I was going to post on a new paper about squirrel behavior, but Matthew has a nice post in line about fossils, so we’ll do that today. Squirrels can come later. Right now I want to talk about an argument we atheists hear constantly. It goes something like this:
“You’re as bad as the fundamentalists you criticize; in fact, you atheists are like fundamentalists. You’re always going after strawmen caricatures of religion: those proffered by Biblical literalists. If you’re going to engage seriously with religion, you have to deal with its best arguments for God. Since you never do that, we needn’t take you seriously.”
When I first heard this, I took it seriously, and began reading about The Best Arguments for God. It turned out that “best” was really a synonym for “most nebulous”, or, sometimes, “those arguments for a God who can’t really be defined.” David Bentley Hart and his new book was often touted as one of the Best Arguments for God, but it turned out to be a distillation of what he saw as the common element in all religions’ concepts of God: a non-anthropomorphic Ground of Being who loves us and sustains everything by His ineffable presence. In other words, a Universal Force permeating everything, outside it all yet immanent in it all. Oh, and He’s—Hart apparently knew something about God’s genitals—”Love,” too.
Oy vey.
After a while, I realized what some of you have known for a long time: there are no best arguments for God, at least as theologians characterize them. What they mean by “best” are simply arguments, invariably couched in highfalutin academic prose, for a God about whom nothing can be said (although they seem to find plenty to say about it!). And I slowly realized that this characterization of “best arguments” arose not because religionists have gained more knowledge about God, but simply because their original concepts of god have been increasingly refuted by reason and lack of evidence. The most Sopisticated Theologians™ have thus retreated to a God Who Cannot Be Proven. It’s the “best” concept simply because it’s the least capable of refutation. In such a way theologians render their beliefs watertight, immune to evidence.
Then they pretend, as did the Eastern Orthodox priest Fr. Aidan Kimel, that this nebulous god is the historically consistent idea of God, one distorted by into an anthropomorphic and theistic God only in the 20th century. Well, that’s bullpuckey. I’ve read some of the early theologians, and while some of them see parts of the Bible metaphorically (but also, at the same time, literally), and have a less anthropomorphic God than some modern fundamentalists, they nevertheless were,by and large, Biblical literalists who simply pretended to divine what the Biblical stories meant. As far as I can tell, the going concept of God among early theologians was, by and large, that of a bodiless mind, some gaseous vertebrate who had desires, wished to promulgate a moral code, and did stuff. And that is, historically, what believers thought as well.
It’s no accident that people like Aquinas thought that nonbelievers should be killed for heresy. If you can’t say anything about God, why should you be killed for not believing in him, or in the doctrines he supposedly promulgates?
The problems with the Best Argument for God argument are exemplified by Kimel. When I wrote a post (“An Eastern Orthodox priest says I know nothing of God“) criticizing his view that he (or rather St. Anthony the Great) had the correct notion of God, that of an emotionless being lacking feelings and an ability to be affected by humans, and that everybody else’s God was dead wrong, Kimel could not help but enter. He left the following two comments on my site before flouncing for good:
Fr Aidan Kimel
Like all bloggers I rejoice when my articles get cited and discussed on other blogs. We live for the traffic. So thanks, Jerry.
Now to the question of anthropomorphism and my quotation from St Anthony, one of the great ascetics of the Church. His insistence on the dispassionate and immutable nature of God is representative of the consensual tradition of both the patristic and medieval Church, both in East and West. This isn’t news. This is Theology 101. All you have to do is to pick up an older (pre-20th century) volume of dogmatic theology (whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or scholastic Protestant) and look under the locus devoted to the divine attributes, and you will see attributes like eternity, immutability, simplicity–each of which rule out the kind of anthropomorphism that concerns you. Or to put it in the language of St Thomas Aquinas, there ain’t no potentiality in the Godhead–God is pure Act.
The Eastern tradition (which was the dominant theological tradition in the Church during the 1st millennium) begins its theological reflection with the via negativa: we must first deny of God all creaturely characteristics before we can say anything positive about him. Or as St Dionysius puts it, God is Beyond Being.
You should know this, Jerry, and the only reason I can think that you do not is because you have restricted your theological reading to 20th century evangelical fundamentalists, who are imprisoned in their literalistic reading of the Scriptures. But evangelicalism is a post-Reformation, minority phenomenon and hardly representative of the wider Christian tradition. Until you acquaint yourself with real Christian theology, you will remain vulnerable to the charge that you don’t know what you are talking about.
I see you grew up in Arlington, Virginia. Did you by any chance attend Woodmont Elementary School. One of my classmates was Suzie Coyne. A relative of yours?
By the way, I never claimed that God didn’t have properties that transcended those of humans: eternity and the like. Kimel doesn’t know what “anthropomorphic” means: having some traits resembling those of humans. And I maintain that, historically, God did have some humanlike traits for both regular believers and theologians: emotions, beliefs, and desires. (And yes, “Suzie” was my sister.)
*****
Does it matter, whatever I were to write in response? Of course not. But if you really want to explore the question of apophatic/cataphatic theology and the nature of theological language I can certainly recommend books for you to read. I’d probably first point you to the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas. For an outstanding presentation of Aquinas’s views on this question, see *Speaking the Incomprehensible God* by Gregory Rocca.
All I am saying is that if atheists wish to engage in SERIOUS debate about theism or Christianity, then they need to learn what ecumenical, mainstream, catholic Christianity really does believe and teach.
This is just commonsense. Before you can critique anything, you have to understand what it is you are going to critique. Otherwise, all you are doing is speaking out of ignorance. It’s easy to set up strawmen and then knock them down.
I’m not trying to convince you to believe in God, much less Christianity. I’m just asking you folks to stop caricaturing the Christian understanding of God. Is that too much to ask?
Daniel Dennett’s first rule: “You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’”
That’s all I’m asking of you guys. Why is this an unreasonable expectation?
The refutation of all this is in the Bible, where God is clearly anthropomorphic: full of emotions, desires, and prescriptions: usually bad ones. He’s jealous, narcissistic, peremptory, and, in the case of Job, simply cruel, like a kid who burns ants with a magnifying glass. Is the Bible wrong about God? If so, Fr. Kimel, tell us how you know. And are you telling us that no theologian before the twentieth century thought of God as having emotions, or being affected by humans, or being susceptible to prayer?
In fact, this is a box we needn’t enter, for the whole idea of a Best Argument for God is specious. If you’re going to make one, you first must show that there is a God. It’s not self-evident, after all, and—just as we scientists must admit the logical possibility of a God—so religionists must admit the logical possibility of no God. The onus on someone making an existence claim is to support it with evidence. I can give evidence for evolution, or the Big Bang. If I were to posit that was once a pantheon of gods, as the ancient Greeks believed and the Hindus do now, and not just one god, there is no need to take that polytheism seriously without evidence. The same goes for monotheism.
You could make the Best Arguments for fairies as well as for God. I would tell Fr. Kimel that fairies live in my garden (why is it always garden fairies in these arguments?), and that they make the plants grow. He wouldn’t believe me, of course, because I can’t show him evidence. But then I’d pull out my hole card: that the fairies are simply ineffable plant spirits which one can’t see, but without them the plants can’t grow: they sustain the vegetation. They are the Ground of Garden. He still wouldn’t believe me: he’d say I was making it up. I’d then tell him that he was a Fairy Fundamentalist and that he hadn’t attacked the Best Argument for Fairies.
But I needn’t go on; you get the point. Before we have to address The Best Argument for God, people like Kimel have to adduce evidence that there is a God: some kind of supernatural being without which the universe would be very different. The burden is on them to show us that there is something to argue about. None of them do that—not Hart, not Kimel, not Plantinga. And so we needn’t take them seriously.
The best argument against The Best Argument for God is to adduce Hitchens’s Razor:
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
or its alternative, which I call Dawkins’s Corollary (see link above):
“The onus is on you to say why, the onus is not on the rest of us to say why not.”
In response to Kimel’s claim, “All I am saying is that if atheists wish to engage in SERIOUS debate about theism or Christianity, then they need to learn what ecumenical, mainstream, catholic Christianity really does believe and teach,” I would say this: “All I am saying is that if theists wish to engage in SERIOUS debate about the existence and nature of god, then they need to learn what science tells us about the use of reason and evidence to support existence claims.”
So here is my response to Fr. Kimel: “If you think there is a supernatural ‘being,’ first give me convincing evidence that it exists. And that evidence cannot be your personal revelation, or that of earlier theologians, but must be something that nearly all rational, objective, and skeptical observers would agree on. If you adduce Scripture as your evidence, then you’re also adducing the very kind of god you reject. Until you give me evidence as strong as that which I’d give you if you asked for evidence for evolution, I needn’t engage you or take your arguments for god seriously.”
Finally, why are theologians’ concepts of God more meaningful than the concepts accepted by regular believers? Seriously! What secret vein of knowledge can theologians tap that isn’t accessible to a religious layperson?
