Category: Sophisticated Theology

Didn’t you know: God’s a question, not an answer!

April 10, 2016 • 10:30 am

I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time.

And so it is with the March 26 column by William Irwin, which you know from the title alone will be a stinker: “God is a question, not an answer.” What does that mean? I bet you can guess.

First, who is William Irwin? Well, he’s got credentials: he’s the Herve A. Leblanc Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He also wrote “The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism Without Consumerism” and is the general editor of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. He seems to have a sense of humor, as witnessed by his “Jeopardy Dream Board” on his university website. But oy, is he convoluted about God!

Irwin begins with Camus, who is his novel L’Etranger show the protagonist rejecting God when a priest visits him right before his execution.  He then fast-forwards to a 2013 novel by Kamel Daoud, whose protagonist declares that “God is a question, not an answer.” And so it is for Irwin:

[This] declaration resonates with me as a teacher and student of philosophy. The question is permanent; answers are temporary. I live in the question.

Any honest atheist must admit that he has his doubts, that occasionally he thinks he might be wrong, that there could be a God after all — if not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, then a God of some kind. Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Herman Melville, “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Dwelling in a state of doubt, uncertainty and openness about the existence of God marks an honest approach to the question.

This is bogus. Any honest person must also admit that there might be fairies, or Santa Claus, or any number of fanciful illusions for which there is no existing evidence. But saying that there is no evidence for something is not the same as saying that there’s a decent probability that that something might exist. I see no evidence for UFO abductions, but of course one can’t rule them out with absolute certainty. But I would bet my life savings that none have taken place. Likewise with wonder-working leprechauns. So why don’t we have Irwin writing a column that “Leprechauns are a question, not an answer”?

Right there Irwin makes one of the most common mistakes of Sophisticated Theologians™: confusing logical possibilities with probabilities. He goes on:

Likewise, anyone who does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief. Worry can make the belief or unbelief genuine, but it cannot make it correct.

People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe and those who don’t believe. They do not really listen to the other side of conversations, and they are too ready to impose their views on others. It is impossible to be certain about God.

Yes, and it’s also impossible to be dead certain about the nonexistence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Xenu and his thetans, and the Golden Plates of Joseph Smith. Does that mean that we should give them a shred of credibility; that there’s something wrong with people who refuse to even consider them? I don’t think so. The onus on those insisting on the God’s existence is to provide at least a shred of credible evidence for a god. There is none: no more than for Nessie or leprechauns. Yes somehow Irwin wants us to think that we should take the existence of God—excuse me, the question of God—more seriously than for these other fictions. Why? Only because far more people share delusions of God than do delusions of leprechauns.

The problem is, of course, that most atheists don’t claim they know with absolute certainty that God doesn’t exist. Many theists, though, claim the opposite—with much greater certainty. But putting that aside, how, exactly, could atheists “impose their nonbelief” on others? Does Irwin mean that we shouldn’t favor the First Amendment? That we should allow prayers in all public schools? It is not atheists who impose their views on others, but religionists who think it’s their duty to make their moral code into civil law. All we do is try to convince others that we’re more reasonable than they, and to prevent them from foisting religious beliefs on the rest of us.

Irwin goes on, but he really says nothing more than this: that both atheists and believers should have some doubt. And then his whole exercise degenerates into a why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along lovefest:

What is important is the common ground of the question, not an answer. Surely, we can respect anyone who approaches the question honestly and with an open mind. Ecumenical and interfaith religious dialogue has increased substantially in our age. We can and should expand that dialogue to include atheists and agnostics, to recognize our common humanity and to stop seeing one another as enemy combatants in a spiritual or intellectual war. Rather than seeking the security of an answer, perhaps we should collectively celebrate the uncertainty of the question.

Does Irwin not see that we are indeed combatants—fighters in a war of rationality against superstition? And it’s no mere intellectual combat, either: lives and well being are at stake. But Irwin, of course, refuses to go the last step and see that there are real consequences of religionists working out their certainty in the public sphere. His is a chickenshit compromise that ignores the realities of faith.

Finally, if God is a question, not an answer, that pretty much guts conventional religions—or at least religious practice. How do you pray to a question? What about the certainties evinced in practices like Communion, or wearing Magic Underwear? Do we still keep these practices? I suspect Irwin would say, “Yes, but we should just have more doubt.” Well, fine. But I don’t see much doubt coming from those who should be the biggest doubters: those who assert the existence of God, and put on their magic underwear before going to Temple.

In the end, Irwin says nothing new; his column is a total waste of space. But of course how much new stuff can you say about a practice for which there’s never been any evidence? Irwin is certainly not the first religious philosopher who says that “we should be less certain.”

Reader Enrico, who sent me the link to Irwin’s column, sent me another link as well, as well as a comment:

I stick to Sarah Silverman (extract about religion from her award-winning show We Are Miracles):

Irwin:

BillIrwinPortrait2011

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Easterology

March 30, 2016 • 10:00 am

This strip “plan 2,” is 9 years old but the author informs us it’s been slightly edited. No matter—it’s still timely. And the whole Easter story and the salvific effects of Jesus (aka God) being crucified has never made any sense to me. I suppose that senselessness makes it even more plausible to a Sophisticated Theologian™. After all, “Credo quia absurdum.”

2016-03-30

Ed Suominen meets a Sophisticated Theologian

March 4, 2016 • 8:30 am

A few nights ago, reader Ed Suominen went to a talk by my old nemesis John Haught, a Sophisticated Catholic Theologian™ whom I once debated at the University of Kentucky. You can read about that memorable encounter on Haught’s Wikipedia page. At any rate, Haught’s talk was at Gonzaga, a Catholic University in Spokane, Washington. After the talk, Ed—a former Christian Fundamentalist in the little-known sect of Laestadianism, and now a nonbeliever who wrote about his deconversion in Salon—chatted with Haught at his book-signing. Ed wrote me about the episode, and, with his permission, I reproduce his account below:

In Evolving out of Eden, Bob Price and I called Haught “one of the best writers out there at articulating the problems that evolution poses for Christian theology.” He began his talk last night with one of those problems, the vast chasm of deep time that preceded the evolution of life. He illustrated that with 29 books representing the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, 450 pages each and with a million years per page. Human consciousness, he said, occupies only the last 10-20% of the last page of the last book, and the first two-thirds of the books are devoid of life entirely. It was an instructive metaphor for him to present.

Otherwise, the talk was pretty much content-free. But it was interesting to watch him speak because it was much more reminiscent of the style of a mellow liberal preacher rather than of a hard-facts scientist. The hand-waving is not merely metaphorical! All that business about God drawing forward and being up ahead rather than up above (this from part two of the talk) was accompanied by appropriate smooth gestures of the arms, along with a soothing oratory that promised eventual warmth and revelation and beauty for us in some undefined future with God.

I sat there knowing that Haught’s gauzy theology doesn’t seem to specify any possible means for an afterlife. How, after all, does this God-in-process watching from the sidelines go about providing an afterlife for a whole disembodied human consciousness if he won’t even twiddle a few lousy point mutations here and there? (In Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life, Haught criticizes efforts to insert “divine action into a series of natural causes,” e.g., quantum events or genetic mutations.) And yet almost everyone else in the audience (mostly senior citizens more inclined than usual to think about mortality) was eating it all up. Evolution, science, and yet this meeting with God soon, too! What’s not to like? There was even a standing ovation, though I remained seated along with about a fifth of the audience.

Haught contradicted himself one memorable time. In his “problem solved” second half of the lecture following the science stuff, he talked about how it seems that the universe was set up for the eventuality of life. The whole thing was spring-loaded, so to speak, so that the whole shelf, even all those blank volumes, can be considered part of the story of life. (I don’t have any exact quotes, but this was the conclusion of some discussion about the fine-tuning argument, which he seems to like.) Yeah, well, it sure seems like a lot of preamble! This God of his certainly doesn’t get bored by a tedious pregame show.

Blah, blah, blah. So much soothing word salad in service of his need (career and psyche alike, I suspect) for there to be a God behind it all somehow, no matter what. With apologies to the writer of Psalms 84:2, “My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the Templeton Prize.”

I posed one of just two questions that were allowed. It was this, verbatim: “What mode of divine action would you propose for God to do this leading and drawing and so forth?” The reply was long and barely coherent, and did not even come close to providing any actual answer. He did say somewhere in all the words and circular upwelling gestures that action implies pushing or force and that’s not what God is doing.

Fine: Then what the hell is he doing? There has to be some sort of interface between this spiritual entity Haught is happy to name for his pious audience and the physical world that The Entity is supposedly cheering on from up ahead somewhere. Otherwise, it is all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I met up with Haught right after the talk, before the book-signing line got going. I offered him a print copy of Evolving out of Eden, and he declined politely, saying he had a copy for the Kindle already. I showed him the page where Bob and I had introduced him with a compliment for his clear-headed way of presenting the scientific issues, saying we found it “refreshing.” (And it is—compared to all the nonsense out there.) He said that he had noticed we were also quite critical of him. I acknowledged that we were, but at least wanted to point out something positive. He said, yes, he noticed we “cut him some slack” in that area—with a faintest of smiles—and that it was good to have had an exchange of ideas. I shook his hand and agreed and said it was a pleasure to finally meet him. And it was; he’s just a fellow human being who yearns for transcendence and, finding almost nothing available to work with, is trying his best to patch up the crumbling edifice of his ancient church.

Thanks to Ed for the story. I told him, when he said it was a “pleasure” to meet Haught, that he was being extraordinarily kind to a man whose lucubrations I dislike intensely, but Ed, having once drunk the Kool-Aid, is more forgiving than I. I also told Ed that perhaps he wouldn’t be so kind had he read Haught’s God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. It’s a dreadful book, full of sanctimony and hauteur. I still find it amazing that Haught, a Distinguished Research Professor of theology at Georgetown University (what kind of “research” do these people do?), gets paid for writing book after book, all touting the same vacuous nonsense. Whatever they pay theologians, it’s too much.

And I’ve always found it a great pity that people like Haught, or those who believe even more firmly in an afterlife, won’t ever be able to find out they were wrong. For with death comes total extinction of consciousness, and no chance to come back and tell people that there’s no reunion with God after all.

haught-webpage-photo
Haught

 

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the Big Sacrifice

February 18, 2016 • 8:45 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “ten”, deals with the arcane doctrine (well, it’s not really so arcane) of “substitutionary atonenement.” Them’s fancy words for “Jesus died for your sins.”

Here’s how the site Compelling Truth explains substitutionary atonement. This is classic theobabble (my emphasis):

Romans 6:23 teaches us two things. First, it tells us that without Christ’s substitutionary atonement, there is no doubt that we are doomed. In the Bible, death refers to separation. When a body dies, the soul is separated from the body. This is the physical death that we all experience. When a person dies without Jesus, his soul is separated from God (spiritual death). Spiritual death will result in eternity in hell, from which there is no escape. The second lesson contained in this verse is that eternal life is available through Jesus Christ to those who believe.

Here is how the substitute works. Jesus Christ is God (John 1:1-18) and is therefore an infinite being. We are finite, created beings. Since the sins we commit are against an infinite being (God), the punishment must also be infinite. There are two ways for this punishment to be carried out. Either an infinite being must die once to pay for sins (the cross), or finite beings must to pay for their sins infinitely (hell). Jesus lovingly offered Himself up and died in our place when He was crucified on the cross. This was an infinite Being making a one-time payment for sins that satisfied God’s requirement (Hebrews 10:10, 14). When this happened, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). This atonement is spoken of again, in 1 Peter 3:18, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”

What a thicket of bad logic! Why, for instance, must sins against an infinite being be given an infinite punishment? If you don’t accept Jesus as your savior, for instance, many Christians think you’ll fry for eternity—infinite punishment. But God and Allah are supposed to be merciful, and why should such a being make us suffer infinitely for doubting Jesus? Isn’t it in their capacity to give us limited punishment?

And why would God allow someone else to die horribly for sins supposedly committed by others? What kind of sense does that make? This is one aspect of Christianity that, although apparently universally accepted by theologians, still puzzles me. Under many forms of Christianity, you can be as horrible a person as you want throughout your life, but if, right before you die, you say you accept Jesus as savior, all is forgiven. You get a pass to Heaven. (This is, of course, the doctrne of “sola fide”: salvation by faith alone.) And that makes no sense, either. But I’m just a poor evolutionary biologist, apparently unable to grasp the nuances of Sophisticated Theology™. I’d be glad to hear readers’ explanations.

But I digress. Theobabble always angers me. Here’s Jesus and Mo:
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The Pope answers a vexing question: what did God do before he made the world?

January 25, 2016 • 1:30 pm

I wonder if Pope Francis was speaking ex cathedra when he figured out, as recounted in a new book for kids, what God was doing before He made the world. I have, in fact, often wondered that myself. There was eternity before there was the Earth, and unless there were an eternity of multiverses before our own Universe, God must have been terribly bored. What did he do?

Well now, according to thejournal.ie, His Holiness has the answer. It’s recounted in the Pope’s new children’s book Dear Pope Francis, to be published by Loyola University Press on March 1.  In it the Pope answers letters from thirty children, one of them asking the question above. And the Pope, showing the most Sophisticated Theology™, gives his answer. It’s in the screenshot below:

deepity

HE LOVED!!!!!  But that raises further questions.  WHO, exactly, did he love? There wasn’t anything around to love! Maybe he loved himself? But that would make him a narcissist!

I’m sure the book is full of bromides; check out his second answer above.  One thing the Pope wasn’t allowed to answer, though, was “How the hell do I know?” After all, as Archie Bunker said, the Pope is inflammable.

h/t: Grania

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ obscurantism

January 13, 2016 • 8:15 am

This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “words,” is said by the artist to be inspired by a post of philosopher Stephen Law, “Pseudo-profundity—from ‘Believing Bullshit.”

Believing Bullshit is Law’s own book published in 2011, and I hope to read it before too long. His post is in fact one chapter of that book, so you can read it to see if you want to go further. The post describes six kinds of pseudoprofundity and then tells us how to deal with them (mockery is one tactic).

The species “Post-modern pseudo-profundity” includes the following holotype produced by “the French intellectual Félix Guattari” (why are the French so prone to this kind of stuff?):

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis.

People who write like that should have their toenails pulled off! Yet a generation of college students was brought up to think that this was not only serious thinking, but good academic writing. Indeed, there are some evolutionary biologists whose prose isn’t that far from the above. I have a list of examples on my computer, but I’ll spare you and avoid indicting my colleagues.

But I digress. The cartoon:
2016-01-13

It almost needn’t to be said that theologians, especially Sophisticated Theologians™, are perhaps the most prolix generators of pseudo-profundity. Here are two examples from Catholic theologian John Haught:

  • “It is essential to religious experience, after all, that ultimate reality be beyond our grasp. If we could grasp it, it would not be ultimate.”  (Deeper Than Darwin, p. 68).

This cannot be put into plain English because it involves not only a tautology but a misunderstanding of the word “ultimate.” What is ultimate reality anyway? Is that something different from the mundane proximate reality that we scientists and laypeople deal with?

Another:

  • In any case, were I to try to elicit scientific evidence of immortality I would just be capitulating to the narrower empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief. What I will say, though, is that the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust in the desire to know. . . . Such a hope is reasonable if it provides, as I believe it can, a climate that encourages the desire to know to remain restless until it encounters the fullness of being, truth, goodness and beauty. (Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, pp. 203-204).

My translation: “I don’t need no stinking evidence! There’s an afterlife simply because I want there to be one.”

 

Templeton’s at it again, wasting money promoting Christianity

November 24, 2015 • 10:00 am

Not long ago, an executive with the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) invited me to dinner on his dime. His aim was twofold: to discuss my latest book, which he was going to review (clearly not positively!), and, more important, to convince me that I had the Foundation all wrong: that it wasn’t really interested in advancing religion, but was becoming more scientific.  We palavered about this meeting: I insisted, for instance, that the JTF would not pay for my dinner, so this gentleman kindly offered to pay out of his own pocket. But I ultimately decided not to go, for I envisioned it as a one-way conversation in which the Templeton guy would propagandize me and ignore my own complaints about his Foundation. After all, why would a billion-dollar enterprise like the JTF listen to a tiny critic like me? I may have been wrong about what would have transpired, but I’ll never know, for I eschewed the dinner (it was at a fancy place, too!).

But what I’m not wrong about is that the JTF has NOT changed, for it continues to promote religion with one hand, science with the other, and then with both hands mix them into a toxic brew of science-y woo. Their continued conflation of science with religion merely confuses people about the relationship of these areas, yet many scientists—among them are atheists!—are eager to line up for a place at the Templeton Trough. (JTF gives millions away annually.) The World Science Festival in New York, for instance, is partly sponsored by Templeton, and always has some “Big Questions” seminars that give credibility to the JTF.

But whatever credibility the JTF gains by supporting science is eroded by their real mission, which is stated clearly on their website (my emphasis):

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.

Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton’s optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation’s motto, “How little we know, how eager to learn,” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

Before I begin, could someone explain to me what they mean by “ultimate” reality? Is there any other kind of reality? (Of course they’re talking about God—or so I think).

Just remember that everything the JTF does, including trying to burnish its image by supporting “pure” science, is ultimately aimed at acquiring “new spiritual information” through science, for Sir John believed that science could ultimately tell us stuff about the supernatural.  If you think Templeton has reformed, or if you want to take money from this Foundation, first have a look at how the JTF has just wasted £1.6 million pounds on a useless study, founding a Christian institute at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The 1.6 million pounds follows another half million pounds given earlier to the same recipient:

SCOTTISH theologians are taking the world lead in a controversial study of the existence and nature of God at a new international institute.

Experts at St Andrews University will tackle the biggest questions facing humanity, including confronting religious belief and analysing the challenges of hostility, sectarianism and terrorism.

The new Logos Institute – logos being the Greek for word or study – is being launched by a £1.6 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research relating to the major questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, and will be the centre for excellence in the study of analytic and exegetical theology.

The work of the institute was founded by father and son academics Alan Torrance, professor of systematic theology at St Mary’s College of the University of St Andrews, and Dr Andrew Torrance of the university’s School of Divinity.

. . . The new institute, which will open in the summer of 2016, builds on existing resources at St Andrews University and the funding will help pay for part-time positions of four leading international thinkers and a further full-time senior appointment.

There will also be research fellowships, six PhD scholarships and a new Masters programme as well as a series of public lectures, a blog, a website and podcasts.

What questions will this institute address? (These Black Holes of Money never answer the Big Questions, they just address them.) The Scotsman reports further:

The range of questions it will consider relate to the existence and nature of God, God’s relationship to time, the nature of the person and the conceptual and social challenges confronting religious belief, which will also look at analysing the challenges of religious hostility, sectarianism and terrorism.

. . .[Alan Torrance]: “Our primary concern will be to explore the immense explanatory power of Christian theism and its relevance for how we understand the ultimate significance of human life. We shall be doing this in dialogue with exciting new developments in contemporary Biblical scholarship. One of the key research topics will be the nature of forgiveness and what this central Christian notion might mean for how we approach religious enmity, sectarianism and terrorism.”

Well I certainly look forward to the answers they’ll provide about the existence and nature of God, and the perennial and vexing question about His relationship to time! Seriously, what progress can be made spinning one’s wheels about these unanswerable questions involving fictitious beings? It’s as if the JTF funded an institute to discover how Santa could really deliver presents to every deserving child within a single night, and about the challenges to Santa-ism. Can Santa do that because he’s outside of time?

And can we expect that JTF will fund atheists to represent “the conceptual challenges confronting Christianity”? I think not, for they’re only accepting fellow members of the asylum (see below).

And really—Christian theism has “immense explanatory power”? What power is that, exactly? What does it explain? Certainly nothing about reality, though it can explain why certain people believe the things they do. And does Christianity have more explanatory power than, say, Islam or Hinduism?

The end of the Scotsman piece shows the intellectual futility of this conference, and also how they’re limiting participation to those with similar beliefs (I’ve put the euphemism in bold). No atheists allowed!

Andrew Torrance said: “At its best, the task of theology gathers together and engages a diverse range of perspectives. Not only does it draw on the insights of biblical scholarship and philosophy, it also draws on the insights of the natural and social sciences. Further, it seeks to be attentive to the religious communities that have devoted themselves to pursuing a knowledge of God.

“Such a diverse conversation is not easy, however. For constructive conversation to take place, those at the table need to share the same language, and this requires conceptual clarity and discipline.”

I’d like to know what the task of theology really is, and how it will be aided by discoveries in natural and social sciences. I could go on, but enterprises like the Logos Institute, which coopt smart people into discussing unaswerable and silly questions, sicken me. As Hitchens insisted, they should be mocked and reviled.

I wonder how the gentleman who invited me to dinner, assuring me that the JTF has changed, can face himself in the mirror each day in light of things like the Logos Institute. Truly, Templeton is throwing away good money in a desperate attempt to meet Sir John’s aims: find out how science can tell us stuff about God. What a waste of time, money, and brainpower!

h/t: Alexander