26 thoughts on “Response to Scott McKenna on Christianity and Assisted Dying”

1. Just wondering on what basis Scott knows what his god wants….

2. I guess the answer to that, Michael, is that, within Christian discourse, this makes sense. There it seems to make sense to speak in terms of a being with purposes and desires and ends to be sought. It is a part of the discourse itself. It’s like speaking about the purposes of, say, a character in a novel, where it makes perfect sense to say that, say, Moll Flanders, has ideas and purposes and intentions, and finds that most of them are disappointed. Outside of Christian discourse, the question does not have much sense, for then the question would be: How can I know that there is a god? And without a reliable to answer to that question, one that is based upon an adequate conception of what is meant by the word ‘god’, and what it would mean that, in relation to a being so understood, that it exists, and that the entity so described has wants, desires or purposes at all, the confidence that anyone can reasonably claim to know what God wants is misplaced.

3. Anytime says “I cannot imagine” this or that, the only thing I can think of is “you lack imagination.”

   The Christian tradition holds that god is omnibenevolent. It seems to me perfectly immoral for someone to propose that a benevolent god would bless suffering or to even allow it to exist.

   But not all theistic traditions have held this viewpoint of a god that wants only the best for humans. Finding a god that is indifferent to suffering or is an active participant to suffering is only as far away as one’s fingertips and a 5-second Google search.

   A deistic god is perfectly indifferent to suffering of any stripe. It only set the wheels in motion, it doesn’t play with its terrarium or the inhabitants therein.

   A pantheistic god is as much suffering as it is pleasure. It’s everything.

   Someone has been reading the press clippings for only one particular god in order to make a “I cannot imagine” statement.

   And even that doesn’t leave room for the real answer — there’s no such thing as a god. Therefore, no reason for there to be any external arbiter of mercy, suffering, justice, or hope. Nor any reason to listen to pious know-nothings who tell us why we must bear the unbearable for the sake of an invisible monster.

4. I can see no difference between Scott McKenna’s attempt to rationalize a merciful god that would not demand intolerable suffering and an uncaused universe where human values are based on maximizing the well being of all human beings.

5. There is an ongoing debate on the Freethought and Rationalism Discussion Board about the Problem of Evil. It has recently reached its twenty thousandth post, and in all that time no theist has been able to give a credible refutation. What’s most remarkable, though, is that they are simply unable or unwilling to accept defeat, and the same feeble arguments get recycled over and over again as if somehow, THIS time, God will intervene to make them hold water. It’s a terrifying object lesson in the power of denial over the theist mind. Only a desperate psychological need could make them so relentlessly illogical.

6. Corio, there’s a very simple reason for this. Let me quote from some notes I took years ago on John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love. In the following my own notes do not appear in quotes.

   Hick tried to deal with this by raising Marcel’s notion of mystery. A mystery according to Gabriel Marcel, is “a problem which encroaches on its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem.” (Hick 1977, quoted 9 (The Problem of Existence, 8)) Does this mean that a mystery is a problem that is caused by one of one’s beliefs, because one does not want to let the belief go? That is, holding the belief is more important than solving the problem? Hick quotes from Marcel a totally unintelligible bundle of words, and then he makes his observation that “As has often been observed, in the case of human suffering the intellectual problem of evil usually arises in the mind of the spectator rather than in that of the sufferer.” (Hick 1977, 10) I should have thought that this is the exact reverse of the truth. Suffering people generally tend to ask Why? Like Job they have a sense of the injustice and the complete inexplicability of suffering. Hick says that the sufferer “does not want or need a theoretical theodicy, but practical grace and courage and hope.” (loc. cit.) But this is not because the sufferer doesn’t want an answer, but because the theoretical theodicy is not really trying to find an answer, but is trying to solve the problem for faith. That’s what makes it a subject matter, and the sufferer does not want a seminar, but an answer! What Hick is remarkably forgetting here are the many people for whom their suffering actually defeats faith, very often much too late.

   In my view, most theologians or philosophers who deal with the problem of evil fail to acknowledge that people who are suffering almost always ask the question, “Why?” Almost without exception. The idea seems to be that this is an interesting intellectual puzzle, but not a problem for faith. But it is a problem for faith, every time. When people come to ask it they are vulnerable, and since there are no answers, they simply accept the tension between faith and suffering. Indeed, Hick himself acknowledges the tension, and then suggests that we will only know it in the sweet by and by, as it were. But the tension is a contradiction, and that is what people of faith simply cannot acknowledge.

7. Eric, thank you for your response. We could probably go on for days or weeks discussing these issues and, while I am tempted, I shall not exhaust your patience or that of your other contributors. If you will, let me have one more comment.

   I found your last post very moving, not least because of Elizabeth and your journey with her. I also read with interest the posts made by others. Let me make five brief points.

   1) In speaking of God, I do so from within faith and I acknowledge that for those with no faith in God some or most of what I say will not make sense or ring true. At its best, faith is an intimate relationship with the Holy and, like all intimate relationships, the love which lies at the core is invisible; to some extent, the effects may be seen but the love itself can never be seen. From within faith, the problem of evil and intolerable suffering are not the defining issues, though in no way am I under-estimating their place in human experience or questions about the meaning of life; in other words, evil and suffering are handled from within the context of a relationship with a loving and compassionate God. In the context of that loving relationship, the problem of evil and intolerable suffering do not ‘disprove’ the existence of God. It may be that, for some, their personal experience of suffering or that of a loved one does lead them towards atheism, but that is not everyone’s experience. The Bible captures extremely well the rage of humanity against intolerable suffering: to rage at God because of injustice, evil or suffering is honest and right but these do not necessarily lead us to atheism.

   2) Atheism or fundamentalist atheism is an irrational position. There is no argument which can conclusively disprove the existence of God and neither is there a scientific experiment which would do that. If one wishes to hold to absolute atheism, one must go beyond reason or rational argument.

   3) Following Grothe, Eric says that it would be better ‘to concentrate on making the world a better place’ instead of ‘supposing that there is a good god transcending the world of human experience.’ Grothe misunderstands Jesus in Matthew 6:33. Grothe argues that, by focussing on the Kingdom, Jesus rejects human experience and real meaning in order to think of another world. This is one dimensional and wrong. No one can accuse Jesus of being uselessly other-worldly: he spent much of his ministry caring for the poor, the suffering, the socially excluded and those with incurable disease. His ministry was a God-inspired critique of the Roman Empire and his society. By making space for the Holy within human experience, we open the door to transfiguring the present moment, not escaping it. At best, we see the world and our neighbour through the wide open eyes of God: we ‘see’ more. (Last year, my own congregation of 300 active members gave away c£153,000 to charities and others in need in order to make the world a better place. In relationship with God, people are motivated by love and compassion for their neighbour.) It does not follow that in seeking the Kingdom of God we deny or reject the reality of the present moment. Arguably, it allows us to enter it more fully, more compassionately.

   4) A number of the posts seem to run the argument that because there is intolerable suffering in the world there can be no God or, at least, no good God. With due respect(!), this is binary thinking. God, the Being who is not a being at all (to borrow from the poet R S Thomas), is far more complex and mysterious than we could ever fully comprehend. A God who works on a scale of billions of years, through randomness, chance and necessity and, say mathematicians, not infinity but infinities is a God who is not easily put into a box by us. I do not subscribe to the grotesque Christian view that suffering is good for us or is a punishment sent by God: the Bible disposed of that theology thousands of years ago (see the Book of Job). However, let me tread very carefully here. In his poem, ‘One Foot in Eden’, the Scots poet Edwin Muir, writes, ‘But famished field and blackened tree/Bear flowers in Eden never known./Blossoms of grief and charity/Bloom in these darkened fields alone./What had Eden ever to say/Of hope and faith and pity and love/Until was buried all its day/And memory found its treasure trove?/Strange blessings never in Paradise/Fall from these beclouded skies.’ Often it is our vulnerability which makes us beautiful; it is love, compassion and mercy which enrich our lives. There is a paradox here: it is often in the midst of the greatest suffering that human beings rise to their fullest potential. In brief, my argument here is that the binary thinking does not stand up to scrutiny.

   5) Fundamentalist atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, go on and on about religion but never mention capitalism. It is capitalism (and human hubris) which is destroying lives at the present moment, pulling families apart through debt and the pressures its brings on relationships; it was human hubris which brought down the banks and set in train the current economic crisis; it is capitalism which supports corrupt regimes. Few noticed that thirty years to the day on 9/11, the US government violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, installing in its place an (obliging) autocrat who went on to massacre more people than died in the Twin Towers.

   God is illusive, mysterious and, as the mystics say, the Divine Dark. God cannot be put into a box, however much religious or atheist fundamentalists would wish. Eric, thank you for this opportunity and I count it real privilege to have been introduced to you.

8. Scott, it was easier for me to grasp the structure of your argument by separating your five points into separate paragraphs. I hope you don’t mind that I have reformatted your comment to reflect that structure. I want to answer them one by one. You are certainly welcome to comment here any time you like. I generally have the patience of Job!

   1) Regarding your first point, that is basically what I said in response to Corio. Within the Christian narrative saying things which seem outlandish outside of that context make sense. However, it does not seem to me that religion really succeeds in dealing with the problem of evil, even within the narrative of faith. Job is not a solution. In fact, I have always thought that Job is the first clear statement of the problem, and God does not come out of the encounter very well. As the philosopher Hermann Tonnessen says (there is a pdf of his paper on this website), Yahweh, in the great theophany at the end, comes off looking more like a rumble-dumble than a god, a figure of great primitivity, and the tacked on ending solves none of the problems in the book, which remain unsolved still.

   I do not think this stands up to inspection:

   From within faith, the problem of evil and intolerable suffering are not the defining issues, though in no way am I under-estimating their place in human experience or questions about the meaning of life; in other words, evil and suffering are handled from within the context of a relationship with a loving and compassionate God. In the context of that loving relationship, the problem of evil and intolerable suffering do not ‘disprove’ the existence of God.

   In my experience, the problem of evil and intolerable suffering has never been adequately handled from within faith. The issue of meaning, and the love and compassion of God are immediately called into question by the existence of unrelievable misery, even from within the context of faith. I grant with Hick that in faith these things stand in tension, and the question may be deferred, but immanently there is no real solution. The only solution possible is that all this will become clear when we are fully known, and no longer need to look through a glass darkly. D.Z. Phillips’ book (The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God), using Rush Rhees’ reflections on Simone Weil, seems to think that we can use Simone Weil’s way out of the problem, but I only find this solution humanly offensive, precisely because it demands an acceptance of evil. In fact, Weil puts it in terms that would have appalled Elizabeth, for she describes a condition which would closely parallel the experience of those with MS or motor neurone disease, and the suggestion is that, by accepting this condition in humility, one somehow transcends the world of human suffering.

   I acknowledge that religion tries very hard to deal with the problem of evil. I do not think it has been successful in providing answers.

   2) You say that “[a]theism or fundamentalist atheism is an irrational position.” However, the default position must be that there is no god, and that it is up to the religions to provide evidence for the existence of their gods. And since there be gods and lords many, that’s a hard thing to do. Atheism is not an absolute position. Even Dawkins acknowledges that there is no absolute knowledge that there is no god, and that he is only very confident that there is not, a confidence that does not amount to proof. He acknowledges that he may be wrong, but thinks that probabilities are on his side. Besides, putting the onus of proof on someone who disbelieves something that others believe is scarcely cricket. Proving a negative existential proposition is virtually impossible. But the fact that the religious cannot prove their positive claims is fairly decisive. And since we can now explain religious belief scientifically, without recourse to gods, it seems unlikely that religion has much to offer that is of great interest, since, after all, there are so many of them. The science of religion gives good reasons for expecting that we should find belief in a diversity of gods. But that diversity is itself embarrassing for religion.

   3) Regarding Jesus and otherworldliness. Of course, he is not completely otherworldly. It’s hard to live in the world and be so, even for Jesus. But Jesus abandons the world, it is important to note, in the belief that the kingdom of God was to come soon. If Christians have grown up a bit in this respect, and have come to realise that Jesus is never going to return, that is not a result of Jesus’ message, but of its falsity. But there is simply too much that is morally questionable in Jesus’ ministry to think of him as concerned except peripherally with conditions of life in this world. You don’t go around cursing villages for their failure to respond in faith, if you are really concerned about people. Nor do you speak of gentiles as dogs. Jesus’ main aim was not benefit in this world, but the coming kingdom.

   And when you say this:

   Often it is our vulnerability which makes us beautiful; it is love, compassion and mercy which enrich our lives. There is a paradox here: it is often in the midst of the greatest suffering that human beings rise to their fullest potential.

   I think there is a conflict in this. It may be true that people who are suffering rise to their fullest potential (at least in relation to suffering), but it is they who do it. These are human achievements. They do not depend on any transcendent source. Elizabeth, to my mind, achieved great things through suffering, but she might have achieved more without it, and her one refusal to accept suffering took the form of a rejection of the possibility of an afterlife, because, to her mind, this would imply that her suffering had a purpose that was realised elsewhere, and she was not prepared to accept that piece of theological double-speak. That her suffering was intended, and served a foreordained purpose was, to her, an offence. To me also. But if it didn’t serve a purpose, it was pointless, even if it did issue in courage and forbearance. Trying to domesticate great human suffering in this way is, in itself, something that is offensive about religion.

   None of this is to deny that religious people can be very generous, and lend support to many worthy causes. Of course, the churches have organisations which make this possible. They meet regularly, too, which makes them a ready made audience for appeals for help. These are things that atheists lack, but it does not show that the religious are by nature more generous. Nor should it be thought that such charity is normative for religions. Christianity spent far more on splendid buildings and great emoluments than it did on charity in the ages of faith. A lot of the church’s contemporary “good works” are far more humanistic in their source than religious, and some of them are positively evil, such as the money spent by American evangelicals in Uganda in an effort (which seems to be bearing evil fruit) to have homosexual relations criminalised by law.

   4) I find this surprising:

   I do not subscribe to the grotesque Christian view that suffering is good for us or is a punishment sent by God: the Bible disposed of that theology thousands of years ago (see the Book of Job).

   As I say above, I don’t think that the Bible actually disposed of that theology, and Job is a very shaky position on which to make a stand. Indeed, Christian theology reinstated a theology of suffering in spades. Hell is, after all, the correlative of the Christian idea that we are not only responsible for our sins, we deserve to suffer for them. On the more positive side, where suffering is not the outcome of ill doing, the whole idea of suffering in one’s own body the sufferings of Christ yet to be endured, as Paul said, is very much an affirmation of the belief that suffering is redemptive, as “Blessed” Teresa of Calcutta so often affirmed in action if not in words. “Jesus is kissing you,” she would say to those who were dying in great pain. The Apocalypse is, while addressed, no doubt, to persecuted Christians, also a paean to revenge as well. And if suffering is not good for us, then Lucretius’ old question inevitably crops up: Si deus ist, unde malum?

   Of course, the Sunday School response to evil, that it is punishment for legalising same-sex marriage or something equally stupid, is a dead end. But that suffering is, somehow, deserved, and redemptive, is still deeply rooted in Christian theology.

   And, of course, Muir puts it so well, if a trifle ambiguously — and you are right to tread carefully — there seems precious little relationship between evil here and goodness anywhere else. These lines are particularly poignant:

   Blossoms of grief and charity
   Bloom in these darkened fields alone.

   So when you say that God is elusive (you say illusive, but that seems not to be what you mean), you speak the truth. But it’s not so much putting god in a box, for there is, especially for nonbelievers, nothing to put in a box. It may reasonably be taken that the elusiveness of God is not the result of mystery, but of non-existence. God is the tone, if you like, in terms of which the religious speak of life in the world. It may even be that speaking in that tone reveals something about being human, but it is not unreasonable to think that we can have that without the apparatus of religion.

   5) I come to the last point, regarding the failure of nonbelievers to address the problematic of capitalism — and more, for this category is a catch-all for things not dealt with in the first four. The United States’ involvement in Chile (and you could add Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere) is not something that either believers or unbelievers should condone, and yet it was largely religion which shored up the government of General Pinochet, and as an earnest of his good faith, he criminalised abortion. You point out an interesting anniversary:

   Few noticed that thirty years to the day on 9/11, the US government violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, installing in its place an (obliging) autocrat who went on to massacre more people than died in the Twin Towers.

   I certainly don’t want to, and I doubt that many Americans would either, defend their government’s actions in Chile and in many other places, including Iraq, though there is no evident relationship between these things and nonbelief. Indeed, as the most religious of the developed nations, no doubt the impetus behind much of American realpolitik is Christian belief. The problem with capitalism itself is not something easily dealt with. The world economy is, right now, operating on capitalist assumptions. No one, least of all economists, know how to run an economy that is not always growing, and that does not bode well for the future, especially with an increasing population (very much due to religious opposition to contraception and abortion) and a warming world. To my knowledge, aside from David Jenkins’ (onetime Bishop of Durham) book about economics, Market Whys and Human Wherefores, the religious have not been particularly successful in addressing themselves either to economic or to environmental issues. Indeed, in the US, Christian belief that we have God’s promise that so long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest will not fail seems to be the preferred answer to questions about global warming. It is not reassuring. So to lay these failures at the doorstep of so-called “fundamentalist” atheists is stretching a bit.

9. I should add here that you are too kind in your final remark that you “count it real privilege to have been introduced to” me. I am merely, as Locke put it, an underlabourer here. Elizabeth’s suffering led me to explore more fully the problem of evil. I do not think that there is a satisfactory answer either from points within faith, and from outside of faith no answer is needed. The universe is indifferent to our striving. This is not really an answer, but it at least prescribes a programme. We are left with the task of shaping life ourselves. All we have is proximate meaning, as Grothe points out, but once it is pointed out, there is at least the possibility of richer meaning, if we are prepared to let our religious illusions go.

10. “2) Atheism or fundamentalist atheism is an irrational position. There is no argument which can conclusively disprove the existence of God and neither is there a scientific experiment which would do that. If one wishes to hold to absolute atheism, one must go beyond reason or rational argument”

    The above quote suggests that unless one can prove a proposition it is irrationally held, but this is simply not the case. If someone were to produce conclusive proof that God exists, and I still held to my atheism, THAT would be irrational, and conversely, if it were proved that God does not exist then continuing to believe would be irrational. The debate over theism is not helped by each side accusing the other of irrationality in my view. Part of the debate is over standards of rationality, and until such time as there is consenus regarding that, then accusations of irrationality are irrelevent.

    I agree that suffering can bring out the best in some people, but I cannot believe in the goodness of an all powerful God who has so disposed his creation that some goods can only be realised as a result of suffering. I watched my mother reduced from a beautiful and healthy woman to a wheelchair bound wreck who couldn’t even sit up unaided. She bore her suffering with fortitude and some degree of grace, but I would rather she had not had to develop those qualities in the first place, and no doubt she would have rather not had to either!

11. Eric, this is a magnificent post, thank you.

12. I shall rise to the bait of Scott McKenna’s response 2), as others have ably done already. ‘Atheism’, as carefully discussed by Dawkins in The God Delusion, is commonly used to imply that one thinks there probably aren’t any gods, and not that one is convinced that there can’t possibly be any. I expect there are people who take the latter position, which I agree is irrational, but I don’t personally know of any; certainly it isn’t Dawkins’ stated position. In my experience most self-declared atheists take a position that is something like “I see no evidence to think that there are any gods; therefore I conclude that there probably aren’t, as far as we can currently tell, and I shall live my life in accordance with this working hypothesis.”

    Some, myself incuded, go further and consider that there is evidence – not proof, but evidence – against the existence of a loving God that actively cares about us and how we conduct our lives. Suffering consitutes such evidence for some, though personally, when I was a believer, I was willing to accept the argument that suffering serves a purpose we can’t yet conceive of (I find this harder now that I’ve encountered more suffering). For me, the fatal evidence against a concerned God was the plurality of religions, for if a Creator wished us to follow a particular set of moral precepts and understand its nature in a particular way, surely it would be easy enough for it to communicate clearly! As I began to lose my faith, I thought for a while that this problem was lethal for religious authority but not for the existence of a loving God, and I imagined a God too great to care if we worshipped it or not, smiling indulgently on our obsession with religions. But I didn’t find this hypothesis sustainable, because humankind expends vast, self-sacrificing efforts on religion: it punishes, represses, persecutes, kills, and martyrs itself in the name of myriad narrowly defined Gods with narrowly defined moral requirements – not more than one of which can be the correct intepretation. And all a loving God need do, to divert the religious fervour of well-meaning but misguided people into its preferred channel, is to speak up unambiguously – but it doesn’t.

    I couldn’t find a theistic explanation that didn’t sound to me like very special pleading indeed, and so I adopted an atheistic hypothesis, under which the problem vanishes altogether. I would be glad to consider further arguments, but I assert that my current position is entirely rational.

13. “The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, THEN THERE IS NO GOD or a bad one. If there is a good God, these tortures are necessary.”

    I am with you on this Eric. How could all the things that cause humans to suffer (MS, ALS, locked in syndrome, cancer with bone metastasis, etc, etc, etc…) possibly be necessary for anything? What could it possibly accomplish? What could it possibly be useful for?

    I was 14 the last time I prayed. My father lay dying of cancer at the other end of the house and I prayed that god would give me some of his pain so he wouldn’t suffer so much. Nothing happened of course. This was the moment I became an athiest. Not because god didn’t do what I asked, but because I realised there was no one listening.

14. This is a new experience for me: posting comments on a blog! And an atheist blog at that! What is most striking is the complete total disconnect between what I read in the comments of others and my own experience and worldview. In Scotland, I am passionately supporting the cause of assisted dying. I believe I can do so with integrity from within the Christian tradition. I had not understood that this blog is primarily anti-religious in its aims. I understand many of the anti-religious comments made and endorse some of them but many of the comments about the reality of the world, prayer and suffering do not stand up to scrutiny, at least not from my point of view. Eric, your most recent post begs as many questions as it answers. For example, 1) your analysis of the Book of Job, 2) your dismissal of an argument that I had not made, 3) your claim not to be absolutist, then go on to state an absolute, 4) your sweeping generalisations about religion, 5) your failure to take my faith as seriously as you take your atheism and 6) your possibly irrational determination to see religion as the root of all evil when, in fact, life is far more complex than that.

    Again, what is most striking is the extent to which you and many of your ‘blogging community’ (if I may use that term) and me are speaking a different language is really interesting. If I thought God as described by you and your community, I could not believe in God….but it is not like that, at least not in the Christian community to which I belong. In short, the God you don’t believe in I don’t believe in either. Yet, I ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘sense’ God everywhere. God is a very present reality. I wonder how many atheists on your blog have meditatively read Scripture, in prayer moved from thinking God is a magician in the sky to the audible Silence at the centre of all things or read theology. (Dawkins knows almost nothing about theology or biblical criticism.) However, despite these differences, hopefully, we can work together for assisted dying?

15. What does “audible silence at the centre of all things” mean? It seems an oxymoron. It appears meaningless while seeming profound. Why do sophisticated theologians always make sure to describe their gods so no one who doesn’t already believe in said god or gods can find any concrete evidence for it or them. The surprising thing to me is that anyone with these fluffy bunny god-concepts can stay within organized religion. How does one pick which god-concept to believe in? Are you saying that no one believes in the god-concept(s) that Dawkins discusses?

    My meditative reading of the Bible turned me into a nonChristian and eventually an atheist. I honestly cannot see how could one stay a believer after reading the Bible. And all of the theology I have read could only make sense if I already believed. I can see how it would if one did believe, but to me it is just mush. It is apologetics – some very eloquent – with no explanation of how one could find out something about these theologians’ gods.

16. Scott, I will come back to this (comment # 14), but it really would be helpful, instead of just listing what you think I get wrong, actually to point out and argue the case for your reading of what I wrote. I am not given to absolutes, and I cannot find the one you refer to, but, if you identify if I will gladly consider your point. I have spent years, myself, with the scriptures, whether in serious academic study or in what you term prayerful, meditative reading. I have worked with scriptures all by life, and I still, in the end, come to the conclusion that much of what is there is truly deeply troubling. The Christian scriptures are simply chock full of antisemitisms, as well as intolerance, and I have always been troubled by these. The concern about heresy, and the dismissal of judaisers (in Galatians, for example) is deeply distressing. Moreover, there is very little support for traditional Christian doctrine in the scriptures, as you must know. Not only is it not clear that Jesus is an incarnation of a god, it is not stated anywhere that god is a trinity. It’s glorification of suffering (as in the Apocalypse) is, I think, mentally deranged, and its vision of the new Jerusalem and the obvious glee taken in the defeat and torment of the unfaithful, is pathological, in my opinion, despite claims that it is written to comfort those undergoing persecution. AS for Job, while I may be wrong in my interpretation, I do not think I am obviously wrong, and, despite everything, I think it does not come anywhere near to proposing a solution to the problem of evil. I still think Hermann Tonessen’s interpretation is viable, and, indeed, profound. However, in order to make a reasoned response to your concerns, I must really know what they are in a little more detail.

    As to willingness to share with anyone who supports and fights for assisted dying, that goes without saying, even though I do not think there is much likelihood that you will be able to change the church’s mind on this. The majority expression of Christianity in the world is solidly opposed to assisted dying, and insists on imposing this view on others. This I will continue to fight, but I also have to say that I think it is the natural product of Christian faith. I will come back later to the idea that assisted dying is consistent with the sanctity of life. There are some very deep contradictions in this view which need to be explored, and I will do so, but first, you must make some effort to respond to me, not just list the things that you think are wrong, without saying why.

17. Hi Scott. No longer writing late at night, but will try to be brief. One thing that puzzles me is the old argument you make that the god I don’t believe in you don’t believe in either. That’s an easy way out of a tight corner, but does it really stand up. The problem is to describe God in such a way that it can be considered an identifiable something. Antony Flew addressed this question pretty closely in his famous book God and Philosophy ages ago, and it is not clear that he came to a very satisfactory conclusion as to the identifiability of what people mean when they speak of God. I agree that Dawkins knows very little about biblical criticism or theology, but this doesn’t solve the problem. When you say this:

    Yet, I ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘sense’ God everywhere. God is a very present reality. I wonder how many atheists on your blog have meditatively read Scripture, in prayer moved from thinking God is a magician in the sky to the audible Silence at the centre of all things or read theology.

    in what was is this an answer to the question about the identity of God? After all, we can all have spiritual experiences without believing in God, or without thinking of God as a magician in the sky. And reading scripture prayerfully is really only possible if you come at it as a believer, though meditatively is possible for anyone. Many people find it difficult, reading the Bible, to find any evidence of the oft mentioned presence of God encountering them in the scriptures. I tend to read critically. It’s part of my training as a philosopher, so I have always struggled with people who came at the scriptures meditatively, for so much that I read in the scriptures put me off. There are some beautiful passages in the Bible, which as a child I loved to read, but when your critical faculties are alive, it’s hard to read them just for their beauty.

    I have done at least ten, fairly long and detailed studies with parishioners, of the book of Job, and the general problem of evil. Do you know one of the greatest problems I had, every time? Convincing people to take the book at its word, that Job was a good and pious man, who did not deserve to suffer! Someone would always interject, “But all have sinned and come short of the glory of God!” Most Christians, in my experience, simply could not get their head around the idea that Job did not deserve to suffer, since we all do! Not a word of a lie! Yet, to my mind, the book of Job is a profound study of suffering, with an incredibly inadequate conception of God, and a failure to account sufficiently for the justice of God. This is the product of many years of studying the book. I know that the language of the great theophany is, according to those who know, some of the most beautifully written Hebrew in the whole of the Jewish Tanak, and for Jews to read this is (in very much the same way that the Qu’ran is said to reduce grown men to tears simply by the beauty of its language) is to hear the voice of God himself. However, whatever the truth about the language, the theophany itself is a great disappointment.

    I find Tennessen’s paper conclusive. You can find it under the recommended tag above. Here is the paragraph which seems to me to be unquestionably true. You are of course free to differ, but, after many years’ reading this book with great attention its spiritual message, this convinces me:

    We can easily imagine Job’s boundless astonishment at this tangible appearance by Jehovah. Here Job has been sitting, attaching the most profound and central importance to the problem, in the belief that he was dealing with an opponent who would convince him at the point of mortal embarrassment as soon as his tongue touched the burning issue — a god of such holiness and purity that even his indictment would release exultation! Only to find himself confronted by a ruler of grotesque primitivity, a cosmic cave dweller, a braggart and a rumble-dumble, almost congenial in his complete ignorance about spiritual refinement. Job immediately realises that it would be an act of ludicrous naivete to broach theoretical questions; if we are to assert a conviction, then the assertion must be made to an opponent who has the qualifications required to grasp it and who recognizes the common ground for debate in the argument. Nothing would be more incongruous in this case than for Job to beat his chest and proclaim his moral heroism, until that gratuitous moment when Jehovah would put his paw on him and rub him out like a louse. He might just as well assume his grandiose attitudes towards the hippopotamus and the crocodile. The situation is completely changed after Jehovah’s fatal disclosure of his real nature and since he no longer enjoys the fruits of man’s idolizing fancies. “Only what the rumour reported, had I heard about you, but now my eye has seen you. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes”. (xlii. 5, 6) Job is now speaking to the Lord in the placative manner one would employ were one to address a mentally deranged person. He has fought against the Lord on completely erroneous premises (3). The new thing for Job is not God’s quantitative greatness; he had realised this in advance (xii. 6-10, 13-25, xxvi.5-14); his discovery lies in God’s qualitative smallness. His most elevated idea, the image of his god, has received a deathblow. Faced with this inane, primitive power, Job is able to yield without the least sense of shame since the “battle” has not even touched his assertion in principle. A spiritual power may be annihilated but it cannot be vanquished through the annihilation of its bearer. Neither has Job been “vanquished” in the flesh, since he has not fought in that manner. He has not been convinced (of any errors in his reasoning) about the justice of world order. He has, on the contrary, been reinforced in his beliefs. By capitulating in this manner, he inflicts the worst conceivable of indignities on the tyrant, Jehovah: that his opponent is not even worthy of a battle!

    That puts into words exactly my own response to the theophany, and it was instantly recognisable when I read it, that it put my own dissatisfaction into words that my piety simply would not allow. But I assure you that my own conclusions are arrived at with long and painful acquaintance with the work, which I consider one of the most profound in the Bible. And I have concluded, on the strength of it, that the problem of evil has no solution, and nothing I have read has changed my mind, neither Hick, nor Adams, nor DZ Phillips, nor those who have written on the biblical answers to the question. And it is not as though I have not read theology, and am not familiar with the theological answers. None of them seem to me satisfactorily to answer the most outstanding questions.

    And that’s the problem, as I see it, with the rather blasé way in which you dismiss people’s disbelief, by speaking in fairly ambiguous terms about the “audible Silence at the centre of things.” That may be oxymoronic as Michael Fugate claims, though I think I know what you want to say by saying it. The problem is, however, that the din of suffering has a way of drowning out that still small voice, for there we are face to face with Tennessen’s “ruler of great primitivity.” As Paul Badham quite perceptively notes in his book on assisted dying, responding to Rowan Williams’ claim that “all religious believers hold that there is no stage of human life, and no level of human experience, that is intrinsically incapable of being lived through in some kind of trust and hope,” Badham says that that is true, but that

    [t]he difficulty is … that that is not the way that most people respond to suffering. The more general human experience of suffering is that however ‘bravely borne’ it is rarely ennobling, and is more likely to lead to the collapse of faith than to its enhancement.

    [87]

    After thirty years of ministry that is my conclusion too, but I do not think that Williams was right, as Badham too generously allows.

    A few years ago, Scott, I would be where you are now. The pressure of life, and the inability of the church to respond to the suffering of someone whose life was more important to me than my own, has led me to look more critically on things that you think are sufficient warrant for your own beliefs. That’s fine. I have no problem with accepting people of faith. I think they’re wrong, but they think I’m wrong, so we’re even on that. What I object to is people of faith trying to impose on others prescriptions that are taken directly from the religious play book. I know you say that it is possible to be a person of faith and support assisted dying, and that sanctity of life and assisted dying are not in conflict, and I willingly accept you as an ally in the struggle for legalised assisted dying. However — and this needs to be said — in my own experience holding views in conflict with the church’s tradition, even if a majority of your fellow believers share your views, will not change the official church’s position without a massive social movement, and even then the change may only be temporary, because the holy texts are always there dragging people back to the old ways.

    And one other thing. Sanctity of life doctrine may not be biblical, but it is based on biblical insights, just like Trinitarian theology and incarnational beliefs about Jesus, neither of which is scriptural. And, according to the sanctity of life tradition, the taking of innocent life is always wrong, regardless of the quality or kind of life in question. Once quality of life considerations enter in, then it is only life of a certain quality that is sacred, and that, clearly, is opposed to sanctity of life considerations. That is why, by the way, I insist that the fundamental legitimating feature of assisted dying must be patient choice, for that takes “objective” considerations regarding quality of life (such as terminality) out of consideration, and leaves the issue up to the individual concerned. For, from the standpoint of providing reasonable grounds for assisted dying, individual choice counts because only the person who is suffering is capable of judging when life, for them, has become intolerable. But then, for them, life itself is no longer sacred, but a burden that only death can release them from. In order to show that sanctity of life and assisted dying are consistent, you must show that sanctity of life considerations are being preserved in situations like this. I don’t think it can be done, but I am open to persuasion.

18. Eric, thank you for your generous comment. I want to get on to Job, so will be brief about your other points. Based on the Book of Job, Tennessen describes God as ‘a ruler of grotesque primitivity, a cosmic cave dweller, a braggart and a rumble-dumble, almost congenial in his complete ignorance about spiritual refinement.’ I shall need to read the paper because, at the moment, I do not recognise this conclusion. However, your other points…
    1) You say, ‘We can all have spiritual experiences without believing in God..’. I agree.
    2) You say, ‘Do you know one of the greatest problems I had, every time? Convincing people to take the book at its word, that Job was a good and pious man, who did not deserve to suffer! Someone would always interject, “But all have sinned and come short of the glory of God!” Most Christians, in my experience, simply could not get their head around the idea that Job did not deserve to suffer, since we all do! Not a word of a lie!’ I fully accept that and have encountered it myself.
    3) You say, ‘The problem, as I see it, with the rather blasé way in which you dismiss people’s disbelief, by speaking in fairly ambiguous terms about the “audible Silence at the centre of things…’. I have not meant to be dismissive of the beliefs of others but only of views which do not stand up to scrutiny; in other words, where the caricature of religion is held up only to be knocked down. It is easy to find bad examples in religion but bad examples do not invalidate religion anymore than bad science invalidates science. I would like to think that I am concerned for intellectual integrity, though you may still feel I’m missing the point.
    4) You say, ‘I have no problem with accepting people of faith. I think they’re wrong, but they think I’m wrong, so we’re even on that.’ Thank you for that.
    5) You say, ‘What I object to is people of faith trying to impose on others prescriptions…..’. I agree.
    6) You say, ‘I know you say that it is possible to be a person of faith and support assisted dying, and that sanctity of life and assisted dying are not in conflict, and I willingly accept you as an ally in the struggle for legalised assisted dying. However — and this needs to be said — in my own experience holding views in conflict with the church’s tradition, even if a majority of your fellow believers share your views, will not change the official church’s position without a massive social movement, and even then the change may only be temporary, because the holy texts are always there dragging people back to the old ways.’ Thank you for your encouragement and I am aware of the intransigence of the churches on all kinds of ethical matters. I have had a phone call from our central office about speaking out on assisted dying. Hay-ho! The Church is bigger than the central office!
    7) I’ll leave ‘sanctity of life’ for another day. I want to get to Job. See next post.

19. Re the Book of Job. Reading the Bible literally is heresy…if I may say that kindly. I’m not saying that you do, but many who approach the Bible do not fully take on-board the nature of the work. In my experience, many clergy are pretty poor at interpreting Scripture!! The Book of Job is an extended faith narrative. By faith narrative, I mean that it is a lengthy poem which incorporates fragments of history, mythology, liturgy and spirituality. It is typical of biblical writing. It is not intended as the last word on suffering or the question of evil but is written within a context and specific time period. Yet, despite its age, it is a remarkably profound book – one of my favourites. The Book of Job is theology through poetic story. It goes without saying that there was not or need not ever have been a man called Job: it is so obviously a story. It is difficult to see how Christians or any others can fail to see that Job is portrayed in anything other than the most glowing terms: again, a literary device. Job is blameless and upright. Job’s suffering is undeserved by contrast to the prevailing view that suffering was somehow a punishment from God for sin. Even today I hear people ask, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ Job is acutely aware that the divine ordering of the universe and human suffering are understood as bound together. In the end, in order to defend their theology, Job’s friends destroy his character rather than rethink their theology. Ah well. As the book moves on, Job gets to the point where he rages against God challenging God’s justice and even mocking Psalm 8. Job says, ‘What is man that thou makest much of him and turnest thy thoughts towards him, only to punish him morning by morning or test him every hour of the day?’ (7: 17 – 18) Job never loses his integrity: he is a man of immense stature.

    Job is not the last word on suffering or the problem of evil. It is a stopping point on our journey. There are many interpretations of this book but one cannot fail to notice that, at 42: 7, God ‘rages’ against Job’s friends. God says that they have not spoken for Him, unlike His servant Job. In Job, God has faced the most overwhelming onslaught about suffering and evil and rather than commend those ‘who spoke for God’, who rattled out the conventional theology, Job, the man who gave God hell, is held up as God’s servant. For me, the Book of Job is a protest against over-simplistic theology. Job’s protests and bitter wrestling were justified. In haste, and am happy to dialogue further, for Job God remained elusive, which is the only way it can ever be. Again, I do not recognise the critique of Tennessen. Eric, I hope you catch the warm sentiment that comes with this.

20. Scott, thank you for that more detailed response. I am interested that you have experienced the same thing in people’s response to Job as I have done. However, what I want to emphasise here is your third point.

    You say, ‘The problem, as I see it, with the rather blasé way in which you dismiss people’s disbelief, by speaking in fairly ambiguous terms about the “audible Silence at the centre of things…’. I have not meant to be dismissive of the beliefs of others but only of views which do not stand up to scrutiny; in other words, where the caricature of religion is held up only to be knocked down. It is easy to find bad examples in religion but bad examples do not invalidate religion anymore than bad science invalidates science. I would like to think that I am concerned for intellectual integrity, though you may still feel I’m missing the point.

    That, it seems to me, is precisely the problem when I spoke about the blasé dismissive way that you refer to disbelief. For it is precisely those words — “audible Silence at the centre of things …” — to which I was referring. When you speak of standing up to scrutiny, I wonder if it makes sense to say that those words do. That’s my problem. Too often people say, “I don’t believe in the god you don’t believe in either,” without saying what it means to speak about God. And speaking about the “audible Silence at the centre of things” just doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t explain in what way the nonbeliever’s understanding of God — which can be quite complex, and spread over a number of different arguments — is a caricature of religion’s god. The main problem is that there are so many of them — gods, that is. And when they come at the end of a chain of argument, they tend to be rarified, effete and intellectual.

    Pascal spoke of the God of the patriarchs, not the god of the philosophers, but that won’t do either, because the God of the patriarchs, even the God of Jesus, is very much the supernatural magician, who heals, provides food in a sticky situation, and even turns water into wine. Now, I know that these can also be read as metaphorical or figurative, as the walking on the water seems to be a resurrection appearance out of order, and signifies victory over death, but still, the question remains, even if they are metaphorical, what is the other term of the metaphor? Metaphors work because we know both the figure and the thing to which the figure refers. But in relation to gods, we don’t have this luxury, so the metaphors are metaphors of what? In other words, there is something missing in the equations, so to speak, and unless the believer can make it clear what it means to speak of God, it seems difficult to fault the unbeliever for his disbelief, as well as the unbeliever’s quizzically profane way of speaking about what believers believe in.

    The point, then, that I think you are missing, in fact, is that religious language does not obviously make plain sense, and even figurative language, or myth, does not really help to explain what religious faith is. Karen Armstrong says that faith is like riding a bicycle. You have to do it to understand. But I did do it, for years, and when push came to shove, I found I could not understand. As I was nearing retirement, while I did not think, at the time, that I was no longer a person of faith, the people I served thought so, and understood. Indeed, I did not finally abandon faith — in fact, on my retirement, I decided to buy the collected works of the early fathers — several feet of books! — which were to occupy my retirement — anyway, I did not abandon faith until I read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech to the House of Lords on assisted dying, and then I simply threw in the towel! And, contrary to you, I could not continue to belong to an organisation that persisted in getting it wrong, and said so with such fervour. The institutional expression of religion is the expression that has the most impact on political decision making, and most of that impact is deleterious. You were scolded for standing up for assisted dying. That’s the institutional expression that I oppose, and it simply can’t be done from within, because belonging to the institution is to support its public expression, and I won’t. And it is vague theological language that permits this abandonment of moral principle. And theological language, in the end, has to be sufficiently vague to encompass an inchoate mass of people whose beliefs can in practically no respect be thought to be in any literal sense compatible with one another. But in order to achieve unity of purpose, the moral issues can be expressed with a definiteness and intransigence which gives the illusion that the theology behind it is equally definite and intellectually unproblematic, and it simply isn’t.

21. While I was writing the above, you were writing about Job! When you said “next post,” I thought you meant post in the blog sense. A post is what I do, comments are what you do.

    About Job. Yes, yes, of course, I understand all that about over-simplistic theology, and the dismissal of Job’s “friends”. The point, though, that Tennessen is making is a different one. He is talking about what is perhaps the unnoticed way in which the story itself is oversimplistic (a subtext, if you will) — unnoticed, perhaps, by the author, and certainly by most readers. (I think Tennessen believes that the author was aware of what he was doing, but that is by the way.) After the theophany, Job speaks about having only touched the hem of God’s garment, but now seeing more fully the awesome power of God. Uncomprehending before, he now understands.

    But, Tennessen is asking the question: What does Job understand? Job cries out for justice — indeed, he challenges God to meet him in court — and aside from condemning Job’s “friends” for simplistic theology (let’s stick with that way of putting it), God answers by thundering on about his power, saying to Job, in the greatest non sequitur of them all, “Were you there when I …” (and then details some of the “wonders” of creation)? This for Tennessen, as for me, makes of God a figure of gross primitivity, because all about power, and not about justice at all. All of Job’s cries for justice, wrung out of him by the experience of intolerable suffering, go unanswered. Job is acknowledged to be a good man, and his friends are wrong for accusing him because their theology is too small, to say nothing of their god. But there is no justice, just an epiphany of power. Job’s suffering goes unrequited. God is a braggart and a cave-dweller, because he does not touch, as Tennessen says, the burning issue. And the ending, of course, when Job is restored to even greater wealth, with daughters even more beautiful than before, turns Job into a comic strip character. The central issue is never faced. I think, like Ecclesiastes, the author of the central part of Job — and there is likely a traditional tale with the addition of the Job’s travails and his “friends” attempt to correct him, so it is not all by one author — is really a nonbeliever, even though he casts is unbelief by speaking in terms of God. Like Advaita Vendanta, Job and Ecclesiastes are the disbelieving part of the Jewish tradition. In my opinion.

    But — now here’s the tricky part — all this goes unnoticed. And why? Because most believers think that we suffer justly! God cannot be served with a subpoena. He does not need to appear in court. All he has to do is to thunder his power. That’s why Tennessen calls this a masterpiece of existential blasphemy, for it is, in fact, if you read it in this sense — and I find, after years of living with the text, that I am unable to read it otherwise — an account of how existence itself is a blasphemy against God.

22. 3) You say, ‘The problem, as I see it, with the rather blasé way in which you dismiss people’s disbelief, by speaking in fairly ambiguous terms about the “audible Silence at the centre of things…’. I have not meant to be dismissive of the beliefs of others but only of views which do not stand up to scrutiny; in other words, where the caricature of religion is held up only to be knocked down. It is easy to find bad examples in religion but bad examples do not invalidate religion anymore than bad science invalidates science. I would like to think that I am concerned for intellectual integrity, though you may still feel I’m missing the point.

    Scott, if you are concerned about intellectual integrity, then define your terms. What is good religion? What is bad religion? If the Bible is out-dated theology, then why doesn’t Christianity get rid of it. We don’t use Aristotle to teach physics or biology – why use the Bible to teach about god?

    Everything you say is all so vague, please tell us which views of god or theology or religion do and don’t stand up to scrutiny. If we don’t know what you mean by god, then how can it be scrutinized?

23. Eric, I have now had time to read Tennessen’s article. I am grateful to you for this! I have enjoyed our wrestling with Job. Without doing any detailed research into the piece, I make the following points. First of all, Tennessen can hardly be said to be an open-minded scholar. Also, he is neither a biblical scholar nor a theologian. Intentionally or otherwise, he misses or discounts the fact that there is more than one God mentioned in the book. He seems to imply that there is only one god, when, in fact, different gods are mentioned at different points. For me, the Book of Job, in part, represents the journey of the Hebrew people towards monotheism. Tennessen does not acknowledge that this journey is part of the theological plot in Job.

    Second, in describing the LORD (Yahweh) as a ‘ruler of grotesque primitivity’, Tennessen does not see that, in this story, Yahweh is over-played in response to Job’s pretensions. Like Job, Yahweh is pretentious. Tennessen is too literal, perhaps because he wants to mock?

    Third, Tennessen does not compare Yahweh as portrayed in the final chapters of Job with, say, Yahweh with Moses at the burning bush. As in the case of Moses, so too with Abraham and Isaac, Yahweh is the God of compassion. (These are faith narratives.) You know as well as I know that the ancients were trying to reconcile the goodness of God with suffering and the problem of evil. They hit the same wall we do. You will know that the ‘evolution’ of Satan is a theological attempt to preserve the goodness of God while acknowledging the presence of evil and suffering. I don’t pretend that religion has an easy answer to this but that tension does not lead me to atheism.

    Fourth, it seems to me self-evident that the One who keeps the universe in being is always going to be beyond our comprehension, so allowing the author in Job to make that point is OK.

    Fifth, decent biblical scholars are no less penetrating in their analysis of the text than Tennessen. However, he, like you, makes a leap at the end, a leap to atheism, which the text may or may not support. (As an atheist) I think Tennesson misinterprets Job’s face to face experience with Yahweh, an experience similar to that of Moses. I think it was Aquinas who had a similar experience towards the end of his life and, having ‘seen’ God, he said he could write no more: his theology was so inadequate. For me, the entire book of Job, including the theology of Yahweh’s speeches, point to the mystery and elusiveness of God. God is always in the darkness and Scripture elsewhere testifies to this. All theology fails or, better, is provisional.

    Finally, a more general point, I no longer confuse the churches or religion with God. God is far more interesting and compelling than both. The churches ably demonstrate themselves to be amateurish, ethically bigoted, slow to change and many of the ‘promoted’ clergy are after power (as in every other management structure). Religions can hurt people – women, children, LGBT people and, now, those suffering intolerably (and their relatives!) They tend to be patriarchal, patronising and, increasingly, intellectually pretty lightweight. However, they are not God. You mentioned elsewhere the diversity of theologies which accompany the different world religions. I acknowledge that, though there is some overlap. I acknowledge that religions are culturally determined, at least in part. But, for me, theological reflection is always a secondary step; it is not the real thing. By contrast, I do like some of the work of a good number of the mystics. There is considerable overlap among them across the faiths. It was no theological thought system which persuaded me to become a follower of Jesus – I don’t like the word ‘Christian’ because of its increasingly destructive connotations.

    In the end, Tennessen is not wholly persuasive for me because I think we can be brutally blunt to God within the context of faith. Like Job, the prophets of Israel on more than one occasion say to God, ‘Thy will be changed.’ Abraham Heschel says, ‘Man should never capitulate…not even to the LORD.’ This is part of what it means to wrestle with God. It is part of our God-given evolution. Tennessen’s argument is good but it is not a fatal wound.

    You said that the breaking point for you was the Archbishop’s speech about assisted dying. For Holloway, as you know, it was the bigotry towards people who are gay. Who knows why I might leave the church, but leaving the church is not leaving God. I remain within the church because, as broken as it is, I feel I am not a lone voice. There are many who think along similar lines to me – and we all need community.

    With affection.

24. Thank you Scott. Let me respond very quickly to your notes about Job. I have not read about Job for several years now, so I am a bit rusty, but, as I recall, there is no clarity about there being different gods in the book. What we seem to have is a story of unknown origin, with an intervening section detailing Job’s suffering and the criticisms of his “friends” with the great theophany at the end, followed, of course, by the remaining half of the traditional story. So, it is probably an adaptation of a regional story, perhaps not Jewish at all. Therefore, it is doubtful if this is related to the journey towards monotheism. I don’t think this journey is part of the plot. Though some people have assigned Job to the time of Abraham, there seems lots of reason not to accept this dating (see below about monotheism and the problem of evil). Nevertheless, in the canonical form in which we have it, there is no sign that different gods are meant. I think that is important, for otherwise, it is not at all clear that the text as it stands makes any sense. (Actually, some parts of it don’t.) It would I think be a mistake to suggest as you do that there are different gods in the story, even though the text may be an adaptation of an existing story, and therefore contains vestigial references to other gods. The story is adapted, and there is no reason to think that the author who so adapted it meant us to think that there are different gods in play, though we have to have the more primitive god to make the criticisms of the “comforters” relevant. But that god, by an ironic twist, comes to seem less primitive than the god of the theophany.

    Second, Tennessen’s not being a biblical scholar is neither here nor there, if he has identified something important in the story, and I think he does. Taken as a text, in itself, it has something to tell us. That is, after all, the canonical assumption.

    Third, the comparison with the God of Abraham is not made. Indeed, it is not at all clear that the writer of the book knows about Abraham. Besides, it is important to note that the God of Job shows no compassion (and yes, I did say the God of Job, because I think the distinction of gods in the book is a bit precious). This is not part of the same story. Indeed, this is the problematic of the book, whether there is a God of justice, let alone compassion. To connect it with ideas of a God of compassion is to short-circuit the story.

    Fourth, I cannot see any pretension in Job. The only way that you can see pretension in Job, rather than real suffering, is if you see him as in some sense already guilty. This, as I pointed out, is precisely the problem with reading the book as a Christian, because Job is assumed to be in some sense guilty. Speaking of Job’s pretension is your way of assigning guilt. Notice that. There is no sign that the response of God is a deliberately inflated account of God’s power. It is a genuinely profound expression of the writer’s sense of God’s majesty and authority, and the language, I am told, reflects this. My Hebrew was never very good, and it is now practically all lost. It is a straightforward affirmation of God’s power, and is usually assumed to be meant to be. The words regarding Job’s repentance in dust and ashes is usually taken as Job’s submission before the glory that has been revealed. But that repentance can be seen as ironic, in face of the fact that God does not answer the burning issue at the heart of the story, whether or not there is a god of justice. And it seems that there is not. This suggests to me that the story itself in its developed form is the outworking of a long period of monotheistic belief, for the problem is, as you note, peculiar to monotheism.

    Fifth, there is no sign that Tennessen makes a leap at the end, nor that he approaches Job as an atheist. He is telling us what he has read in the text, and I think he is right. For all I know Tennessen was a Christian, and simply noted the heavy irony of the story, though I admit that is unlikely. Most of his philosophical work, however was done in philosophy of science and epistemology. However, the problem of evil is still a problem even for faith, and, in my experience, especially for those who are suffering. To say, as you do, and as has often been said, that God is elusive, is a bit like talking about the Cheshire Cat, of whom all that was left was his smile. If God is elusive, how do we know that it isn’t a figment of our imagination? If we can’t identify the God we worship, why should we think that there is a worshipful God? Aquinas’ psychological episode notwithstanding, we are not bound to take it as indicative of something real. Indeed, there is now a book on the bestseller list in which a neuroscientist tells of his visit to heaven, but there is no reason to think that his many dimensions of reality are any more than the peculiarities of his psychological experience when his brain was suffering from a lack of oxygen or some other liminal state.

    When you say,

    In the end, Tennessen is not wholly persuasive for me because I think we can be brutally blunt to God within the context of faith,

    I can imagine myself saying it too. It’s pastoral theology 101. But the question is, what does it mean to be brutally blunt to “someone” who never answers back. No, I know you will speak of your experiences of God, and I don’t mean to mock them. But God doesn’t answer back. You may feel the comforting presence of God. I did. And then, in the end, I realised it was all smoke and mirrors. I’m certainly not saying that you must feel this way, for you don’t and it would be useless to suggest it. I am saying that, once you do feel this way, God talk becomes a completely different thing, and it seems so like a shadow play, without the puppets. The funny thing is that, within the context of faith, everything makes perfect sense, and you wonder why atheists are so acidulated about the kinds of things religious believers say. However, the point is that the context of faith is a protected zone, in which things are said that no one else thinks make any sense, and when religious people are asked to say what sense they make, the explanations seem to be squishy somehow, unanchored. So, just speaking of God as elusive is a strange thing to say. The Abominable Snowman is elusive! And people who believe in it will say: Well, can you prove it doesn’t exist? And that’s the way God talk ends up seeming like, I’m afraid, and that’s why the comments amuse you, because to you it makes perfect sense. But you have to be inside the cocoon of faith in order to feel that kind of security.

25. It is hard to discern cause and effect, but there appears to be a positive feedback loop between finding agency in nature and belief in gods. They continue to reinforce each other until something breaks the escalation. For me it was starting an undergraduate program in science – I realized that the natural world didn’t need agency to work.

26. Michael, I think you are right on the money here. The trouble with any religious claim nowadays, is that it can be explained scientifically, in evolutionary terms. Some scientists of religion are not willing to say this, Scott Atran in particular, but it is something that needs to be acknowledged whenever the question of religious truth comes up. We now know that there are reasons why religious beliefs take the form they do, why they have such mass appeal, why they seem intuitively correct, etc. I have avoided this argument, because I think there are other ways to show that religious beliefs don’t stand up to scrutiny. However, in all fairness, the science of religion response is the most decisive one, I agree.

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