This post is now available at the Polish site Racjonalista. Thanks once more to Malgorzata!
In the New York Times this morning there is a letter to the editor from Beverly Brewster, a Presbyterian minister, in response to Susan Jacoby’s article on atheism and empathy. Here are a few of her words:
The world’s enduring religions offer much more wisdom and meaning than a child’s idea of God as a superhero. As a Presbyterian minister, I often say to self-proclaimed atheists, “Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.”
Ms. Jacoby states that atheists “need to demonstrate that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect,” but atheism is rooted in neither. A lack of belief in one concept of God is nothing more than that. Ms. Jacoby also presumes that faith in God necessarily includes belief in an afterlife, complete with angels in heaven. Here again, atheism ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.
Brewster is responding in particular to Jacoby’s realisation, as a child, that there is evil in the world, and finding it difficult to believe in a god which would allow such evil things to happen. Brewster’s response is that her god is not like that; it is not a superhero who comes to rescue us in need. She has a different concept of god, and so she comes out with that old chestnut:
Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.
This is so tired and worn out that I wonder at the person who could have repeated it and thought that she was saying something profound. Once this has been said, however, it needs to be noticed how very little has been said.
Atheism, says Ms. Brewster, “ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.” This is simply not true. What atheism does not give the religious believer room to do is to skate away over the surface of things with statements like this which subvert themselves. If the gods people believe in are simply the consequence of a bit of conceptual jiggery-pokery, as Ms. Brewster’s god appears to be, then there is simply no reason to believe in them at all. For how, after all, are gods to be identified? The great diversity of the world’s religions points out the problem. The only way to identify gods is to describe them. Whereas the god of Genesis is depicted anthropomorphically, as someone walking in the Garden in the cool of the day, from whom Adam and Eve have hidden in shame at their disobedience, so that God has to call out to them, “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3.8-9), very few believers think of their gods in this simplistic way. But if gods are not like that, then identifying them will be a problem. We cannot identify them by their works, for the only works of a god that might be considered godlike would be something supernatural or miraculous. Anything else we can account for in immanent ways, as the products of human action or activity, or the normal results of the workings of the natural world.
There is an old story that illustrates this point. There is a big storm, and as the flood waters rise, the people in the house first of all abandon the first floor and move to the second; then they move into the attic, and then, finally, they get out onto the roof which is even now being lapped by the rising floodwaters. But the floodwaters continue to rise, threatening their shrinking island. In desperation the the stranded family cries out to God for mercy. Soon, a rescue worker in a boat comes by, but the desperate people, full of faith in the mercy and goodness of their god, do not see the need of a boat, which continues on its mission of mercy. The flood waters inch up the incline of the roof, and, realising that soon there will be nowhere for them stand, they pray more earnestly, beating their breasts and promising, if they are spared, a change of life. Soon after, a rescue helicopter chances by and lets down a rope ladder, but for those who believe in God’s goodness, helicopters are merely human contrivances, and unnecessary. Not unreasonably thinking them a bit mad, the rescue crew goes on its way in search of other people endangered by the storm. The people on the roof cry out with even greater passion, begging their god to come and save them, lest they drown. At this, an exasperated voice cries out from heaven: “I sent you a man in a boat, and then a rescue team in a helicopter. What more did you expect?”
This story is told in all seriousness by religious believers, and some people, who think that prayer and anointing with oil is all that is necessary for the recovery of their sick children, actually behave this way, and rebuff offers to help with all the marvels of modern scientific medicine can provide. But this is not, Ms. Brewster would say, the god she believes in. The god she believes in, she is convinced, will not be the one upon whom atheists lavish their disbelief. Atheists, she thinks, simply ignore “the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.” But this, of course, is precisely the wrong answer, for the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions is an argument against belief, not an argument that supports belief in gods or other supernatural or transcendent entities. Philip Kitcher calls it the symmetry argument (see page 5). As he points out, there is a perfect symmetry between believers in one religious tradition and those in another. They are born into it, taught it, learn its scriptures and its practices, and yet when confronted with each other, they do not agree. The tension between beliefs, and their lack of grounding in any objective criteria, suggests that religious beliefs are, one and all, simply constructs of the human imagination working on peripheral aspects of evolved human psychology.
Here are Kitcher’s words:
Most Christians have adopted their doctrines much as the polytheists and the ancestor-worshippers have acquired theirs, through early teaching and socialization. Had the Christians been born among the aboriginal Australians, they would believe, in just the same ways, on just the same bases, and with just the same convictions, doctrines about the Dreamtime instead of about the Resurrection. The symmetry is complete. None of the processes of socialization, none of the chains of transmission of sacred lore across the generations, has any special justificatory force. Because of the widespread inconsistency in religious doctrine, it is clear that not all of these traditions can yield true beliefs about the supernatural. Given that they are all on a par, we should trust none of them.
So, even if the god that atheists disbelieve is not the one that Ms. Brewster believes in, there is no reason we should take her word for it either. If it is simply a matter of reconceptualising God so as to escape one particular set of criticisms — say, Susan Jacoby’s childhood experience of having a friend contract polio and die young, with no apparent care or concern from a loving God — saying, rather blandly that she doesn’t believe in such a god either, the most appropriate response is that such reconceptualisations are cheap. Anyone can dream up a concept that escapes particular criticisms. The question is whether the concept so derived actually picks out some reality, whether something that exists, or, conscious of Tillich wagging an admonitory finger, some “thing” that is beyond existence, the Ground of Being, or ultimate reality as such. Reconceive God any way you like, it still will not solve the problem of justification. And, besides, if God is not some kind of superhero, then what, pray, is God like? And what reason can you give why we should believe in such a god?
In a remarkable chapter in her book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, entitled “Divine Agency, Remodeled,” Marilyn McCord Adams, one time Regius Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford, rehearses in detail various suggestions as to how to account for God’s agency in the world, which both protects God’s function as creator, while at the same time preserving God’s nature as loving and caring. Reading this chapter in the context of studying the Holocaust, I wondered what significance such a conceptual exercise could possibly have, and how reasonable or reassuring the victims of so much callous violence would have found exercises of this sort. I came away from the chapter feeling bruised and violated. Whether the gods so conceived satisfy the theological problems that lie at the heart of the existence of so much incomprehensible suffering in the world, they neither relieve the suffering nor do they provide any basis for the conviction that the beings variously described stand a chance of being real in any of the various senses in which reality may be attributed to things. Nor is it clear what value belief in such reconceptualised beings could possibly have.
The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that our conceptions of God tend to swallow up the human. As in the story of the flood-stranded family on the roof of their house, human goodness is turned into God’s love and mercy. Once acknowledge that God does not act, in his own person, as it were, but acts in and through things that naturally occur, or that are done by other people, it comes to seem as though God is exhaustively described by the totality of things that occur, much in the same way that Spinoza spoke of Deus sive Natura (viz. God or Nature).
In general, of course, this is not how religious believers conceive of God, and this is the problem that I have spent the last fifteen hundred words approaching. For the religions, God tends to be the supreme person (in very much the same way as you and I, dear reader, are persons). All that is quintessentially human is vested in God. Justice, loving kindness, mercy, compassion, long-suffering, slow to anger, quick to forgive, generosity, nobility, gentleness, an ever present help in trouble, trustworthy – well, we could go on laying down superlatives with a trowel, a veritable infinity of them. The problem with this is that, once we have shifted all these good things onto God, and imagine them to be, there, raised to the highest power, we must inevitably think of ourselves as correspondingly inadequate in all the same respects, in need of God’s mercy for our failures, and quick to judge others who fail to measure up to the divine goodness which judges us. And, of course, since there is a diversity of religious traditions, the divine goodness that judges us, if we are Christian, say, is bound to be different from the divine goodness which judges others, since religions tend to adopt the ethical project as it manifested itself at the time and place where the religious traditions began, which has every chance of expressing a very different ideal of humanity along at least some of its dimensions.
The problem is that gods are forever (at least in believer’s minds), and so the values that are vested in them come to be seen as moral absolutes, and while morality has tended to function, traditionally, in this way, based as it has been in systems of religious belief, morality is seldom best understood in so marmoreal and intransigent a form. The pope tends to dismiss those who question the Roman Catholic Church’s unyielding moral laws as relativists without noting that the field is not divided, as he seems to think, into absolutes and relatives, but into principles and their application to complex and nuanced human circumstances in which there is no role for absolutes to play. Of course, the pope thinks that all values derive, in the end, from the absoluteness and infinite wisdom of his god, without noticing that it was he and his forebears who vested those values in their god in the first place. For, despite everything that he can say about moral value, he cannot provide evidence for the proposition that these values are either commanded by his god, or inscribed by his god into the very fabric of human nature. The values are purely human. They have a history.
The biggest problem the pope faces is providing an explanation as to why we should stop that history at some point in the past, and accept, as eternal, human values as understood at that point, instead of recognising that the ethical project has much of its history yet to run. Even people like Beverly Brewster recognise that many conceptions of god are now no longer useful — may even be morally repugnant, as the gods of Jesus or Muhammad often are – and need to be discarded. There is not one conception of god that has stood the test of time. Isn’t it about time that we recognised that gods are human creations, and that, in the end, we are responsible for what we do with them? It is simply untrue to say that
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. [James 1.17]
This belief in unchanging perfection has haunted humanity almost from the beginning. It is a will-o-the-wisp. It does not exist, but belief in its existence has set humanity, time after time, chasing after shadows and rainbows. Quite contrary to Beverly Brewster’s shopworn charge, that “atheism ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions,” not only do we recognise the diversity, but we conclude from it that all the world’s religions are human creations, and none should be allowed to have final or supreme authority over us. They are images of perfection frozen in time, and all the worse for being so. The poison of religion consists precisely in this, that religions have stopped looking, when there is much that we still do not know, about our world, ourselves, and about how best to live. The gods swallow our humanity. We should ask for it back.
Once again, I’m reminded of Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, because it illustrates nicely what Brewster is doing… church membership retention. In the book, a minister loses his faith in God, but one of his superiors tries to convince him to stay by trying to re-imagine God in a huge spectrum of ways, any of which is just fine, so long as he keeps doing his job.
Ultimately, it does seem a desperate argument though, just as Eric points out. When you acknowledge and accept the diversity of religious opinions as being valid, not only do you put down the people that believe in a more literal god (which Brewster certainly does here, when she dismisses the God of some people as a ‘superhero’), but you admit that there is no correct option. And yet, by clinging to faith, she seems to imply that *any* faith is the correct option.. but why? Its the Cherry Picker’s dilemma… after a while you really just seem like someone that wants to keep making money from faith, not someone who actually believes in their product.
Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.
This is a pretty blatant reverse onus — I disbelieve in a largish number of possible gods, do I really have to enumerate and disprove all of them? The appropriate response is: “No. You tell me about your God, and then we can discuss whether it is likely to exist”. Granted, there are no doubt atheists (say, those in reaction against whatever sect they were raised in) with simplistic notions about religion, but it’s insulting to assume that “atheism”, meaning all atheists, or atheism as an entire school of thought, is thus blinkered.
I can’t say I have heard this dodge before. It makes about as much sense as a teacher demanding the student give a precise definition of a concept they do not know. Tell me about the leprechauns you do not believe in. Must we conclude there is a correct leprechaun concept only because there are an infinite number of such concepts to be described? There is a reason the burden of proof, and thus the burden of description, is on the one making the positive assertion.
I will admit that this uncertainty mongering was the last stumbling block keeping me from adopting the atheist label. I cringe at the simplicity of the trick now, but I still remember how it held me in sway at one time. The symmetry argument was exactly what tipped me over to complete unbelief.
I remember the flood joke from quite some time ago, but even back then I noticed the actions of the god were carefully selected. My response was to change the criteria accredited to god and have him reply: “Do you think I am unaware of what you want or how floods work? I deliberately made the flood happen with my infinite wisdom. You are foolish indeed to think you know better than I what to do with the water of my creation. Your plight is exactly as I have planned it, and I will not change it just because it is not to your liking. I already knew what you would want when I made the flood in the first place. I do not take requests from the likes of you.” Kind of Calvinist I know, but I cannot let the believers choose only the stuff they like for the actions of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient god.
+1 Eamon.
This seems to me to be contradictory. On the one hand she wants to discuss the one and only god she believes in, and shortly after tells us atheists that we are ignoring all the other gods! The fact is that we do not believe in a god. Any god! As someone with a science background, I would say “anything supernatural”.
The flood story reminds me of the sheep and goats parable in Matthew. When giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty and clothes to the naked is the path to salvation. We are supposed to see agency in the world because gods exist and, because of agency, every day is a test of our worth before these gods. What else could it be? This another one of those battles, do you believe in a god that wants works to complement faith or just faith or just works? Theology is so plastic, that one can always keep believing no matter what.
Haggis has it right.
The first time someone tried the ‘Tell me more…’ gambit I was stumped. The second time I said ‘I don’t believe in the supernatural god’ and she was stumped.
Dear Ms. Brewster:
I don’t believe in your god either. And I’ll thank you to not claim otherwise.
Thanks.
And, of course, it’s quite impossible to ignore the diversity of religious opinion. I’d rather ignore the entire lot altogether.
But when Muslims are blowing each other up over the existence or lack thereof of a 12th Mahdi, when Christians blow each other up over whether they wear green or orange, when Hindi discriminate against Muslims and vice versa to the point where they each had to be given their own countries to keep themselves separate … well, it’s kinda hard to ignore all that.
Oh sure, now she’ll come back with the “peace, love and understanding” vaguely deistic liberal Christianity that she practices. Well, she’s a pretty small minority of Christians – at least in the US. Sadly for us and for the world at large.
And BTW — shouldn’t there be one and only one “religious opinion”? We’re talking about the express wishes of the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth here. Shouldn’t some being with that amount of power and authority be able to do a better job at letting us know which of the world’s thousands of religions is the correct one? Shouldn’t we instantly understand heresies when we see them? Shouldn’t people laugh riotously at the $cientologists or the Mormons?
The fact that there is diversity of religion thought only adds one more check mark in the column of “all gods are myths, made up by humans”. First to try to understand the weather and diseases, later to control the population, and as a side benefit to provide smart people an indoor job rather than working in the fields.
“atheism ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions.”
No, it doesn’t, atheists just don’t believe any of these are true. In fact, this is often a consideration that leads to athiesm – after all they can’t all be right can they?
And frankly Beverly also ignores the great diversity of the world’s religious traditions because she is only a believer in one of them.
Being 100% sure about the lack of a God strikes me as the same concept as being 100% sure there is indeed a certain God. Both ideas are rigid and reveal what i see as the fundamental error of accessing the spiritual realm in an absolute and finite way. this misses the point.
To me a risk of pure atheism is that it opens the door to being tricked into living a life simply opposed to extremist religion. why give extremist religion the time of day? This can close you off. Maybe there is a type of connection to the spiritual that will grip just you, not a cult or anything, and bring you peace one day. I’m hoping I will be so lucky to find peace in my heart and develop more spiritual understanding of the world one day but am willing to wait and accept that it might not come without my open mind and willingness to be unsure of what will come. Best , Liz
And I call that being agnostic for life
I don’t think atheism makes sense nor does fundamentalist religion. why do you need to make up your mind one way or another and claim to prove something unprovable? It might be easier for those who are confused but I think spirituality is much more complicated than that and great thinkers have acknowledged this much.
Liz
A prayer with uncertain attribution is often said in Catholic schools. It is some version of this often (apparently incorrectly) attributed to St. Teresa:
Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours
It’s supposed to be a way to get students to see that when they do good works, they are really acting in Jesus’ place since he is now “dead” – i.e.. not on earth anymore. This is supposed to inspire them to do good works such as bringing in food for the food bank. It’s a little sinister and insulting though when you consider that it demeans the good works of some of the students who all the time thought they were doing good works because they are humans with compassion. Many never considered why they were doing good works other than that they really felt they should because hungry people exist and they think that’s wrong. Of course the religious like to take away the natural inclination of people (especially impressionable students) to be charitable because if they didn’t, it would be an acknowledgement that you really can be good without god. Since that is so obvious, then the best thing to do is to co-opt that natural human goodness and attribute it to Jesus in a sense – similar to Jesus’ “own words” “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me” — as if you can’t do something to another human for the sake of the other human.
All this also reminds me of experiences whereby someone has some awful tragedy befall them and subsequently is saved due to the special expertise of paramedics, firemen, police officers, surgeons, anesthetists, nurses, etc. etc. etc.. and then the person or someone close to them says something like “God is great to have saved my brother, (sister, father, mother, friend etc.). Thanks be to God.”
It’s perverse and widespread psychological manipulation, or bait and switch, or a confidence scam – I can’t come up with the correct term to describe it – but it is pervasive.
“paste” – rotten morning!! [Paste and correction succeeded.]
It’s OK Steeve, we understand
. And I couldn’t agree more with your last point. It makes me mad to see the expertise, care and sheer hard work of professional experts ignored or effectively denigrated by this appalling attitude.
I can’t worship any god that is ‘knowable’ because such knowledge appears to be self delusion. I can’t worship any god that is unknowable because there is no way of knowing that worship is appropriate or appreciated. Not much of a gap to slide a god into is there?
Liz: First, prove there is something called “the spirit”.
Then, we’ll talk.
Empirical evidence, Liz. Not the warm fuzzy feeling you get staring at a sunset (ie, the logical fallacy of argument from personal experience).
@Lizzie: Oh, please: not this straw man again. Very few atheists claim to be 100% sure there is no God (and the ones that do generally present arguments as to why, and if those arguments are valid, then it is rational to be 100% confident, right?). There are many, many questions — and “Does God exist?” is one such — for which I lack absolutely positive proof either way, but on which I have very good evidence in one direction, and no or poor evidence in the other. It’s entirely rational and honest of me to draw the more likely conclusion, and go on to other matters (acknowledging that I might have to reconsider at some point in the future, *if* some new evidence becomes available).
And if you think that approach risks closing myself off to the “spiritual”, then I’ll have to first ask you to define that term, so we can know whether there’s anything there to discuss.
Eric – great post. I will be sending it to various sophisticated theist acquaintances. To answer Ms. Brewster’s challenge, “Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.”I suggest we turn the tables and say, “No, I’ll tell you about the god I do believe in; Humans are God’s God”
Thanks for “marmoreal” – sent me to the dictionary, which is one of my great pleasures.
Steeve, your remarks above remind me of an incident recounted by Edmund Gosse in his book “Father and Son”. Gosse senior was a biologist and an elder of a sect called the Plymouth Brethren in 19th century England. He was famous for his book “Omphalos” in which he attempted to disprove evolution by arguing that the world was created to look old. But that’s no tthe point of this post. The story is this: in the church were a number of poor families. Gosse junior had been told that he would receive a spiritual blessing for helping the poor, so the young boy saved up his pocket money, and one day he took it to one of the poorer families in the parish. The family received the money from him, and placing i ton the table, the father of the family lifted his eyes heavenward, and thanked the Lord for providing.
The young Gosse felt quite put out, as he felt that it should have been him that the family should have thanked, after all, it had been his money, and his sacrifice.
Pingback: Three gods I don’t believe in
I’ve always been a bit confused by responses such as Brewster’s. My understanding is that theism is “the belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures” (New Oxford American Dictionary).
I’m an a-theist, meaning I don’t believe that sort of entity exists. If someone wants to go on about god as “the ground of being” or “effing ineffable,” that’s fine with me. They can even say that a theistic type being set up the universe and is now off contemplating his cosmic navel for all of eternity without any further “intervention” (i.e. deism). Fine, go for it. However for a meaningful debate about the existence or otherwise of these types of “entities” (for want of a better term), you’ll need to be a bit clearer in your definition (or just take the Chán approach, don’t say anything and point to a pile of dog droppings or some such, which is an approach I’m quite sympathetic to).
But the exact moment “the ground of being” or the “effing ineffable” tells me who to have sex with, who to marry, who I can associate with, what to eat, what to study or teach, who to kill, or who to stop from dying, either by telling me now through a direct line or telling me from the past through any old document, well, they’ve stopped being “the ground of being” or the “effing ineffable” and become a good ol’ theistic entity.
I totally reject that type of entity. There are so many logical, historical, and moral problems with any possible conception of it that I think it is intellectually bankrupt to believe it in and morally reprehensible to try and force it on anyone else.