I began writing this post by saying that it would be unusually short. However, I find it difficult to say what I want to say in a brief compass, so I thought I’d add this introduction to make it just a bit longer!
On this morning’s Guardian Comment is Free page is the latest in Julian Baggini’s series on the new heathenism. As the series progresses Baggini approaches closer and closer to the new atheist position. As I understand it an important aspect of the new atheist approach to religion is to be forthright in the criticism of religion, thus being less concerned about the offence that such criticism may cause, and, at the same time, to insist that supporters of religion state their position clearly, and with as little ambiguity and slippage of meaning as possible.
Baggini’s new article is entitled: “‘You just don’t understand my religion’ is not good enough.” This is a move that John Haught made in his debate with Jerry Coyne, where he tells Jerry that he doesn’t believe in “Jerry’s god” either. However, the point really is that the religious believer must make clear precisely what he or she means by the locution ‘god’ right up front, and very few believers do this. As Antony Flew says in his famous book, God and Philosophy, the identity of God must be clear from the outset, otherwise the argument is really about nothing. However, not only did Haught not identify the god he was speaking about, he really poisoned the well from the start by saying that only through personal transformation can one come to know God. In other words, Haught is saying, nothing that Jerry is about to say can in any sense be about God, because Coyne, by definition, has not had the religious experience of personal transformation which is a necessary condition for understanding what we mean when we speak of God.
But Flew’s point still stands:
This is the question: ‘What is it that all these magnificent attributes are supposed conceivably to be the attributes of?’; or ‘How is it considered that it would be possible to pick out God, in this sense of God, as an object of discourse? [God and Philosophy, 2.10]
In what Haught said about God in the debate, he referred ambiguously to that towards which everything is evolving as their end, or the loving presence which wants the universe to become itself, or the one who is experienced by the person who has undergone a transformative experience, but at no point did he offer a clear indication of what, when he used the word, the word ‘god’ was to mean.
This puts Julian Baggini’s point in a particularly striking way, for this is precisely what Baggini is saying. The trouble is that Baggini is really, at the same time, still very leary of the new atheists. He tells us, for instance, that
Terry Eagleton’s quip that reading Richard Dawkins on theology is like listening to someone “holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The British Book of Birds” is a funny and memorable contribution to a debate that is rarely amusing and frequently forgettable.
But in context the quip was truly silly and not funny at all — nor was it meant to be. It was intended as a mordant criticism of Dawkins’ conception of God, and he goes on to say, as though it were at all relevant:
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences
between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?
The obligation lies with the religious believer to define god in such a way that we can argue intelligibly about it. And Dawkins’ definition is itself surely not far off the mark, whether or not he has read Aquinas in depth, or compared Aquinas’ epistemology with that of Duns Scotus.
If the word ‘god’ is so ambiguous that we need to read in depth every theologian that has ever written on the subject, then there is no way that the critique of religion can even begin. We must simply all become theologians. The question is whether theology is to be taken seriously or not, and that depends entirely on the answer to the question of the existence of God. Haught said rather loftily that he didn’t believe in Coyne’s god, but at no point did he really indicate what kind of being God may be taken to be. Indeed, he says at one point that all we can do in the presence of the infinite is to remain silent. This bears a decided resemblance to the quotation from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, which is placed under a picture of a googly-eyed archbishop:
The archbishop of Canterbury described his faith as a 'silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark'
Neither the archbishop’s oracular description of faith, nor Haught’s relapse into a very similar silence will do, if we are trying to discern whether or not belief in God can in any sense be thought to be reasonable or true.
And that, of course, is precisely what Baggini is saying, and while I think it is true that atheists and believers have to a large extent been talking past each other, the main reason for this is that religious believers tend not to define God in a way that serves to pick out a possible being, belief in whose existence is rationally justified. But Baggini wants to say more than that. Take the following, for instance:
It is always possible to think there is a fog when really it’s just that your glasses have steamed up. But I’m not only prepared to allow that an intelligent religious faith might have a big fat mystery at its heart, I think it must have. Only the most juvenile gods are like super-humans we can truly understand. If there is a God, it must surely [be such that it] passeth all understanding.
He goes on to say that believers have to pay a price for this mystery. Indeed, he says, quoting the archbishop:
If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, your faith is a kind of “silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark”, then think very carefully before you open your mouth.
But this simply won’t do. If faith is a “pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark,” then, I am afraid, opening your mouth simply won’t do, however carefully you think about it; and if God does pass all understanding, then it — whatever ’it’ refers to — is, after all, beyond all understanding, and cannot be put into words at all.
Baggini says that “[t]oo often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively.” But if, at the heart of faith, there is something that passes understanding, then there is nothing more to be said. The thing that distinguishes religious belief from a kind of pure, meditative spirituality, is that it is about something, and even if, with Tillich, we want to say that that something is not really a “thing” at all, but something beyond existence, if belief is to be belief that something is true, then it must have some ontological status, however that status is described. But if it does really disappear into mystery, then even saying as much as Tillich does about the “Being beyond Being” becomes meaningless twaddle. And what would a religion, at least an institutional religion, be, if it had no beliefs? But if those beliefs are to be based on something that disappears into mystery, then how are we to distinguish beliefs which are worthy of belief from those which are not?
I await with interest the coming articles in Baggini’s series on the new heathenism, but it seems to me that this is what the new atheists have been saying all along. So far as I can tell, people like Dawkins, Harris, Coyne, Hitchens, Dennett, Myers, and so on, have been demanding clarity from the religious. What is it that you believe? On what do you base your belief? Why should we believe what you believe on this basis, when others (say, Jews, Muslims and Hindus — since so far the new atheist challenge has been directed mainly towards Christianity) believe quite different things on arguably a similar basis?
Have the new atheists, say, to go no farther, failed to make themselves understood? I do not myself see why this should be thought to be right. Atheism itself is simply a denial that there are any grounds for religious belief. Atheists themselves cannot define the religious territory that they negate. The religious must do that, but to my knowledge, so far the religious have not provided anything substantive in reply, either in terms of a definition of what it is that religious believers believe, or in terms of the grounds that they offer for this belief. And, until they do so, atheists must await the religious response. God disappears — as in the most recent case of the John Haught – Jerry Coyne debate — in a puff of ineffability. But the religious, while in argument they resort to ineffability and mystery and vague expressions, eff the ineffable all the time. Haught did it in the same lecture, where he says Christians must stick to their understanding of God which is made manifest in Jesus as the self-emptying of God — which is the ineffable effed — but where he also says that the best expression of our encounter with the infinite is silence. He really can’t have it both ways.
But Baggini, who has already told his story about the new atheists, and is determined to stick to it, cannot justifiably begin with an implied criticism of the new atheists, when his article is really about the failure of religious believers to make their beliefs clear. Religion, traditionally, in the Western tradition, has been assumed to consist, not only in faith as trust, but in faith as propositional (creedal) belief, enumerable beliefs, and while it is true that defenders of religion have resorted to mystery and silence in response to criticism, the religions they represent continue to express their faith in statements of faith, catechisms, creeds, and moral prescriptions. Until religion retreats to a position of silence in the face of mystery, those beliefs are open to question and refutation.
Another way to escape criticism (which I do not intend to discuss here in any detail) is to retreat into culture, where religion is seen simply as a cultural human creation whose meaning is restricted to this life and this world, even as it speaks in terms of god or gods, the afterlife, heaven and hell. Such sophisticated ways of “believing” may pass the test of orthodoxy for some religious groups, but, in the end, whatever sophisticated believers may believe, most, as Aquinas recognised, would believe quite simply and straightforwardly, not having the time or opportunity or aptitude for the study of such mysteries. Those who speak for faith cannot be permitted the luxury of retreating into culture, any more than it is reasonable to take refuge in mystery. How the majority of religious believers believe, and as insititutions variously define and enumerate those beliefs, cannot simply be excluded by fiat. The retreat into supposed “sophistication” is as dubious a move as disappearing into the fog of mystery. This is why Jerry Coyne’s list of Catholic evils is as relevant to the debate about religion as is Dawkins’ fairly conservative definition of what he understands by the word ‘god’. “This is what most people believe” is not an irrelevant point to make in the argument with religion, just as “I don’t believe in your god either” is not an answer to the criticism that there is no evidence for such a being. The only answer that will do is: “This is what I mean by ‘god’. Here is the evidence for the reasonableness of belief in such a being.”
“In other words, Haught is saying, nothing that Jerry is about to say can in any sense be about God, because Coyne, by definition, has not had the religious experience of personal transformation which is a necessary condition for understanding what we mean when we speak of God.”
Oh Jesus, did Haught really say that? Has he never heard the term “special pleading?”
I’m afraid, by that same standard, Haught cannot dismiss my belief in the international leprechaun and martian peanut-butter conspiracy. He just hasn’t had the right personal transformation/traumatic brain injury yet. Poor Haught.
Well, Andrew, he didn’t come right out and say it, but that’s what it amounted to. If you say, as Haught did, that it is only possible to know or understand religious belief if you have been through a process of personal transformation, then anyone who dismisses religious belief is, by default, irrational, because they are dismissing what they cannot know or understand.
I’m sorry if it seemed as though I doubted the accuracy of your interpretation of Haught’s words. I was just baffled that he could pull such an old, pathetic trick by claiming a need for “personal transformation.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a theologian would resort to such childish trickery.
Andrew, no apology needed. While it may be childish trickery, this is fundamental theological lore, at least in Christianity. People are in a personal relationship with God, and just as any other personal relationship, it can be claimed that if you do not have a personal relationship with this person, then you cannot understand the person as a person. What theologians seem to miss is that, in order to speak about personal relationship with someone, you at least have to give good reasons for believing that that someone is not an imaginary friend. Haught gave no such reasons.
That was an eff-ing good post!
‘where religion is seen simply as a cultural human creation whose meaning is restricted to this life and this world’
I’ve just starting reading Religion without Revelation by Julian Huxley, in which he argues for something similar. If the words god, heaven etc where removed I’d be all for that development. And I wonder if some people need that option before they will reject unfounded belief.
Clarity of just what God is would be really nice. I’m constantly told I don’t get it or that I’m making a caricature of God, yet they talk of God in terms of agency. How can there be a civil conversation when it seems there’s no definite target to have a civil conversation about? Worse still, how can it be a civil conversation if each person has their own conception of what the target is and I’m meant to address *their* target?
What can I read, or who can I engage in conversation in, that will give me any capacity to be able to reject God without being told I’m ignorant? Because, as far as I can see, no matter what I’m forever being told that I’m wrong and don’t truly understand. It seems like an (unconscious) shell game…
Atheists themselves cannot define the religious territory that they negate.
Unless you meant something different from how I read what you wrote, I would say it’s more along the lines of we are not allowed to define religious territory. Despite the fact that the majority of atheists came from faith and are perfectly capable of understanding the basic tenants of ‘the nature of God.’ After all, some of us, myself included, were lay ministers, etc. and considered rather well-versed in their religious denomiations… And others, such as yourself, had a full, formal religious education and were professionals…
I, of course, reject this position taken by Haught and so many others. I rather do understand the nature of God at it has been understood for thousands of years. I also understand how God has ‘evolved’ as it were.
And this evolution has been through many channels. One is religious sycretism (avoided by most of the religious) through which every major religion practiced has evolved tremendously. Another chanel of change is philosophy which has dispelled, in many circles, more primitive concepts of a corporeal God. Science has changed God, some of the religious now talk about God living on the quantuum level and not in ‘some place in the clouds/sky/outerspace.’ And it goes on…
Yet we, despite understanding all this, and more, are somehow incapable of understanding the religious environment and traditions of where we came… As understood by the vast majority of the practitioners of these faiths and traditions…
More like intellectual Whack-a-Mole. Only, the board has no holes and there is no mole.
The whole ‘personal relationship’ dodge is a non-starter. I -have- personal relationships. I know what they are like. If I have a relationship with someone who tells me one thing while telling others something else then I can get the relevant folks together and sort it out. Try that with the ineffable and see how far it gets you.
Sometimes these personal relationships are tough to distinguish from imaginary relationships.
Moseszd (#7). You say:
My point is simply that the onus is on the religious to define their terms carefully and then provide evidence for the existence of the being or beings described, or otherwise characterise a system of beliefs or practices which have some justification. I think they cannot do this. And when Baggini suggests that atheists and believers are talking past each other, the only people that this correctly characterises is the religious. Atheists may begin with what they believe the religious are saying. If they are wrong, it is not an answer to say, “Well, I don’t believe in that god either.” The only acceptable response is: “This is the god I believe in. This is how I understand the word ‘god’ and these are the reasons why I believe it is reasonable to involve myself in religious practice appertaining to god understood in this way.” Otherwise it is strictly a waste of time.
That does not mean that it is wrong to take historical beliefs about god seriously, and show why it is unreasonable to hold such views and enter into religious practices concerning beings so understood. But if the religious want to claim that this is just a matter of talking past them, it is they who must very accurately characterise their beliefs and belief system, and explain just what evidence they have that the world is ordered in the ways described. The whole point that I was trying to make is that religious believers have not really done this. John Haught makes a lot of noise about Jerry Coyne not providing an argument against any god that he can recognise, but his characterisation of his beliefs in god are laughable. As a response to Jerry’s arguments they are empty verbiage, vague and ambiguous. He has not provided single reason for assuming that there is any such being as he proposes, a presence of love that is concerned that the universe should become itself. This is just a bit of a crib on evolution, and what might, at an extreme guess, be at the end of things, given that some of the things in the universe seem to be intentional systems, and thus anthropomorphising the rest without any justification. What he must do to be taken seriously is to give us a reason why it is not only possible to talk this way, but why it is necessary to talk this way. And this, I suspect, he will not be able to provide. He spoke a lot of suggestive nonsense. Religious believers must do better than this if they expect to be taken seriously.
There is a way that atheists very effectively get around the inability of theologians to define things. If theism -> supernaturalism, then we can make the question one of supernaturalism versus naturalism (as a metaphysical thesis). The really deep problem isn’t lack of clarity about what the theological claims are supposed to be, the problem is lack of clarity about what the epistemological story is supposed to be. That’s what was so problematic about Haught’s claim that personal transformation is essential to justifying his claims. If a scientist published a paper that said “You have to have a personal transformation to understand what the evidence for my claims are” we would think she had lost her mind.
Well, we know that the religious cannot define their terms, nor can we get in their heads to grok the feelings or experiences that they say they.feel or experience. For many believers, is it not the case that religious belief simply helps them arrive at an accommodation with the world which they are unwilling to give up at any cost? Hence the continual talking past one another. As you said somewhere Eric, it takes time and stuff to happen to move this.
It’s hard for atheism to replace the hope for eventual justice or the comfort that religion provides that some people, a lot of people, seem to need badly.
“If the word ‘god’ is so ambiguous that we need to read in depth every theologian that has ever written on the subject, then there is no way that the critique of religion can even begin.”
Hear, hear!
Eric (#2):
This touches on what has been a theme in your essays lately, namely that invoking mystery is not going to get you anywhere if you also want to advocate for certain articles of doctrine, or legislation, or anything that requires specificity. You’ve summarized Haught’s position as 1) Accept Jesus. 2) Receive personal transformation. 3) Learn that god is that it is a an immaterial “purpose” to the universe, about which nothing can meaningfully or intelligibly be said.
Does this mean one should treat 1) and 2) like ladders that are to be kicked away once one has had one’s head in cloud 3) for a while?
Eric,
But the religious, while in argument they resort of ineffability and mystery and vague expressions, eff the ineffable all the time. Haught did it in the same lecture, where he says Christians must stick to their understanding of God which is made manifest in Jesus …
A general modus-operandi that gives some credibility or weight to charges of intellectual dishonesty, at best. Along which line the Wikipedia article on metaphysics has this:
Rudolf Carnap, in his book “Philosophy and Logical Syntax”, used the concept of verifiability to reject metaphysics:
“Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their statements nonverifiable, because if they made them verifiable, the decision about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend upon experience and therefore belong to the region of empirical science”.
But the peregrinations and contortions of the religious mind is a curious phenomenon and one that deserves a discipline or study in its own right. It seems there’s a general tendency on the part of theologians in particular to think that any harebrained scheme or conjecture they come up with – for example as discussed here on Jerry Coyne’s site – is just as valid and as deserving of respect as any other regardless of how few facts there are in support of it. But curiously that type of “story” was characterized several hundred years ago as Philosophick Romances on which P.B. Medawar commented as follows:
Even the more sophisticated authors of Philosophick Romances did not seem to realize that any one set of phenomena could be explained by many hypotheses other than the one they fancied. It seems a strange blindness, but I think that Dugald Stewart in a finely reasoned passage got to the bottom of it. It was a favorite conceit in eighteenth-century philosophizing – Stewart found it in Boscovich, Le Sage, D’Alembert, Gravesande and Hartley – that natural philosophy is, in David Hartley’s words, “… the art of deciphering the Mysteries of Nature … so that … every Theory which can explain all the Phaenomena, has all the same Evidence in its favour, that it is possible the Key of a Cypher can have from its explaining that Cypher.” [The Art of the Soluble: Two Conceptions of Science; pg 147]
While deciphering the “olde English” is not easy, at least for me, it seems clear that a willingness to accept virtually any delusion – and to insist than others accept them too – seems characteristic of many philosophers of religion and of theologians.
“My point is simply that the onus is on the religious to define their terms carefully…”
History tells us that religions which ‘define their terms carefully’ don’t survive for very long. Even theists prefer their nonsense decently veiled behind a smokescreen of obscurity and obfuscation. (And not only theists, of course — Marx and Freud come to mind along with many other ideologies.)
I think they can do it. I think they are unwilling to do it because, as you pointed out, once you define your belief system, someone can attack it.
What frustrates me is when the faithist says we cannot discuss their ‘sophisticated’ (full of meaningless, meandering hot-air) God concept because we haven’t read some 16th Century philosopher (who was wrong anyway). And when we ignore their assertions and meaningless philosophical God-construct (it’s the Universe evolving into brotherly love!!!!) and trot out an argument against the common, core principles of their nominally-referred-to belief systems, they play whack-a-mole and say we can’t do that because that’s not what ‘sophisticated’ individuals with ‘sophisticated’ beliefs believe, ergo Jesus, while ignoring it is what most people believe.
I acknowledge the unwillingness of the religious to pin themselves down by defining terms and providing evidence, and the corner they might end up in if they do, but, if the contemporary dispute between belief and unbelief is to go anywhere, and if the religious are going to have the right to say that religious belief is rational and compatible with science, this they must do. Until they do so, the debate is really, to a large extent, pointless, as so many of my posts point out. And we must keep up the pressure on the religious to either put up or shut up, because their case depends on their making one.
I have never murdered anyone, but as a police officer I came into close contact with numerous murderers. Whilst it is true to say that I have not had the intimate experience of extinguishing human life I have the experience from association to debate the rights and wrongs, whys and wherefores of the act of murder.
I would suggest that it is the difference between empathy and sympathy, and actual personal experience will never be a bar to engagement.
I’m familiar with that dodge from the evangelicals. It doesn’t look any better when pulled by a Sophisticated Theologian[tm].
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Tao Christ. Who knew?
Gingerbaker, your comment just reminded me of Raymond Smullyan’s piece “Is God a Taoist?” which appears in “The Mind’s I”:
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-20-is-god-taoist.html
Are the religious experiences of personal transformation that believers allegedly have identical? If yours is different to that of the person standing next to you, have you really experienced God, or is the person next to you the one with the true experience.
If they are different, what degree of differentiation will exclude a person from a ‘true’ transformation?
It can only go like this:
‘I say, I had a personal transformation last night.’
Yeah, me too. We ought to form a church.’