselves with the most basic truth about reality. I call this “the ethico-religious hope,” and I define the God of religion as that which, if it existed, would fulfill this hope. Such a definition is what I call “functional,” in that it doesn’t specify God in terms of a list of properties (although it implies benevolence) but rather in terms of the role that God serves in the psychological economy of the devout theist—that is, the theist who loves and trusts God. Tyrants inspire neither love nor trust, but only fear and servile obedience.
HZ is unhappy with this kind of functional definition, perceiving it as my attempt to define God so vaguely that the theist can “evade, hide, and shift his ground every time he gets cornered.” HZ wants me to offer what, in my book, I call a “substantive definition” of God—that is, a definition in terms of a list of precise properties.
This is an issue I have discussed in other posts, and so I won’t beat a dead horse here. Suffice it to say that early scientists wouldn’t have gotten very far if they hadn’t left room for non-substantive definitions. Image a Copernican-era scientist who insisted that “star” be defined in terms of the old substantive conception of it as a “pinhole in the firmament,” who then concluded on the basis of the evidence that stars do not exist, and finally accused those who defined “star” by pointing upward, and who offered new conceptualizations in light of new evidence, as being guilty of “evading, hiding, and shifting the ground every time they get cornered.”
HZ writes:
Can he justify his claim that the "cause of the trouble is a fundamentalist insistence that one ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader (is perfectly) articulating the very will of God?" (The reviewer leaves out of the quote what I have re-inserted in parentheses for the sake of clarity). Isn't this a circular argument? Who is a fundamentalist? It seems that he would be someone who disagrees with Reitan.
In the passage quoted (found on p. 71), I am discussing ways in which belief in God’s goodness can be stripped of meaning. One issue I focus on is the idea that you “ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader” perfectly represents God’s will. For ease of reference I call this way of thinking “fundamentalist,” and I argue that it strips all meaning from the claim that God is good, leaving us with a supernatural being whose will must be followed, but who isn’t good in any meaningful sense. In short: a supernatural tyrant. Fundamentalism in the indicated sense leads to belief in the god of superstition. There is no circularity here, and the meaning of “fundamentalist” is far more substantive than just “anyone who disagrees with me.”
HZ writes:
Reitan called Dawkins a philosophical novice because (or so Reitan believed) he did not understand Aquinas. Reitan and Aquinas believed in God (and since Aquinas was Christian, Reitan's belief must be Christian) because everything in the universe must have a cause except the first cause. They realise d that if they don't put a stop to this then they are stuck in an infinite regress - turtles all the way down. So why is this first cause so personal that he needs and wants to be worshipped? Why not just a bang from a bag of gas? Reitan would believe that a bag of gas must have a first cause. So, can he explain why a bag of gas can't be the first cause that he believed must exist; a cause that had no cause? How does he differentiate his idea of the first cause (his "god") from a bag of gas?
I set aside the invalid argument that since Aquinas and I both believe in God, and Aquinas was a Christian, I must be Christian too. I’ll simply refer HZ on this matter to any introductory logic book. What I want to point out is that HZ is simply repeating the very interpretive errors that Dawkins falls into, and which I discuss in Chapter 5.
Let me put this as simply as I can. It is one thing to argue that everything must have a cause, notice that this leads to an infinite regress, and then try to escape the regress by arbitrarily positing a first cause which, in defiance of the first premise, doesn’t need a cause after all. It is something else entirely to argue that everything which possesses some property P (e.g., the property of coming into existence) requires a cause, notice that if everything possessed property P there would be an infinite regress, and therefore conclude that to avoid such a regress we must suppose there exists something which lacks property P. Aquinas argues along the latter lines, not the former. And, arguing along these lines, Aquinas concludes that there must exist some fundamental reality that never came to be (that is, exists eternally), that does not change but is capable of bringing about change in other things, and that exists necessarily. If HZ wants to make the case that a bag of gas could be eternal, unchanging, and necessarily existent, I’d be very interested to see the argument. However, it would have to be a bag of gas radically unlike anything in the empirical world—including bags of gas.
HZ goes on:
(I)n defending theodicy, he placed the blame(as most theists do) on man (the victim) and not god, the presumed almighty and all good. It is man's free will, he stated, when referring to the evil caused by man. What of the evil caused in natural disasters like Hurricane Katarina? Such evil if caused by god, would be redeemed by god. How? And how does Reitan know that? Perhaps we were not mean to question him on this either.
In the chapter that HZ references here, I provide an overview of a number of different ways in which theists have attempted to respond to the problem of evil. I seek to identify both the merits and the weaknesses of these responses. For example, on p. 192 I critique the appeal to free will by noting that “not all evils result from wicked choices. Some of the worst suffering is brought on by disease, famine, and natural disaster…(and) it isn’t reasonable to trace all the harms from natural evils back to human negligence.” I likewise critically discuss the so-called “soul-making theodicy,” noting among other things that it does not take into proper account the suffering in the non-human world. My aim in this chapter is not to resolve the problem of evil. Rather, my aim is to argue that even if the problem hasn’t been resolved, it doesn’t constitute such a decisive case against theism that it becomes unreasonable for someone to live in the hope that the evils of the world will be redeemed by a transcendent good.
And, just for the sake of clarity, living in the hope that evil will be redeemed is not the same as knowing that it will. I do not know that it will. No one does. Anyone who claims to know this is lying—probably first and foremost to themselves. Likewise for anyone who claims to know that evil will not be redeemed.
Last but not least, HZ writes:
I would not say don't read this book, but I would say read it but also read the counter-arguments (Amazon has a list of books on atheism); in both cases, read all the arguments critically.
Finally, something we can agree on.
For ease of reference, I will refer to the reviewer as HZ. Let me walk through HZ’s main points one by one. HZ writes:
Reitan begins with an attack against people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, calling them "New Atheists" without explaining why the adjective "new" was necessary and what he meant. Would he be a "New Apologist" then?
This is a minor point, but still deserves some reflection. Writing the kind of book I did, I needed a phrase to refer collectively to the authors of the atheist bestsellers I was addressing. Early on I borrowed Schleiermacher’s language and referred to them as “today’s cultured despisers of religion.” This proved to be an extremely clumsy phrase for repeated use. And so I chose “new atheists” for its brevity as well as for reasons mentioned on pp. 3-4 of the introduction.
It turns out I was hardly unique in finding this appellation appropriate. In fact, it’s become the common name for the species of atheism exemplified by Hitchens and Dawkins. Their kind of atheism is characterized by several features. First, it isn’t merely disdainful of religion, but hostile to it. Second, it’s not quietly hostile. In fact, Dawkins calls for atheists to “come out of the closet” and profess their atheism to the world, to express a kind of “atheist pride.” But the pride he advocates is not the sort that can comfortably coexist with respect for religious belief, because it involves taking pride in having avoided the supposed foolishness of religion. And this fact highlights the third distinctive feature of this species of atheism: it’s not just about disbelief in the supernatural. It asserts that to be religious is to exhibit a shortcoming in one’s intellect or moral character (or both). The view seems to be that, on this issue, reasonable people cannot disagree, because to disagree with atheism is unreasonable.
Is such atheism new? Not entirely. Bertrand Russell, for example, seemed to have been an atheist of this sort (at least in his more bellicose moments). But the prevalence of this species of “out” atheist hostility to religion appears to be on the rise in recent years. And so, to speak of the representatives of this brand of atheism as the “new” atheists seems apt.
Let’s move on to some of HZ’s more substantive criticisms. HZ writes:
He tried to garner support and sympathy by flattering people of all religions, but tripped up when he concluded his Introduction with this comment: "We must find ways, not to stamp out religion, but to let true religion loose upon the world." (Reitan's emphasis) Which was that true religion he had in mind? His own belief seems clearly to be Christian (but which model?); and that being so, was he then really empathetic to Sikhism, Islam, and all the other religions he fawned over? At page 61 he distinguishes "the god Hypothesis" from "the God Hypothesis". Who was his "God"? We won't find the answer in this book.
Here, HZ pounces on my use of the phrase “true religion,” but ignores the context which gives it meaning. In fact, two pages prior to the passage HZ quotes, I explicitly state what I mean by “true religion." It is religion that is “born out of a combination of rational insight, profound experiences of a distinctive kind, and morally laudable hope” and is then “refined and shaped by careful and humble reflection in open-minded discourse with others” (p. 9).
Throughout the book I develop these elements into an account of the parameters within which religion can be both intellectually respectable and morally benign, and I also discuss the corrupting forces that can push religion outside of these parameters. Any religion—Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu—that stays true to these parameters counts as “true religion” in my sense. Religion that loses touch with them is not.
And one way to lose touch with them is to lose touch with what Schleiermacher calls the “beautiful modesty” and “friendly, attractive forbearance” that naturally accompanies experience of the transcendent. Religion rooted in such experience cannot help but recognize that the subject matter of religion defies finite human efforts to describe it. This is why Schleiermacher insists that anyone whose religion is rooted in such experience “must be conscious that his religion is only part of the whole; that about the same circumstances there may be views and sentiments quite different from his, yet just as pious.”
In short, far from belying my propensity for religious inclusivism, my reference to letting true religion “loose upon the world” is an expression of that inclusivism. By “true religion,” I mean religion that (among other things) views other religious traditions as having something of value to say about the mysteries of the transcendent. Such inclusivism is not uncritical, but the criteria by which religions are judged are not those of doctrinal orthodoxy or allegiance to a single tradition or holy text, etc.
As for the reviewer’s mention of my distinction between “the god of superstition” and “the God of religion,” it is astonishing when he says that “we won’t find any answers in this book”—since developing and discussing the significance of this distinction is one of the book's chief aims.
In briefest terms, my point (piggy-backing on Plutarch) is this: There is a profound difference between believing in a supernatural tyrant who needs to be appeased on pain of harsh retribution, and living in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness. Religions that affirm the supernatural tyrant are what Plutarch called superstition. And belief in this god of superstition inspires the same kind of frenzied efforts at appeasement that an abusive spouse so often inspires, producing a supernatural variant of battered wife syndrome. Such belief is harmful—and atheism in the face of such a god is like a healthy divorce with a lifetime restraining order attached.
But it doesn’t follow that it is likewise harmful to live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, that when we act with moral integrity we are aligning ourselves with the most basic truth about reality. I call this “the ethico-religious hope,” and I define the God of religion as that which, if it existed, would fulfill this hope. Such a definition is what I call “functional,” in that it doesn’t specify God in terms of a list of properties (although it implies benevolence) but rather in terms of the role that God serves in the psychological economy of the devout theist—that is, the theist who loves and trusts God. Tyrants inspire neither love nor trust, but only fear and servile obedience.
HZ is unhappy with this kind of functional definition, perceiving it as my attempt to define God so vaguely that the theist can “evade, hide, and shift his ground every time he gets cornered.” HZ wants me to offer what, in my book, I call a “substantive definition” of God—that is, a definition in terms of a list of precise properties.
This is an issue I have discussed in other posts, and so I won’t beat a dead horse here. Suffice it to say that early scientists wouldn’t have gotten very far if they hadn’t left room for non-substantive definitions. Image a Copernican-era scientist who insisted that “star” be defined in terms of the old substantive conception of it as a “pinhole in the firmament,” who then concluded on the basis of the evidence that stars do not exist, and finally accused those who defined “star” by pointing upward, and who offered new conceptualizations in light of new evidence, as being guilty of “evading, hiding, and shifting the ground every time they get cornered.”
HZ writes:
Can he justify his claim that the "cause of the trouble is a fundamentalist insistence that one ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader (is perfectly) articulating the very will of God?" (The reviewer leaves out of the quote what I have re-inserted in parentheses for the sake of clarity). Isn't this a circular argument? Who is a fundamentalist? It seems that he would be someone who disagrees with Reitan.
In the passage quoted (found on p. 71), I am discussing ways in which belief in God’s goodness can be stripped of meaning. One issue I focus on is the idea that you “ought to accept without question that some text or institution or prophetic leader” perfectly represents God’s will. For ease of reference I call this way of thinking “fundamentalist,” and I argue that it strips all meaning from the claim that God is good, leaving us with a supernatural being whose will must be followed, but who isn’t good in any meaningful sense. In short: a supernatural tyrant. Fundamentalism in the indicated sense leads to belief in the god of superstition. There is no circularity here, and the meaning of “fundamentalist” is far more substantive than just “anyone who disagrees with me.”
HZ writes:
Reitan called Dawkins a philosophical novice because (or so Reitan believed) he did not understand Aquinas. Reitan and Aquinas believed in God (and since Aquinas was Christian, Reitan's belief must be Christian) because everything in the universe must have a cause except the first cause. They realise d that if they don't put a stop to this then they are stuck in an infinite regress - turtles all the way down. So why is this first cause so personal that he needs and wants to be worshipped? Why not just a bang from a bag of gas? Reitan would believe that a bag of gas must have a first cause. So, can he explain why a bag of gas can't be the first cause that he believed must exist; a cause that had no cause? How does he differentiate his idea of the first cause (his "god") from a bag of gas?
I set aside the invalid argument that since Aquinas and I both believe in God, and Aquinas was a Christian, I must be Christian too. I’ll simply refer HZ on this matter to any introductory logic book. What I want to point out is that HZ is simply repeating the very interpretive errors that Dawkins falls into, and which I discuss in Chapter 5.
Let me put this as simply as I can. It is one thing to argue that everything must have a cause, notice that this leads to an infinite regress, and then try to escape the regress by arbitrarily positing a first cause which, in defiance of the first premise, doesn’t need a cause after all. It is something else entirely to argue that everything which possesses some property P (e.g., the property of coming into existence) requires a cause, notice that if everything possessed property P there would be an infinite regress, and therefore conclude that to avoid such a regress we must suppose there exists something which lacks property P. Aquinas argues along the latter lines, not the former. And, arguing along these lines, Aquinas concludes that there must exist some fundamental reality that never came to be (that is, exists eternally), that does not change but is capable of bringing about change in other things, and that exists necessarily. If HZ wants to make the case that a bag of gas could be eternal, unchanging, and necessarily existent, I’d be very interested to see the argument. However, it would have to be a bag of gas radically unlike anything in the empirical world—including bags of gas.
HZ goes on:
(I)n defending theodicy, he placed the blame(as most theists do) on man (the victim) and not god, the presumed almighty and all good. It is man's free will, he stated, when referring to the evil caused by man. What of the evil caused in natural disasters like Hurricane Katarina? Such evil if caused by god, would be redeemed by god. How? And how does Reitan know that? Perhaps we were not mean to question him on this either.
In the chapter that HZ references here, I provide an overview of a number of different ways in which theists have attempted to respond to the problem of evil. I seek to identify both the merits and the weaknesses of these responses. For example, on p. 192 I critique the appeal to free will by noting that “not all evils result from wicked choices. Some of the worst suffering is brought on by disease, famine, and natural disaster…(and) it isn’t reasonable to trace all the harms from natural evils back to human negligence.” I likewise critically discuss the so-called “soul-making theodicy,” noting among other things that it does not take into proper account the suffering in the non-human world. My aim in this chapter is not to resolve the problem of evil. Rather, my aim is to argue that even if the problem hasn’t been resolved, it doesn’t constitute such a decisive case against theism that it becomes unreasonable for someone to live in the hope that the evils of the world will be redeemed by a transcendent good.
And, just for the sake of clarity, living in the hope that evil will be redeemed is not the same as knowing that it will. I do not know that it will. No one does. Anyone who claims to know this is lying—probably first and foremost to themselves. Likewise for anyone who claims to know that evil will not be redeemed.
Last but not least, HZ writes:
I would not say don't read this book, but I would say read it but also read the counter-arguments (Amazon has a list of books on atheism); in both cases, read all the arguments critically.
Finally, something we can agree on.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Why I Believe in a Personal God
“God,” as I understand that term, names something that is not the least bit anthropomorphic but is deeply and profoundly personal. When I say that something is personal, I mean that it is both a subject and an agent. In other words, a person is a conscious self that acts.
And love cannot happen without such personhood, because love is really about a self that says YES to the other in all its otherness. To say that God’s essence is love is to say, I think, that “God” names that fundamental reality which is constantly and endlessly saying YES to all of us and everything around us. Even if such a reality is unlike anything remotely human, even if it is otherwise shrouded in a cloud of impenetrable mystery, it cannot affirm and value and care unless it is personal.
I believe in a personal God because, when I clear my mind of all my fears and frustrations and preoccupations, I can feel that YES affirming me and resounding in every particle of the universe, coming as if from the very root of it all.
The YES feels like more than just an endorsement or an attitude of approval. It is more fundamentally active than that. It is a performative YES, a YES that sustains. The YES resounds through it all as if it were the source of it all, the limitless being from which all bounded realities flow. It is the YES of the Infinite that cradles the finite, keeping it from descending back into non-existence, from being swallowed up by “the abyss in which it must inevitably sink, the ocean by whose waves it must inevitably be overwhelmed, if He who created it did not also preserve and sustain it” (to quote Karl Barth). It is, in short, a love that preserves.
The encounter with that YES is always transitory. Anxieties and the preoccupations of ordinary life flood back in, drowning it out. The dread of the abyss returns, and all that is left is the memory of a YES that, for the brief moment that it sounded clearly, was more potent than any no could ever be.
The experience of that YES could be delusional. It could be nothing but my deepest hopes projected onto the field of experience. It could just be the power of suggestion, or a side-effect of neural misfirings.
But it feels real. And I can decide to live as if it is real. For there is not a single empirical fact which precludes the reality of something like what I am experiencing—even if, as must be admitted, there are ways of elaborating on the concept of God that do clash with the empirical facts. Such elaborations must be rejected, but not the reality of that which loves from beyond the world.
Believing that my experience of a personal God is veridical doesn’t change what I would expect to observe with my ordinary senses. I wouldn’t expect the empirical world to look different were my experience authentic rather than delusional. But even if believing in the veridicality of that experience makes no difference for what I would expect the empirical world to be like, it makes an enormous practical difference for my life. When I embrace it, when I don’t explain it away but instead accept its substance—when I really come to trust that the fundamental reality in the universe is saying YES to me and everything that is, treasuring and sustaining it all, I find myself saying YES so much more.
And this means that my capacity for joy and gratitude expands, and it means that my capacity for love expands. I live, not in an indifferent universe of blind mechanism and chance, but in a universe that says YES. So long as I can sustain the hope that this is true, I find that I can love more fully and richly, without the usual limitations and conditions. In a universe where that YES is the fundamental truth, to join in the joyous affirmation is to be in tune with the voice of God.
And love cannot happen without such personhood, because love is really about a self that says YES to the other in all its otherness. To say that God’s essence is love is to say, I think, that “God” names that fundamental reality which is constantly and endlessly saying YES to all of us and everything around us. Even if such a reality is unlike anything remotely human, even if it is otherwise shrouded in a cloud of impenetrable mystery, it cannot affirm and value and care unless it is personal.
I believe in a personal God because, when I clear my mind of all my fears and frustrations and preoccupations, I can feel that YES affirming me and resounding in every particle of the universe, coming as if from the very root of it all.
The YES feels like more than just an endorsement or an attitude of approval. It is more fundamentally active than that. It is a performative YES, a YES that sustains. The YES resounds through it all as if it were the source of it all, the limitless being from which all bounded realities flow. It is the YES of the Infinite that cradles the finite, keeping it from descending back into non-existence, from being swallowed up by “the abyss in which it must inevitably sink, the ocean by whose waves it must inevitably be overwhelmed, if He who created it did not also preserve and sustain it” (to quote Karl Barth). It is, in short, a love that preserves.
The encounter with that YES is always transitory. Anxieties and the preoccupations of ordinary life flood back in, drowning it out. The dread of the abyss returns, and all that is left is the memory of a YES that, for the brief moment that it sounded clearly, was more potent than any no could ever be.
The experience of that YES could be delusional. It could be nothing but my deepest hopes projected onto the field of experience. It could just be the power of suggestion, or a side-effect of neural misfirings.
But it feels real. And I can decide to live as if it is real. For there is not a single empirical fact which precludes the reality of something like what I am experiencing—even if, as must be admitted, there are ways of elaborating on the concept of God that do clash with the empirical facts. Such elaborations must be rejected, but not the reality of that which loves from beyond the world.
Believing that my experience of a personal God is veridical doesn’t change what I would expect to observe with my ordinary senses. I wouldn’t expect the empirical world to look different were my experience authentic rather than delusional. But even if believing in the veridicality of that experience makes no difference for what I would expect the empirical world to be like, it makes an enormous practical difference for my life. When I embrace it, when I don’t explain it away but instead accept its substance—when I really come to trust that the fundamental reality in the universe is saying YES to me and everything that is, treasuring and sustaining it all, I find myself saying YES so much more.
And this means that my capacity for joy and gratitude expands, and it means that my capacity for love expands. I live, not in an indifferent universe of blind mechanism and chance, but in a universe that says YES. So long as I can sustain the hope that this is true, I find that I can love more fully and richly, without the usual limitations and conditions. In a universe where that YES is the fundamental truth, to join in the joyous affirmation is to be in tune with the voice of God.
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