Abiding astonishment

In the book God's Presence In History, Martin Buber is quoted as saying this:

The concept of miracle which is permissible from the historical approach can be defined at its starting point as an abiding astonishment. The ... religious person ... abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment.

This passage gets at what I think is a very important thread in the tangled ball of yarn that is religion: the abiding awe--or astonishment--that comes when we contemplate the question of why there is something rather than nothing. That there is anything at all is a wondrous fact, and no amount of reflecting upon that fact dampens its exhilarating effect on us, or lessens its mysteriousness.

Moreover, note how this "question of existence"--the question of why there is something rather than nothing, of why there should be anything at all--is framed. To talk of "there being something" or "there being anything" is to talk in maximally general terms about the world. We are not expressing abiding astonishment that there is this or that particular thing; it is not that we experience awe because the world is the way it is as opposed to some other less desirable possible arrangement. The source of our astonishment, in other words, is not that we inhabit this or that possible world, but that there are possible worlds. We are celebrating and wondering at the fact that existence exists.

To even conceptualize the world in such a maximally general way requires, I think, a non-trivial feat of imagination. It means really apprehending, in one moment, the all of everything. It is a dizzying experience, and also a frightening one, because apprehending the all of everything naturally leads one to think of the absence of the all of everything--of utter, abyss-like nothingness.

These sensations of dizzying exhilaration on the one hand and utter terror on the other find their religious expression, I think, in the various sensations that God causes in men: the abiding astonishment, the bottomless terror. In religion, humanity's concerns surrounding a maximally general conception of the world--surrounding, in other words, our conception of existence as such--is anthropomorphized, bringing this cluster of difficult and troubling questions into a framework that any human can easily interface with. The question of existence, so elusive before, is now no more difficult to access at a superficial level than some surly authority figure: it walks, it talks, it commands, it emotes, it does stuff in the world (like part oceans).

Of course, many people's conception of God is more refined than a bearded man sitting up in the clouds. If you ask ten different people what their conception of God is, you will often receive ten different answers, each one varying in its degree to which God is conceived as a human-like being or capable of affecting human affairs. However, insofar as God is a window to the abiding astonishment that there is something rather than nothing, all conceptions of God (that are not flatly pantheistic) are flawed--or at least potentially very confusing--because God is a particular thing, and the moment you veer away from a maximally general conception of the world you also veer away from the topic of existence as such. It seems to me that while it is quite possible that a religious person with a sophisticated outlook could be experiencing abiding astonishment at basically the same thing as me but with theological rather than secular/philosophical/analytical window dressing, it is more likely that the God-concept--with all of its anthropomorphic trappings--has led him down a false path to a sort of existential idolatry, where what is generating awe and astonishment is not the higher-order, maximally general conception of the all of everything, but a lower-order conception of a particular possible world: specifically, the possible world in which a being "God" exists that has all manner of amazing and superlative properties.

A more satisfying debate about God

Usually any debate between an atheist and a full-fledged believer ends before it ever really gets started because religion entails a whole bunch of empirical claims that there just isn't any reason to believe--for example, that God created the earth, or that God parted the ocean. Ultimately, nothing the believer says about faith or anything else is going to get the atheist to allow miracles or God or any other supernatural thing into his empirical sanctum sanctorum. And this is as it should be: it is not valid to believe an empirical claim to be true when there is a total lack of any supporting evidence--even if you really, really, really, really want it to be true, as is often the case with religion-motivated empirical claims that are not or cannot be substantiated.

However, though I certainly feel that these short-lived debates resolve in the atheist's favor, there is the lingering feeling of having won on a technicality--like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. And the dogmatic tone of the atheist's argument--These are the rules of empiricism!--makes atheism sound paradoxically religious.

The truth is, there are many more interesting conversations to be had between believer and atheist beyond that initial empirical sticking point. But how do you carry on a conversation about God when there isn't even any agreement at the outset that God exists?

I think one way to break the impasse is to ask a slightly different question than the one usually posed. Rather than, "Does God exist?", the question ought to be: "Is the existence of God possible?" By "modalizing" the question ("modal" means having to do with possibility), we elide the usual questions about evidence and proof and faith and instead focus on a more substantive target: the divine itself. We move the conversation from a primarily epistemological one ("How can we know that God exists; what is the evidence?") to a primarily ontological one ("What kind of a thing is God; is such a thing possible/coherent?"). We set aside the question of which, of all possible worlds, is the one that we happen to inhabit, and take up instead the broader question of divine being, irrespective of which possible worlds this divine being happens to reside.

Indeed, I think a lot of the more compelling arguments against God are the ones that criticize the God concept itself as incoherent, or unable to deliver on its metaphysical promises. For example, acerbic atheist Christopher Hitchens regularly characterizes God--giver of laws and arbiter of good and evil--as nothing more than a dictator in the sky. The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.

Anyway, that's just one example of the direction things can go once the question shifts to the possibility of the existence God, rather than simply the existence of God. And I think it's a much more satisfying and fruitful way to go--for both believer and atheist.

What an anti-torture amendment should look like

Daydreaming about an anti-torture amendment to the Constitution, I decided I would peruse the internets to see what other people might have proposed along these lines. Surprisingly I couldn't find anything that looked authoritative, like from an anti-torture organization or a legal scholar or lawyer. And most of the ones I did find, disappointingly, were pretty much clueless from the standpoint of Constitutional panache.

Look. If you're going to write an amendment concerning something as morally fundamental as a ban on torture, you can't bog it down in half a dozen "Sections" and lump a laundry list of examples into each one. When James Madison authored the First Amendment, he didn't belabor the point with all sorts of examples of what kinds of laws might abridge speech or even what he meant by "speech", exactly--he just dashed off a single bad-ass sounding sentence, added in some extra commas (as was the style at the time), and had a sandwich.

It all makes sense when you realize that the literary parallel to the Bill of Rights is nothing less than the Ten Commandments. God knew if he wanted to get the point across it would have to be with an awesome-sounding bullet list--"I'm God! I'm the only God! Don't say my name! You can take Sundays off! And no killing!"--and that the mundane details could be safely left to the Talmud nerds. Madison followed suit, to satisfyingly dramatic effect--"Talk! Shoot! Fuck Redcoats, am I right? And no snoopin'!". See? It's wisdom*, distilled into Power-Point-sized chunks for easy consumption.

So, anyway, if we're not talking about some nerdy amendment like allowing an income tax, we'd better be making sure that it lives up to its rhetorical pedigree. That's why my version would look something like this:

Amendment XXVIII.
Congress shall make no law permitting the use of torture against any person.

There you go. All of the ticking time-bomb shit, all of the ambiguities about what counts as torture--those can all be sussed out by Supreme Court nerds. Indeed, sensibilities are bound to shift over time, and there's certainly nothing wrong with letting those emerge via Court decisions over the years. But this way, you're sending a clear message about where the United States stands on the issue of torture and human rights.

*Er, wisdom minus the whole slavery-is-bad bit. Both lists seem to be okay with it.