The Case for God (53 page)

Our world is already dangerously polarized, and we do not need another divisive ideology. The history of fundamentalism shows that when these movements are attacked, they nearly always become more extreme. The atheist assault is likely to drive the fundamentalists to even greater commitment to creationism, and their contemptuous dismissal of Islam is a gift to Muslim extremists, who can use it to argue that the West is indeed intent on a new Crusade.
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Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is
only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well as on reason. The physicist Paul Dirac has argued that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”
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The mathematician Roger Penrose believes that the creative mind “breaks through” into a Platonic realm of mathematical and aesthetic forms: “Rigorous argument is usually the
last
step! Before that, one has to make many guesses, and for these aesthetic convictions are enormously important.”
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There are many circumstances in which human beings have to lay aside an objectivist analysis, which seeks in some way to master what it contemplates.
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When confronted with a work of art, we have to open our minds and allow it to carry us away. If we seek to relate intimately to another person, we have to be prepared to make ourselves vulnerable—as Abraham did when he opened his heart and home to the three strangers at Mamre.

As Tillich pointed out, men and women continually feel drawn to explore levels of truth that go beyond our normal experience. This imperative has inspired the scientific as well as the religious quest. We seek what Tillich called an “ultimate concern” that shapes our life and gives it meaning. The ultimate concern of Dawkins and Harris appears to be reason; this has seized and taken possession of them. But their idea of reason is very different from the rationality of Socrates, who used his reasoning powers to bring his dialogue partners into a state of unknowing. For Augustine and Aquinas, reason became
intellectus
, opening naturally to the divine. Today, for many people, reason no longer subverts itself in this way. But the danger of this secularization of reason, which denies the possibility of transcendence, is that reason can become an idol that seeks to destroy all rival claimants. We hear this in the new atheism, which has forgotten that unknowing is a part of the human condition, so much so that, as the social critic Robert N. Bellah has pointed out: “Those who feel they are … most fully objective in their assessment of reality are most in the power of deep, unconscious fantasies.”
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Modern physicists, as we have seen, are not wary of unknowing: their experience of living with apparently insoluble problems evokes awe
and wonder. In the 1970s, string theory became the Holy Grail of science, the final theory that would unify force and matter in a model integrating gravity and quantum mechanics. There is some skepticism about string theory: Richard Feynman, for example, dismissed it as “crazy nonsense,”
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but some string theorists have admitted that their discoveries cannot be either proven or refuted experimentally and have even claimed that no adequate experiment can be devised to test what is a mathematical explanation of the universe.
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The wonder of modern cosmology seems derived in no small measure from the physicists’ inherent inability to answer all its questions.
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They know that the terms they use to describe these natural mysteries—big bang, dark matter, black holes, dark energy—are metaphors that cannot adequately translate their mathematical insights into words. Unlike Newton, of course, modern physicists are not introducing God or the supernatural into their cosmos. But the obviously mythical character of these terms is a reminder that what they point to is not readily comprehensible; they are straining at the limits of scientific investigation, and these terms should carry an air of mystery because they name what cannot yet be investigated.

Today many physicists sense that they are on the brink of another major paradigm shift.
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Even Stephen Hawking is no longer so certain that a theory of everything, which will enable humans to look into the “mind of God,” is readily available. They have learned that what seemed incontrovertible could be replaced overnight by an entirely different scientific model, and are at home with unknowing. Thus the cosmologist Paul Davies speaks of his delight in science with its unanswered and, perhaps, unanswerable questions:

Davies has confessed: “It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion.”
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He is still asking the primordial question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Modern physicists have more information than our ancestors could have dreamed of, but unlike Dawkins, they do not all dismiss this query as redundant or pointless. Human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve, pit themselves against the dark world of uncreated reality, and find that living with such unknowing is a source of astonishment and delight.

Philosophy, theology, and mythology have always responded to the science of the day, and a philosophical movement has developed since the 1980s that has embraced the indeterminacy of the new cosmology. Postmodern thinking is heir to Hume and Kant in its assumption that what we call reality is constructed by the mind and that all human understanding is therefore interpretation rather than the acquisition of accurate, objective information. From this it follows that no single vision can be sovereign; that our knowledge is relative, subjective, and fallible rather than certain and absolute; and that truth is inherently ambiguous. Received ideas that are the products of a particular historical and cultural milieu must, therefore, be stringently deconstructed. But this analysis must not be based on any absolute principle, and there is no assurance that we will ever arrive at—or even approximate—a wholly accurate version of the truth. Fundamental to postmodern thought is the conviction that instead of ideologies mirroring external conditions, the world is profoundly affected by the ideology that human beings impose upon it. We are not forced by sense data to adopt a particular worldview, so we have a choice in what we affirm—as well as an immense responsibility.

Postmodernists are particularly suspicious of Big Stories. They regard Western history as scarred by the ceaseless compulsion to impose a totalizing system on the world. Sometimes this has been theological and has resulted in crusade and persecution, but the “stories” have also been scientific, economic, ideological, and political, resulting in the technological domination of nature and the sociopolitical subjection of others in slavery, genocide, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the oppression of women and other minorities. So, like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, postmodernists seek to deflate such beliefs but without attempting to substitute an absolute “story” of their own. Postmodernism is iconoclastic, therefore. As one of its early luminaries,
Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), explained, it can be defined as “the incredulity towards grand narratives (
grands récits).”
Top of the list of such
récits
is the modern “God,” who is omnipotent and omniscient and keeps watch over the world, working all things to his own purposes. But postmodernism is also averse to an atheism that makes absolute, totalistic claims. As Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) cautioned, we must also be alert to “theological prejudices” not only in religious contexts, where they are overt, but in all metaphysics—even those that profess to be atheist.
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Like any postmodern philosopher, Derrida was deeply suspicious of the fixed, binary polarities that characterize modern thought, and the atheist/theist divide was, he believed, too simple. Atheists have reduced the complex phenomena of religion to formulas that suit their own ideologies—as Marx did when he called religion an opiate of the oppressed or Freud when he saw it as oedipal terror. A fixed and final denial of God on metaphysical grounds was for Derrida as culpable as any dogmatic religious “theology” (his term for a
grand récit)
. Derrida himself, a secularized Jew, said that though he might pass for an atheist, he prayed all the time, had a messianic hope for a better world, and inclined to the view that, since no absolute certainty is within our grasp, we should for the sake of peace hesitate to make declarative statements of either belief or unbelief.

Some orthodox believers and most fundamentalists will be repelled by this unabashed relativism, but there are aspects of Derrida’s thought that recall earlier theological attitudes. His theory of deconstruction, which denies the possibility of finding a single, secure meaning in any text, is positively rabbinical. He has also been called a “negative” theologian and was greatly interested in Eckhart. What he called
différance
is neither a word nor a concept but a quasi-transcendental possibility—a “difference” or “otherness”—that lies within a word or idea such as “God.” For Eckhart, this
différance
was the God beyond God, a new but unknowable metaphysical ground that was inseparable from the human self. But for Derrida,
différance
was only quasi-transcendental; it is a potential, something that we cannot see but that makes us aware that we may have to qualify or even unsay anything we say or deny of God.

In his later work, Derrida seemed haunted by the potential and lure of an open future. He affirmed what he calls the “undeconstructible,” which is not another absolute, because it does not exist, and yet we
weep and pray for it. As he explained in his lecture “The Force of Law” (1989), justice is an undeconstructible “something” that is never fully realized in the actual circumstances of daily life but that informs all legal speculation. Justice is not what exists; it is what we desire. It calls us; it seems sometimes within our grasp but ultimately eludes us. And yet we go on trying to incarnate it in our legal systems. Derrida later went on to discuss other “undeconstuctibles”: gift, forgiveness, and friendship. He loved to talk of the “democracy to come”: we yearn for democracy but we never fully achieve it; it remains an incessant hope for the future. And in the same way, “God,” a term often used in the past to set a limit to human thought and endeavor, becomes for the postmodern philosopher the desire beyond desire, a memory and a promise that is, by its very nature, indefinable.

Some postmodern thinkers have applied these ideas to theology. Significantly, they are usually philosophers rather than theologians. Reversing the trend begun by such philosophes as Diderot, d’Holbach, and Freud, their interest heralds a change in the intellectual atmosphere of academe. At the time of the Death of God movement in the 1960s, God’s days seemed numbered, but now God seems alive and well. Postmodern theology challenges the assumption that secularism is irreversible; some have suggested that we are now entering a “postsecular” age but have also made it clear that the religion being revitalized must be different from “modern” faith. The first to apply Derrida’s ideas to theology was Mark C. Taylor in
Erring: A Postmodern A/theology
(1984); the slash in the subtitle was designed to mark a Derridian hesitation before settling for either God or Godlessness. Taylor saw a link between deconstruction and the 1960s Death of God movement, but criticized Altizer for being stuck in the modern dialectic in which things were either dead or alive, absent or present. In his view, religion was present even when it seemed absent—so much so that he was criticized for allowing religion in his later work to be entirely swallowed up in other discourses.

Those philosophers who focused on Derrida’s later work have been more successful. The Italian postmodernist Gianni Vattimo argues that from the very first religion had recognized that it was an essentially interpretive discourse: it had traditionally proceeded by endlessly deconstructing its sacred texts, so that from the start it had the potential to liberate itself from metaphysical orthodoxy. Vattimo
is anxious to promote what is called “weak thought” to counter the aggressively triumphalist certainty that characterizes a good deal of modern religion and atheism. Metaphysics is dangerous because it makes absolute claims for either God or reason. “Not all metaphysics have been violent,” Vattimo admits, “but all violent people of great dimensions have been metaphysical.”
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Hitler, for example, was not content to hate only the Jews in his vicinity but created a
grand récit
that made metaphysical claims about Jews in general. “When someone wants to tell me the absolute truth,” Vattimo remarks shrewdly, “it is because he wants to put me under his control.”
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Both theism and atheism make such claims, but there are no absolute truths anymore—only interpretations.
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Modernity, Vattimo believes, is over; when we contemplate history, we cannot now see the future as an inevitable and unilinear progression toward emancipation. Freedom no longer lies in the perfect knowledge of and conformity to the necessary structure of reality, but in an appreciation of multiple discourses and the historicity, contingency, and finitude of all religious, ethical, and political values— including our own.
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Vattimo wants to bring down “walls,” including the walls that separate theists and atheists. Even though he believes that society will reembrace religion, he does not want to abandon secularization, because he regards the Church-state alliance set up by Constantine as a Christian aberration. The ideal society should be based on charity rather than truth. In the past, Vattimo recalls, religious truth generally emerged from people interacting with others rather than by papal edict. Vattimo recalls Christ’s saying “When two or three are gathered together in my name, I will be in the midst of them,” and the classic hymn “Where there is love, there is also God.”
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