How a monotheistic God undermines itself by issuing universal proclamations

There is a strain of atheism that rejects belief in God not (only) on empirical grounds, but also because such a God could have no claim to any kind of moral authority. On this view, God is no different in principle than an all-powerful dictator, who issues laws that are not subject to rational scrutiny and cannot be changed by the people who must live under them.

The reply of the religious believer to this is that God is a fundamentally different kind of thing than a human dictator, such that God's actions cannot be morally evaluated in the same way a human being such as Saddam Hussein's actions can be morally evaluated. But this reply lays bare what is at the heart of the matter, which is an ontological disagreement about the possibility--and coherence--of there being fundamentally different kinds of things in the world where different metaphysical rules apply, versus an ontologically flat, materialistic world in which no chunk of matter has any metaphysical privilege over any other chunk of matter.

What I like about this atheist challenge is that it unveils the nub of the difficulty of trying to analytically compare contradicting ontological claims--the one has no truck with the other. For the atheist analytic descriptions of the divine cannot be differentiated from assertions of a profane magic that accompanies certain convenient objects and texts; for the believer, attempts to describe divine being itself run into the same difficulty as describing a sense modality to someone who congenitally lacks that modality--while you can build descriptions in the object layer with someone who shares access to the metalayer/substrate, you cannot build a description of the metalayer/substrate itself that is independent of a reference to a shared human experience. Religious Man and Profane Man find themselves on opposite sides of a communication barrier that cannot be overcome except by a profound change in one or the other's essential way of being.

However, this does not mean that we cannot tease out certain tensions in the religious believer's ontological framework, because certain kinds of assertions imply certain thing about one's ontology. What I am thinking of here is God's penchant for issuing laws that are universally applied--that is, applied to all actors, regardless of the actor's ontological standing. What a universal law ends up doing is ontologically flattening all that it applies to, because suddenly what matters is the action being done, independent of anything about the essential being of the thing doing the action. Murder is wrong; ok, but if it applies universally than it applies equally to a king and to a peasant, thus in this instance placing the two on the same level. In fact, I would go so far as to say that universality is the key driver of any materialistic, flat ontological viewpoint, precisely because of the ontologically equalizing process of factoring a thing's essential being out of the relevant equation.

In any case, the more condensed and monotheistic the God, the more flat will this God's universal proclamations render the ontological landscape. When a universal proclamation is divine in origin, the separation between the divine and the profane is reinforced. However, this separation is doubly reinforced by the fact that these proclamations do not apply to competing entities in the divine space--another, different set of proclamations governs these intramural squabbles within the divine space. So for example, the Hebrew God says "do not kill", which is a diktat to the profane world; however to deal with rival gods, is not a question of binding them to the same rules as the profane mortals must abide by, but rather, attacking them along the appropriate ontological vector: "do not worship those other gods". For an early monotheism that is struggling against a bevy of polytheistic rivals, then, the divine space is a large and bustling one and its protrusions into the profane world many: false idols abound. However, later on a mature monotheism becomes the victim of its own success: with all competing gods eliminated, the divine space contracts to a single point and loses its vibrancy. Without an element of drama to sustain it, it recedes from human awareness except as the 1-dimensional, inscrutable source of universal proclamations that now apply to the whole world--and flatten the whole world--except for that one tiny little dot.

And so the monotheistic religion enables its self-destruction by stultifying the divine and reducing its chaotic protrusions into a profane world increasingly bridled by human will, in the forms of scientific investigation, technological innovation, self-organization, and commodification. The atheist who accuses God of moral bankruptcy is representative of a new kind of humanity that emerges, blinking, in a flat materialistic world whose only essential purpose is to provide something for human wills to work on as they aimlessly proceed through history, eating and procreating and--if they're the lucky ones with material wealth--frittering away afternoons watching Iron Man sequals.

American pantheism

I'd go so far as to confer "must-read" status on Ross Douthat's latest column, which uses Avatar as a jumping off point for the kind of elevated discussion that you don't often find in a newspaper op-ed piece, and offers some pretty cutting observations:

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

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.

Divinity and magic

I want to jump off of something from a previous post:

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.

This discussion--about the possibility of the divine as a special, purer being that is separate from normal profane (non-sacred) being--is I think a very important one, because it leads naturally to the idea of false or mistaken divinity, or what I call magic (or magical thinking). Simply put, magic is what you get when you take something that is purportedly divine or sacred--which is, ostensibly, of that purer being--and shoehorn it or put it into the context of normal, non-sacred being. For example, I may believe that oak trees are somehow very mystical and sacred, that they perhaps play a special role in the cosmos--but in a different, non-sacred context, these same beliefs, which before were quite epic and meaningful and cosmically important, are now just silly, superstitious, arbitrary, wrong, quaint, and easily dismissed with a condescending chuckle. So what happened here? Clearly there was some kind of mismatch, where either there was a miscommunication, or a mistaken belief, or perhaps, if we want to avoid seeming judgmental, we could say it was a case of two people "living in different worlds". However its put, the important thing is this idea that when divine being is stripped if its divinity, it becomes something debased, profane, and silly: magic.

And so in the conversation outlined in the quote above, what is going on is a struggle, where the believer is trying to get across this idea of divine being, of something fundamentally different from normal being, and the atheist is failing to see or understand this specialness, and instead all of this stuff is registering as mere magic, as no more or less superstitious and silly than the cosmic sanctity of oak trees. There is a mismatch where the believer and atheist are indeed "living in different worlds", and the believer is trying to resolve the mismatch by bringing in the atheist to the world of legitimate sanctity and divinity, and the atheist is trying to resolve the mismatch by trying to bring the believer into the profane world, explaining away the believer's world as a confused bundle of routine falsehoods.

I think what both believer and atheist could do to keep the conservation productive would be to directly address this divinity/magic problem: how can one distinguish between the two--and is the distinction even really coherent? And if the distinction is coherent for the believer but not the atheist, then why is this the case? Is it because the believer has or had access to a special kind of experience that the atheist does or did not, like a direct exposure to the divine, a "conversion experience"? Or is there some other special insight or motivation at work, that does not require some special event in the believer's life-narrative?

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll have more to build off of this later, but I think I want to keep these to short bursts because otherwise I risk losing focus...

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.

How to talk to an empiricist

An empiricist scoffs at a religious man who has spent his life contemplating the spirits of a particular waterfall and some oddly shaped rocks. "You are worshiping childish fairytales and superstitious nonsense", the empiricist says. "None of it is real--you've frittered away your life."

The religious man replies: "Yes, you are right--none of those things are real. There's no empirical support for them whatsoever. But to ridicule me on those grounds is to miss the point--like ridiculing someone on an exercise bike because, for all their effort, they are traveling nowhere. Like the exercise bicyclist, my intent with spirit worship is not to affect a change in the world but to affect a change in myself with respect to the world. The bicyclist's movement is not 'real', but his muscles are strengthened all the same; my spirits are not 'real' but my being is grounded and revealed to me all the same."

The empiricist nods. "Fair enough. But remember well this distinction you make as you carry on your business in the empirical world. Just as a person on an exercise bike should not yell at people to get out of his path, neither can you impose on others in a way that presupposes the realness of your spirits."

"Of course," says the religious man.

***

The above dialog takes place on the empiricist's "home court", so to speak--the religious man admits his deities are not real, but given the context I think it's clear that by "real" he means empirically real--i.e., it can be observed with the senses in the material world. So I don't think he's really yielding any ground to the empiricist, and yet is able to carve out a philosophically defensible position that must appear to the empiricist for all the world like a mysterious and impenetrable walled city that shuns outsiders and keeps to itself.

God is a fuddy-duddy

There have been a few hysterical editorials about Harvard's decision to close off its gym to men for a few hours a week in order to accommodate Muslim women who are forbidden from being viewed by male eyes whilst in workout clothes.

Personally, I think it's probably not that big a deal one way or another whether Harvard extends this special favor to the Muslims on campus. If everyone's fine with it, then, fine, do your thing. However, if lots of people are being inconvenienced by the women's-only hours, then I think that the Muslim women will just have to figure something else out. If you want to practice a religion with all sorts of crazy restrictions, you're free to do so--and you're certainly free to ask communities and institutions to make special exceptions for you to accomodate your lifestyle.

But those communities and institutions are also free to decline making special exceptions to accomodate your religious idiosyncrasies.