Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God" (3)

(Cont'd)

Armstrong thinks that whilst the new atheists have a distorted view of the what true religion means and accordingly regard all monotheistic religions evil, the religious fundamentalists have an equally "exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil" . This plays directly into the hands of the new atheists and make their job that much easier. Thus the new atheists never discuss the works of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich. In Armstrong's view, "unlike Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate" . (CG 293) She agrees with Haught that the new atheists have failed to confront their enemy at its strongest and thus "their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth"  (ibid  63). She thinks them "morally and intellectually conservative" (CG 293). She says, "Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work." (CG 293-294)

Whilst she criticizes the new atheists, she finds that one of them has a point. i.e. the views of Dawkins. who she says argues that "we are moral beings because the virtuous behavior of our ancestors probably helped to ensure their survival" and that "altruism was not divinely inspired but was simply the result of an accidental mutation that programmed our forbears to behave more generously and co-operatively than others." She agrees with Dawkins when he argues that there are many such "blessed" evolutionary misfirings in human behavior, one of which being 'the urge to kindness--to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity" ( The God Delusion 221).  She says that "it is characteristic of our humanity to take something basic and instinctual and transform it in such a way that it transcends the purely pragmatic" e.g cooking is refined into haute cuisine, our ability to run and jump is developed into ballet and athletics, our ability to communicate in words is developed into poetry. She thinks that we have done something similar with this altruism that Dawkins finds. "As Confucius pointed out, they have found that when they practised it 'all day and every night', it elevated human life to the realm of holiness and gave practitioners intimations of transcendence.". I think Armstrong is right with regard to one of the many possible origins of how religion came about.

Armstrong strongly disapproves the way in which the religious fundamentalists and the new atheists fail to talk to each other. "In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of view with atheists". She thinks that the ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach; Bultmann, Tillich and Rahner were all influenced by Heidegger. (McGrath The Twilight of Atheism 93). She finds that it would probably be most difficult to dialogue fruitfully with the likes of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchins "because their theology is so rudimentary.". (CG 294). But she thinks that the theologians and the clergy are partly to blame for the fact that many laymen are unable to deal with the new atheists. She says, "modern theology is not always easy reading. It would be helpful if theologians tried to present it in an attractive, accessible way to enable congregants to keep up with the latest discussions and the new insights of biblical scholarship, which rarely reaches the pew." (CG 295).  I can't agree more with her there. I have long been such a victim.

Armstrong expresses her fears that our world is already "dangerous polarized" and thinks that "we do not need another divisive ideology". She advises moderation from both sides because 'the history of fundamentalism shows that when these movements are attacked, they nearly always become more extreme." For this reason, she thinks that "the atheist assault is likely to drive the fundamentalists to even greater commitment to creationism, and their contemptuous dismissal of Islam is a gift to Muslim extremists, who can use it to argue that the West is indeed intent on a new crusade." (CG 295)

Armstrong thinks that the problem with the new atheists is that they seem to rely exclusively on science and on reason to solve all problems which she thinks is insufficient. She thinks that we also need faith, intuition and an esthetic vision. She says: "Typical of the fundamentalist mindset is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead to the truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition and esthetic vision as well as on reason." She cites in her support first the physicist Paul Dirac who said that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. (Paul Davies The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning 1992 176) and then Roger Penrose, who believes that the creative mind breaks through into a Platonic realm of mathematical and esthetic forms: "Rigorous argument is usually the last step! Before that, one has to make many guesses, and for these, esthetic conviction are enormously important." ( Penrose The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Mind and the Laws of Physics 1989 421). Armstrong thinks that there are many situations in which we must put aside our reasoning and our logic and simply lay ourselves open to experience e.g. when we find ourselves in front of a work of art, we have to open our minds and allow it to carry it away and if we seek to relate intimately to another person, we have to be prepared to make ourselves vulnerable, "as Abraham did when he opened his heart and home to the three strangers at Mamre." (CG 295). She thinks that man has a natural but irresistible urge to explore the "ultimate" or "levels of truth that go beyond our normal experience." and that it is this "imperative" which has inspired the scientific as well as the religious quest. "We seek what Tillich called 'ultimate concern' that shapes our life and gives it meaning." (CG 295). For Dawkins and Harris, their ultimate concern is the triumph of reason but theirs is a very different kind of reason that that of Socrates, "who used his reasoning powers to bring his dialogue partners into a state of unknowing" (CG 295). She prefers the kind of reasoning of Augustine and Aquinas, for whom "reason became intellectus, opening naturally to the divine." (CG 295). Today, we run the risk of a reason which seeks to destroy all rival claimants, instead of one which opens us to the possibility of transcendence. She agrees with Robert Bellah's view: "Those who feel they are...most fully objective in their assessment of reality are most in the power of deep unconscious fantasies" (Robert Bellah Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a post-traditional World 1970  254)

Armstrong is reminds us that at the forefront of our cutting edge physics, we are faced with uncertainties and terms which suggest our ignorance rather than knowledge, terms such as big bang, dark matter, black hole, dark energy etc, all metaphors that cannot be translated into fully comprehensive mathematical formulas. The latest is string theory in which scientists found certain mathematical formulas which seem able to accommodate fairly closely certain physical constants of our universe as found empirically by our scientists but its theorists admit that their theories cannot be "either proven or refuted experimentally" and some have even claimed that "no adequate experiment can be devised  to test what is a mathematical explanation of the universe (George Steiner Is Science Nearing Its Limits ? xxii-xxiii) and Richard Feynman has dismissed it as "crazy nonsense" (ibid xxii).  According to Mark Vernon (After Atheism Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life 2007 49-51), the wonder of modern cosmology stems in part from the physicists inability to answer all questions and some physicist think that we are on the verge of another paradigm shift (Vernon ibid 45-47) and even Stephen Hawkings is no longer so sure that we can find a Theory of Everything which will enable us to look into the mind of God. Paul Davies speaks of his delight in science with its unanswered and perhaps unanswerable problems: "Why did we come to exist 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang? Why are the laws of electromagnetism or gravitation as they are? Why these laws? What are we doing here? And in particular, how come we are able to understand the world? Why is it that we're equipped with intellect that can unpick all this wonderful cosmic order and make sense of it? It's truly astonishing." (Paul Davies in an interview with Bel Mooney in Mooney Devout Skeptics 2003 57)  He thinks, "it may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion" (God and the New Physics ix) and he is still asking the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing" . Although we now have more information than our ancestors could have dreamed of, but we do not all dismiss this query as redundant or pointless, like Dawkins.. To Armstrong, "human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve, pit themselves against the dark world of uncreated reality and find that living with such unknowing is a source of astonishment and delight" (CG 297) The unknown is always a source of awe, the primal religious emotion and the essence of our sense of the holy or the sacred, something numinous, something felt to be objective and greater than ourselves and upon whom we depend, according Rudolf Otto. (The Idea of the Holy 1917)

Armstrong also deals with a movement in Western thought which has developed since the 1980s: postmodernism and which she relates to religion. She thinks that insofar as postmodernists think that what we call reality is constructed by our mind and consequently that all human understanding is interpretation rather than the acquisition of accurate, objective information, it is heir to David Hume and Immanuel Kant. To the postmodernist, "all our knowledge is relative, subjective and fallible rather than certain and absolute and truth is inherently ambiguous" and so, "no single vision can be sovereign. In addition, received ideas that are the products of a particular historical and cultural milieu must therefore be stringently deconstructed but such an analysis must not be based on any absolute principle. Above all, there is no assurance that we will ever arrive at or even approximate to a wholly accurate version of the truth. The postmodernist is convinced that instead of ideologies mirroring external conditions, the world is profoundly affected by the ideology that human beings impose upon it. We are not forced by sensory data to adopt a particular point of view and because of that we have a choice in what we as well as an immense responsibility. (CG 297). According to Armstrong, "postmodernists are particularly suspicious of "Big Stories." They regard Western history as scarred by the ceaseless compulsion to impose a totalizing system on the world"; If it is theological, it resulted in crusades and persecution. If it is scientific, economic, ideological and political, then it resulted in "the technological domination of nature and the socio-political subjection of others in slavery, genocide, colonialism, anti-Semitism and the oppression of women and other minorities.". Like Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, the postmodernists seek to deflate such beliefs but without substituting any absolute story of their own.

As Jean-Francois Lyotard said, postmodernism is the "incredulity toward the grand narratives (grand récits) eg. the "modern God", omnipotent, omniscient, watching over the world, working all things to his own purposes. But postmodernists are also opposed to any atheism which makes absolute totalistic claims. Thus Jacques Derrida warns us that we must be careful about all "theological prejudices", not only to in an overt religious context but also in all metaphysics, even if atheist because he is "deeply suspicious" about all fixed, binary polarities that characterize "modern thought" . and think that the atheist/theist divide is too simple, like Freud, who saw religion as Oedipal terror and Marx who called religion the opiate of the oppressed.

To Derrida, a fixed and final denial of God on metaphysical grounds is as culpable as any dogmatic religious "theology" because it is also form of grand récit. He says that although he is a secularized Jew and may pass for an atheist, he has a great interest in Eckhart, prays all the time and has a messianic hope for a better world and inclines to the view that since no absolute certainty is within our grasp, we should hesitate to make declarative statements of either belief or unbelief, for the sake of peace. Central to Derrida's thought is the idea of "différance" which is neither a word nor a concept but only a quasi-transcendental possibility, a sort of difference or otherness, that lies within a word or idea such as "God". He denies the possibility of ever finding a single, secure meaning in any text and as thus been called a "negative theologian". For Eckhart, "this "différance" was the God beyond God, a new but unknowable metaphysical ground that was inseparable from the human self'. But for Derrida, this "différance" is "only quasi-transcendental,: it is a potential something that we cannot see but which makes us aware that we may have to qualify or even unsay anything we say or deny of God" (CG 298). If I understand it correctly, the postmodernist always glides along the surface of words, careful not to fall within it, because he thinks that words are slippery and may often get us into trouble if we believe that it completely encompasses a certain absolute reality, which to the postmodernist, is always elusive. We can only approach "reality" obliquely by examining carefully the historical, intellectual, psychological, social, cultural, religious context in which a word  is used, and hope that we may get a glimpse of "reality" or "truth" by comparing the different possible meaning of that word or concept in different contexts but his own conclusion must always be "tentative" and is always open to the possibility of further revision in the light of new information. In other words, "truth" or "reality" is never absolutely fixed for all time, peoples, places and is thus an "open" concept, always something in the process of being discovered.

Armstrong believes that Derrida is haunted, especially in his later writings,by the potential and the lure of an open future through affirming what he calls the "undeconstructibles" which are not new absolutes because they do not yet exist but are something we weep and pray for e.g justice is something undeconstructible which is never fully realized in the actual circumstances of daily life but which informs all legal speculation. ("The Force of Law 1989): something which calls us, seems something within our grasp, but ultimately eludes us and yet we go on trying to incarnate it in our legal systems. Other "deconstructibles"  include gift, forgiveness and friendship, democracy to come, And even the idea of God has the potential to become another such "deconstructible", "a term often used in the past to set a limit to human thought and endeavor" may become for the postmodern philosopher "the desire beyond desire, a memory and a promise that is, of its very nature, indefinable."(CG 299). The first one to do so is Mark C Taylor who wrote  Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (1984), the slash in the title signifying a Derridian hesitation before settling for either God or godlessness and who thought that the Death of God movement in the 1960s a deconstruction of traditional religion. He criticized Thomas J Altizer ( The Gospel of Christian Atheism 1966 with William Hamilton Radical Theology and the Death of God 1966) for being stuck in the "modern dialectic" in which things were either dead or alive, absent or present because to him, religion was present when it seemed absent. The Italian postmodernist Gianni Vattimo ( Belief tr. Luca D'Isanto 1999 , After Christianity tr. Luca D'Isanto 1999  Nihilism and Emancipation  ed. Santiago Zabala 2004)  argues that from the beginning, religion had recognized that it was an essentially interpretative discourse and proceeded by endlessly deconstructing its sacred texts to liberate itself from metaphysical orthodoxy"and advocates what he calls "weak thought" to counter the aggressively triumphalist certainty of the fundamentalists and the new atheist. To him metaphysics is dangerous because it makes absolute claims for either God or reason. He says:" Not all metaphysics have been violent but all violent people of great dimension have been metaphysical." ("Towards a Non-Religious Christianity" in Caputo & Vattimo, After the Death of God 2007 43) . e.g. Hitler was not content with hating the Jews in his vicinity but created a grand récit about the metaphysical claims about Jews in general. He is aware of the power motive behind all absolutes. "When someone wants to tell me the absolute truth, it is because he wants to put me under his control.". To Vattimo, though both atheism and theism makes absolute claims, there can no longer be any absolute truths, only interpretations. (After Christianity 17) because when we survey human history, we can no longer find any inevitable and unilinear progress towards human liberation nor can we trust in any perfect knowledge of reality acting in accordance of which will guarantee our emancipation. All we find are the  multiple discourse of the historicity, contingencies, finitude of all religious, ethical and political values, including our own. (Vattimo The Transparent Society  tr. David Webb 1992 2-9) Vattimo wishes to break down the barriers between theism and atheism and thinks the sooner or later, society may re-embrace religion but it would no longer be the old  "modern religion" but one based more on love and charity than on so-called "objective truth".. He regards the old alliance between Church and State, first set up by Emperor Constantin is a Christian aberration. He recalls that formerly religious truths generally emerged from people interacting with each others rather than by papal edict and recalls Jesus saying "When two or three are gathered together in my name, I will be in the midst of them" and the old classic hymn, "Where there is love, there is also God." (Towards a Non-Religious Christianity in Caputo & Vattimo After the Death of God  45)

Armstrong thinks that there is a third advocate of some kind of postmodern religion, the American philosopher John D Caputo (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion
without Religion 1997, On Religion 2001, The Weakness of God: A
Theology of the Event 2006), whose thoughts are heavily influenced by Heidegger and the post-modern French thinker Gilles Deleuze (The Logic of Sense 1990 with Felix Guatarri What is Philosophy? 1994) and Jacques Derrida ( Of Grammatology tr. Gayatri Spivak 1997). He fully endorses the desire of Thomas J Altizer (The Gospel of Christian Atheism 1966 with William Hamilton Radical Theology and the Death of God 1966) and Paul van Buren  (The Secular Meaning of the Gospel 1963) to deconstruct the "modern God" but wishes to advocate "weak thought" and to transcend the warring polarities of theism and atheism. Although he appreciates the Tillich's emphasis on the symbolic nature of religious truth, he is wary of calling God the "ground of being" because doing so may jeopardise the process of endless flux and becoming which he thinks is essential to life by setting absolute limits on what is possible and what is not. (Atheism, A/Theology and the Postmodern Condition in Michael Martin The Cambridge Companion to Atheism 2007 277). He thinks that both atheist and theist should abandon the modern lust for absolute certainty. For this reason the Death of God movement should itself die because no state of affairs is permanent. To him the atheistic idea of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx are merely "perspectives...constructions and fictions of grammar" and the enlightenment secularism which wants "to reduce religion to something other than itself, eg. a distorted desire for one's mother or to a way of keeping the ruling authorities in power...is one more story told by people with historically limited imaginations, with contingent conceptions of reason and history, of economics with labor, of nature and human nature, of desire, sexuality, and women and of God, religion and faith" (On Religion 60) . Although the Enlightenment had its own rigor, he thinks that postmodernity should be "a more enlightened Enlightenment that is no longer taken in by the dream of Pure Objectivity" (ibid 60) and should open doors to "another way of thinking about faith and reason" to achieve " a redescription of reason that is more reasonable than the transhistorical Rationality of the Enlightenment"  (ibid 63). Following Derrida, he thinks that God is the desire beyond desire.( "Spectral Hermeneutics, on the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event" in After the Death of God 57-59). For him, the question is no longer "Does God exist" nor "Does Desire Exist" but "What do we desire?".  Desire is in the space between what exists and what does not yet exist and addresses all that we are and are not, everything we know and what we do not know. Like Denys and Aquinas, Caputo does not see negative theology as a deeper, more authoritative truth . It simply emphasizes unknowing "in the sense that we really don't know" ("The Power of the Powerless" ibid 115-116). For him, religious truth is a truth without knowledge ( On Religion  115) and adapted Derrida's différance to create his theology of the event, distinguishing between a name, such as "God", "justice" or "democracy" and what he calls an event, something which is astir in that name but is never fully realized but the "event" within the name inspires us, turns things upside down, making us weep and pray for what is "to come". The name is "a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable, if evolving structure, while the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways" (Special Hermeneutic 47) We pray for what is to come, not for what already exists. "The event does not require "belief" in a static, unchanging deity who "exists" but inspires us to make what is "astir" in the name of God, e.g. absolute beauty, peace, justice and selfless love, a reality in the world. " (CG 300-301)

Armstrong thinks that such postmodernist ideas about what is required in the new religion may sound strange and unfamiliar to people accustomed to "modern" religion but in fact, they hark back to some pretty ancient ideas. Both Vattimo and Caputo insist that their ideas are "primordial, perennial ideas with a long pedigree" (CG 302) His idea that religion is interpretive reminds us of the old rabbinic maxim: "What is the Torah? It is the interpretation of Torah" and when he emphasize the communal nature of religious truth and the primacy of charity, we are reminded of the rabbi's repeated insistence: "When two or three study Torah together, the Shekhinah ( the Holy Spirit) is in their midst", the story of Emaus, and the communal experience of liturgy. Caputo sees Anselm's "ontological proof" as "autodeconstructive": "Whatever you say God is, God is more. The very constitution of the idea is deconstructive of any such construction...the very formula that describes God is that there is no formula with which God can be described" ( Power of the Powerless  147) and when Caputo argues that the "event" requires a response rather than "belief", he echoes the rabbis definition of scripture as miqra, a summons to action. (CG 302) Vattimo expresses a point of view which I think Armstrong agrees. He says; "If modern atheism is the rejection of a modern God, then the delimitation of modernity opens up another possibility, less the resuscitation of pre-modern theism than the chance of something beyond both the theism and the atheism of modernity."  (Atheism/A/Theology 283). She thinks that both Vattimo and Caputo have rightly stressed the importance of the apophatic, which was once "central to religion" but has since  tended to be submerged in the positivist discourse of modernity. She thinks that its re-emergence in a new form speaks of the perennial desire of humanity for a form of transcendence towards the "unknowing" and perhaps of the "unknown". To her, the "modern" yearning for purely notional, absolute truth may have been an aberration. (CG 302) Although she does not mention it, I think that she might be influenced in part by the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead. She concludes the chapter by asking a number of questions pointing to what may be new possibilities: "if athesim was a product of modernity, now that we are entering a post-modern" phase, will this too, like the modern God, become a thing of the past? Will the growing appreciation of the limitations of human knowledge--which is just as much a part of the contemporary intellectual scene as atheistic certainty--give rise to a new kind of apophatic theology? And how best can we move beyond pre-modern theism into a perception of 'God' that truly speaks to all the complex realities and needs of our time?"

(To be cont'd)