Category Archives: Theodicy

Apophatic, Papophatic, or just plain Fishy

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There is a long tradition of apophatic theology in Christianity, and, I shouldn’t wonder, in other religions as well. The word comes from the Greek ἀπόφασις (apophasis) from the verb ἀπόφημι (apophemi), which means ‘to deny’. Apophatic theology, therefore, is negative theology, and is based on the thought that, in the end, God is unknowable and incomprehensible. That being the case, however, one would have thought that it would be better just to suspend judgement. That would be the counsel of reason, at any rate. People have believed, or half believed, for centuries perhaps, that there is some kind of a sea monster in Loch Ness, something like Grendel, perhaps, in Beowulf, and others have believed in the Himalayan “Abominable Snowman” or Yeti, or, in the North American Rocky Mountains, the so-called “Big Foot.” The existence of these creatures has never been confirmed by undoubted evidence. It seems, in consequence, better to think of them as mythical instead of real, until such evidence comes along, and most of us give them no thought at all. If it makes sense to take the usual religious route, and have faith in their existence, despite the lack of evidence, on the strength of the claim that negative existential statements can never be disproved, then the number of such beings would be countless, and people would still believe pointlessly in fairies, trolls and gremlins, and many other imaginary beings as well. Why should we suppose that there is a god at all, if we find it pointless to believe in Yetis and Big Foots and Loch Ness monsters?

I was going to ignore this, but Ophelia’s post on the comments of Kevin Smith in the Ottawa Citizen, and one of the commenters having linked to a Guardian op-ed, perhaps it is worthwhile after all. I just find it hard to understand why anyone would take the incomprehensibility of God a reasonable place for faith to find a foothold. First though, to Kevin Smith, the one disbeliever amongst a group of religious believers who comment on questions put to “religious experts” in the Ottawa Citizen. There is a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Roman Catholic, an Anglican, a Pentecostal, a Bahá’í, and then, of course, Kevin Smith, who is not a religious expert at all. Given the question: “How can we explain the tragedy of the Newtown shootings?” each of the experts has a go. Rabbi Rueven Bulka says that

[i]t is an emotional cry with no possible answer, just possible responses. These  are responses that deal mainly with going forward, which we hope and pray the  families, in due time, will be able to embrace.

There is no answer. The Anglican says the same, and so, in various ways, do most of the others, though some try their hand at sociological or other explanations. But for the tragedy itself there is no answer. It is incomprehensible. As Kevin Smith says, in response to those who suggested that it was an expression of God’s wrath for having been banished from American public schools:

How cruel to the grieving families that these self-serving defenders of their faith dare make excuses for a God who doesn’t care, or who is not there. He is  never anywhere.

This is a problem that the others needed to face, and did not. All they can fall back on is their desperate cries about the incomprehensibility of such evil.

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Gods swallow our humanity

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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?”

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Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: VI: The Design of Things

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I want to return today to the series that I began some time ago on Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. The last instalment of the series was about the metaphysical claims of religion. The question I raised there was whether the more refined of the arguments for the existence of God require closer attention than Hitchens gives them. It’s one thing to say that, if you posit god as a designer, this raises the question of who designed the designer; it’s a completely different thing to say why there is no way of stopping the regress. Modern Thomists like Edward Feser think that Thomas Aquinas had a way of doing that, so that the question becomes simply a misunderstanding of the arguments themselves. This applies especially to the first way of Aquinas, where what is at issue is not a first move in the order of time, but a first mover in the order of being.

I feel myself on very unsteady ground when considering these arguments, and perhaps that is because the arguments do not provide the kind of definitive proof that Thomists like to think they do, but I assume that, as philosophical arguments, they demand a response. I suspect, though I do not know this, that much hangs on the Aristotelian way of thinking about causes and effects, and how things come to be. If you can make a distinction between the essence of something and its act of existing, then it might seem that we need a prior thing (prior in the order of being) in order to actualise any existing thing, and then it might seem absurd — and I’m not sure that it is — that there is not something existing in its own right, that is, something whose essence is pure act (of existing), in order to explain why there is anything at all. I simply do not have confidence that the metaphysical arguments are that compelling, or that the premises of the argument are satisfactorily demonstrated, and I sometimes wonder whether this has more to do with the presuppositions that are brought to the argument rather than with the details of the argument itself.

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An Even Bigger Disaster. A Train Wreck of a God.

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This morning when I woke up I had in mind writing something about theodicy, and how it is simply impossible to square the way the world is with a god that is considered even remotely good, and so I wrote the post “A Disaster of a God,” but then, checking in just now with a few of my favourite blogs, I came upon Jerry Coyne’s post about the Biologos video below. How can you plan for this kind of thing? Christians go from one peak of nonsense to another. As we saw yesterday (was it?), it’s hard to tell the jokes from the real thing. Do you think the guy in the video below is really serious? What, I wonder, would tip you off?

Clearly, it seems that whoever posted it believes that, if a pastor said it, it can’t be stupid, but it is. (And that’s not surprising, since a pastor is a shepherd, and shepherds herd sheep. As Christopher Hitchens says, “Once you know that Christians call themselves a flock, you already know enough about this religion.”) In it Pastor Daniel Harrell proposes a solution to the problem of evolution and the problem of evil. The problem is that evolution magnifies the problem of evil, since waste and death and suffering are part of the process of weeding out the fit from the unfit. That’s how the filter of natural selection works.

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Fiddling While Rome Burns

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I’ve had the strange feeling, over the last week or so, when I’ve been trying to understand what the authors of several of the Faraday Papers are saying, that it’s really a matter of fiddling while Rome burns, that is, simply marking time, while the really important issues are simply being ignored. Each of the papers, in some way, addresses a question or questions that have been raised by Christian belief’s encounter with science and reason, and the answers are almost wholly concentrated on solving that or those problems for Christian belief, and trying to protect Christian belief from the assaults of reason or the findings of science.

We have, for example, John Polkinghorne’s idea that the more beautiful the mathematical expression of theories is, the more likely it is that those theories are true, and reflect something in nature. He takes this as evidence that there is an intelligence at work here, much as someone looking at the beauty of a sunset might think that there is surely something more than the merely physical involved. How could something so deeply and hauntingly beautiful be merely the chance occurrence of light, landscape, particulate matter in the atmosphere, the diffusion of light with the sun at the horizon, and therefore seen through so much more of the atmosphere than when it is directly overhead? Well, of course, there is the person who is seeing it. Isn’t that explanation enough for the beauty? Why do we need to posit some creative being behind the beauty, as though we couldn’t ourselves perceive beauty without a creator to make it beautiful? But natural beauty, like sunsets, or the beauty of the mathematics of physics, is simply the way things are. Why things are beautiful is that there are minds that perceive it, and those minds perceive it, no doubt, because there are things, for many different reasons, having to do with culture, experience, and the particular receiving apparatus of the brain, in terms of which they seem to be beautiful. Would I, knowing very little of mathematics, be able to perceive the beauty of quantum theory in mathematical form? Renoir, for example, painted nude women in all their fleshly glory, but they were, by today’s standards, fat, and would no longer be seen as examples of female pulchritude. A lot depends on how, and in what context, things are perceived, whether they are seen as beautiful or not, and at no point, in the perception of natural beauty, does the question of an intelligent beautifier arise.

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Enough of this Nonsense!

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Yesterday, Jason Rosenhouse published on his blog his review of the latest nonsense emanating from the computers of Francis Collins and Karl Giberson. As Jerry Coyne says, considering Jason’s willingness to put himself through the torment of reading books like this:

He must be something of a masochist, because he regularly plows through creationist and accommodationist tomes, but in so doing he saves us the trouble of reading them.

But at some point we have to say: Enough is enough already! How can reputable scientists and scholars continue to produce nonsense like this before we simply tell them to put up or shut up?

Take this simple point. In the Preface to their book, The Language of Science and Faith, Collins and Giberson say:

The intersection of science and religion is an important crossroads, for it is there that the world of facts meets the world of values. It is there that we ask our deepest questions: How did we get here? Does our existence have a purpose? [quotations from the sample Kindle download]

And so predictably on. How, though, do they propose to deal with this intersection, where all the contradictions between religion and science come home to roost? For it is simply silly to go on claiming that religion and science deal with different things, facts and values, as this suggests. Indeed, they go on at once to contradict this by asserting that

The authors are evangelical Christians committed to the historic truths of Christianity and the central role of the Bible in communicating those truths. [my italics]

The word ‘historic’ refers to facts, not to matters of value. Either these things happened historically, and can be shown to have done so, or they didn’t. This is a “scientific” matter, in so far as history is an empirical discipline, including the development of theories and their confirmation in the residue that the past leaves in written records and physical (archaeological) remains. For the authors to go on, then, to say, that their approach

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Darwin meets Job

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Over at Why Evolution is True Jerry Coyne posted an article (yesterday, 21 February) about the mindlessness of evolution. He quotes the following from the text he is using, Evolution, by Douglas Futuyma:

[Darwin's] alternative to intelligent design was design by the completely mindless process of natural selection, according to which organisms possessing variations that enhance survival or reproduction replace those less suitably endowed, which therefore survive or reproduce in lesser degree. This process cannot have a goal, any more than erosion has the goal of forming canyons, for the future cannot cause material events in the present. Thus the concepts of goals or purposes have no place in biology.

But of course they don’t! Job could have told you that. And this is why the theological shenanigans over at the National Center for Science Education are really way out of line. For, try as they might, theologians had to give up on a strong teleology a long time ago. Rabbi Harold Kushner, after the death of his son, had to rationalise it by saying that God really doesn’t have the power to influence outcomes. Others try different expedients, but only the blind can think that the evils of the world express a good purpose. No one, with an ounce of sense, can look at the world and say that it was designed for a purpose. On the one hand, it’s practically impossible to keep our teleological fingers off things; but on the other, life has a tendency to go so badly that supposing there is a purpose to the things that happen stretches credulity so far that anyone who tries to do it literally has to have a bad intellectual conscience.

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Emotional vs. Epistemological Doubt

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This is a move laterally from the earlier discussion of Kitcher’s idea of religious faith as orientation. In order to make the move we go back two years to a paper written by the philosopher Richard Norman, and to a discussion of this paper on Butterflies and Wheels. It was the Philosophical Primate, George Felis, who reminded me of this earlier discussion, and after reading through the paper and the discussion, it seemed to me relevant to the discussion of Kitcher’s idea of religion as orientation.

First, I want to look at a couple of relevant points from Richard Norman’s paper, then we’ll get down to the emotional vs. epistemological doubt angle. As you will see, it ties in nicely with Kitcher’s papers. Norman’s paper is really a critical response to the New Atheists, Dawkins in particular. He considers criticisms by Eagleton, Armstrong and Keith Ward, onetime Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. What is most interesting is what Norman calls the “sideways move” that Eagleton and Armstrong make. In her Case for God, Norman says, Karen Armstrong claims that

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The Empty Consolations of Religion

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Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. [C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 41]

After my wife Elizabeth died, I decided to read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. When I had first read it, years before, it meant nothing to me. But when I read it, deep in grief myself, suddenly so much of it seemed to be true. The epigraph (above) seemed to me truest of it all. Religion was no consolation. During all the years that Elizabeth was sick, religion offered no consolation at all, no sense of any final destiny, just empty promises that would never come true.

It reminded me that when I had patiently piloted people through times of grief, through funeral arrangements, funeral services and other things that comprise the obsequies we owe to the beloved dead, it had always seemed to me that the religious words and promises were empty, and what helped was the purely human contact, the concern, the busy-ness of a death in the family, and the instinctive coming together of the community in support and encouragement.

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Redemption Religions and the Right to Die

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In his review of Karen Armstrong’s new book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, Richard Holloway (Episcopal [Anglican] Bishop of Edinburgh 1986-2000) raises issues of some importance for the way that religions like Christianity and Islam bear on important moral questions such as the social approval of homosexuality and the right to die. Though he does not mention the right to die in this review, he raises an issue which is vital to understanding the traditional Christian response to suicide and assisted dying.

Both Christianity and Islam, Holloway explains, are redemption religions:

Christianity and Islam are redemption religions, not wisdom religions. They exist to secure life in the world to come for their followers and any guidance they offer on living in this world is always with a view to its impact on the next.

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