On July 9 I wrote a bit about poet Michael Robbins’s review, in Slate, of Nick Spencer’s book Atheists, the Origin of the Species, a book that has pretty much tanked on Amazon. As he has done before, Robbins didn’t really review the book but, in an essay called Know Nothing” (subtitled “The true history of atheism”), used his essay to bash New Atheism. He really, really despises us all. I should add that Robbins is religious, describing himself as a “leftist Christian.”

You will probably remember Robbins: he’s the hipster poet who wore a Traci Lords tee-shirt and was easily irked. In his review, he faulted New Atheists for being dumb, for not realizing that religion is all about allegory, that its truth claims aren’t to be taken seriously since Church fathers like Augustine and Aquinas read scripture as metaphor, that you can’t fathom religion until you’ve embraced it, and, finally, the oldest chestnut on the Tree of Faith: New Atheists aren’t dolorous enough. We need to be freaked out and distressed by the absence of God, as Nietzsche supposedly was.

Robbins also claimed that I had misunderstood him, but unless he’s such a bad writer that he simply cannot translate what he thinks into English words, I stand by my critique.

Further, Robbins took a shellacking not just at my site (390 comments, very few of them favorable), but also at reader Maggie Clark’s site, and even at Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Dish, where a number of readers went after him. 

Since Hipster Robbins has a fulminating case of Maru’s Syndrome (“When I see a box, I cannot help but enter”), he was compelled to respond in all three places (see my original post for his response to me). He may be hip, but not he’s not savvy enough to learn the First Rule of Blogging: “Do not keep defending yourself when you’re criticized.” He’s also flouted the Second Rule of Blogging: “When a number of people go after you independently, and you respond that they’ve all misunderstood you, it is likely that you’re either wrong or that you didn’t write clearly.”

At any rate, Robbins couldn’t leave well enough alone, and has responded to critics on The Dish. He’s still banging the drum about how un-serious we are, how we misunderstood him, and that religion is certainly not about the literalism of scripture. I’m not going to reprise his arguments except for two of them, for I suspect we’re going to hear this guy whining about New Atheists for some time to come.

I’ll start by noting that Robbins took me to task by saying that I can’t tell the difference between metaphor and allegory, and was simply wrong when I said that people read the Bible metaphorically. But I’ll be damned if there’s a substantive difference between them when you’re talking about the stories of the Bible not as literal truths, but as standing for something else. Here are the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “metaphor” and “allegory”. Note that an allegory (Robbins’s preferred usage) can be seen an extended metaphor (my emphasis):

Allegory:

1. The use of symbols in a story, picture, etc., to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one; symbolic representation. Also: the interpretation of this.
2. A story, picture, etc. which uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one; a symbolic representation; an extended or continued metaphor.

Metaphor:

1.  Figure of speech in which the name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that which it is literally applicable; an instance of this, a metaphorical expression.
2.  Something regarded as representative or suggestive of something else, esp. as a material emblem of an abstract quality, condition, notion, etc.; a symbol, a token. Freq with for, of.

I do note that “metaphor” can also mean a single word or phrase that stands for something else, as when one says “She was beside herself”. Nevertheless, if it makes Robbins or the Sophisticated Theologians™ happy, I’ll be glad to use “allegory.” The point is that we all know what Robbins was saying: the Bible stories weren’t to be taken literally, but meant something else: moral lessons, observations about life, and so on.

And so on to his first claim at The Dish (Robbins’s words are indented):

Claim #1: No sophisticated believer is a literalist

Which brings me to the readers who write in to inform me of the most obvious fact in the world, that some religious people believe crazy shit. (Although I have to laugh at the trend of quoting the extraordinarily metaphor-rich Jonathan Edwards to prove this.) One of your readers comments:

“When Robbins writes: “Of course the dead in Christ don’t intervene with God to help you find your car keys, and of course the Bible is inconsistent and muddled (no matter what the Southern Baptists claim to believe), and of course I find it extremely unlikely that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse”, that’s when he gets to criticize atheist focus.”

I guess I get to criticize atheist focus, then, since I’ve explicitly written that such beliefs are superstitious nonsense, often, in Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and Commonweal. (The same reader has failed to note that “austere abdication of metaphysical premises” is a quote from David Bentley Hart in which he is praising science for its abdication.) I had assumed it was obvious that Origen and Augustine would hardly have taken the trouble to deny literalist readings of the Bible if such readings did not exist. And some of the more idiotic beliefs held by American Christians (such as young-earth creationism), are, of course, based on no readings of the Bible at all.

Let’s take the colonial American preacher Jonathan Edwards first. He may have used metaphor in his sermons, but he certainly believed in the God of the Bible, as you can see in his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry god,” delivered in Enfield, Connecticut in 1741. Here’s a famous passage:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

. . . Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: “Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.”

Yes, of course the “spider” bit is metaphorical—actually, if we’re precise, it’s a simile—but what is not metaphorical is the idea of an angry god who will send you to hell if you don’t repent your sins.  And of course the “slender thread” keeping you from hell is also metaphorical, but the whole point of this passage is to tell the listeners that they’ll roast eternally if they sin. Hell is NOT a metaphor here, nor is the idea that God is angry. There was a reason why many of Edwards’s audience wept bitterly during his sermons.

What kind of game is Robbins playing when he fobs off stuff like this as metaphorical just because it contains a few metaphors?

Further, if Robbins denies all Biblical claims “superstitious nonsense,” then why is he a Christian? Does he believe that Christ is both God’s divine son and God at the same time? Does he believe that Jesus was crucified and then resurrected? If he believes none of this, then I have no idea what he means by calling himself a Christian, or even religious. By all means let him tell us explicitly what he believes. (I’m not holding my breath.)

Third, it’s palpably obvious to anyone who reads the Church fathers that many, if not almost all of them, took the major contentions of scripture literally, including the divinity of Jesus, his birth from a virgin, his resurrection, God’s instantaneous creation of all plants and animals, as well as of humans, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve and the Fall, and the inherited sinfulness of humans.  This is literalism, pure and simple, andI have posted about this many times (see here and here for instance). Early theologians may not have believed literally in Jonah’s ingestion by a large fish, of Lot’s wife turning into sodium chloride, but they were all literalists about some things—the major claims of Christianity as set out in the New Testament.

Finally, Robbins says this: “And some of the more idiotic beliefs held by American Christians (such as young-earth creationism), are, of course, based on no readings of the Bible at all.”  Is the man insane? Claims of a young earth come directly from totting up the “begats” given in the Bible, for the Bible provides a largely unbroken lineage of ancestors and descendants up to historical times. From this, Archbishop Ussher calculated that the world began in 4004 B.C.  And he was not alone. As Wikipedia notes about Biblical chronology, after recounting how Ussher did his calculations:

Ussher’s proposed date of 4004 BC differed little from other Biblically based estimates, such as those of Jose ben Halafta (3761 BC),Bede (3952 BC), Ussher’s near-contemporary Scaliger (3949 BC), Johannes Kepler (3992 BC) or Sir Isaac Newton (c. 4000 BC). Ussher’s specific choice of starting year may have been influenced by the then-widely-held belief that the Earth’s potential duration was 6,000 years (4,000 before the birth of Christ and 2,000 after), corresponding to the six days of Creation, on the grounds that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). This view continued to be held as recently as AD 2000, six thousand years after 4004 BC.

No readings of the Bible at all? In fact, the notion that the Earth was young comes largely from a literalistic reading of the Bible, and from calculations based on it. When Robbins makes a statement that palpably false, he is either completely ignorant of the history of Christianity, or he is dissimulating.

And of course creationism itself—the instantaneous appearance of all species (or “kinds”) by God’s fiat—comes directly from reading Genesis.

Creationism is based on no readings of the Bible at all? Really?

Claim #2: Atheists neglect “the best arguments for God”

Robbins notes:

But the New Atheists did not write books that simply attacked creationism. They wrote books that purport to challenge theistic belief as such. They therefore have a responsibility to address the best cases for God, not the dullest. When Dennett asks if super-God created God, and if super-duper-God created super-God, he is simply revealing a lack of acquaintance with the intellectual traditions of the major religions. If you want to argue against something, you have to understand what you’re arguing against. That’s axiomatic.

You know, it would be easier for us to argue against concepts of God if people like Hart and Robbins would tell us precisely what they mean by God. If they simply mean something nebulous, like “Ground of Being,” something that is ineffable but sustains everything (and is divine), then it is up to them to adduce evidence for that, which means being explicit about what God is, what God does, and what the world would be like without Him/Her/It.  If they can’t provide evidence, what reason do we have to take them seriously, or engage them in argument? This is not, after all, an argument about philosophy, but an argument about an existence claim.  The “best case for God,” therefore, comes down to this: “the case for God that has the strongest evidence behind it.” An “intellectual tradition,” as anyone with two neurons to rub together knows, is not the same thing as evidence.  But theologians seem to lack that second neuron.

Since neither Robbins, nor Hart, nor any other Sophisticated Theologian™ or Hipster Poet has produced any evidence for God that would convince someone who wasn’t already a believer or an incipient believer, we needn’t take their claims seriously. The reason people like Robbins sneer at the New Atheists’ call for evidence is because believers don’t have any.