The Case for God (55 page)

Idolatry has always been one of the pitfalls of monotheism. Because its chief symbol of the divine is a personalized deity, there is an inherent danger that people would imagine “him” as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they could use to
endorse their own ideas, practices, loves, and hatreds—sometimes to lethal effect. There can be only one absolute, so once a finite idea, theology, nation, polity, or ideology is made supreme, it is compelled to destroy anything that opposes it. We have seen a good deal of this kind of idolatry in recent years. To make limited historical phenomena—a particular idea of “God,” “creation science,” “family values,” “Islam” (understood as an institutional and civilizational entity), or the “Holy Land”—more important than the sacred reverence due to the “other” is, as the rabbis pointed out long ago, a sacrilegious denial of everything that “God” stands for. It is idolatrous, because it elevates an inherently limited value to an unacceptably high level. As Tillich pointed out, if it assumes that a man-made idea of “God” is an adequate representation of the transcendence toward which it can only imperfectly gesture, a great deal of mainstream theology is also idolatrous. Atheists are right to condemn such abuses. But when they insist that society should no longer tolerate faith and demand the withdrawal of respect from all things religious, they fall prey to the same intolerance. Some atheists are unhappy about this militancy. For Julian Baggini, atheism means “open-hearted commitment to truth and rational enquiry,” so that “hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with a dogged conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs … is antithetical to such values.”
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During the early modern period, Western people fell in love with an ideal of absolute certainty that, it seems, may be unattainable. But because some are reluctant to relinquish it, they have tended to overcompensate, claiming certitude for beliefs and doctrines that can only be provisional. This has perhaps contributed to the aggressive tenor of a great deal of modern discourse. There are very few Socratic “philosophers” these days who know that they lack wisdom. Too many people assume that they alone have it and, in matters secular as well as religious, appear unwilling even to consider a rival point of view or seriously assess evidence that might qualify their case. The quest for truth has become agonistic and competitive. When debating an issue in politics or in the media, in the law courts or academe, it is not enough to establish what is true; we also have to defeat—and even humiliate—our opponents. Even though we hear a great deal about the importance of “dialogue,” it is rare to hear a genuinely Socratic exchange of views. It is often obvious in public debates that instead of
listening receptively to other participants, panelists simply use others’ remarks as grist for a brilliant point of their own that will deliver the coup de grace. Even when the issues debated are too complex and multifaceted for a simple solution, these discussions rarely end in a realistic Socratic
aporia
or an acknowledgment that the other side may also have merit.

This too is part of our democratic heritage, and in practical matters it may be the fairest way of getting things done. This was the kind of discussion that was going on in the Athenian assemblies from which Socrates carefully dissociated his own dialogic technique. Unfortunately, much of the current debate about faith is conducted in this antagonistic spirit and it is not helpful. We badly need to consider the nature of religion and discover where and how it goes wrong. But if dialogue lacks either compassion or
kenosis
, it cannot lead to truly creative insight or enlightenment. Religious truth has always developed communally and orally; in the past, when two or three sat down together and reached out toward the “other,” they experienced transcendence as a “presence” among them. But it was essential that religious debates be conducted “in the most kindly manner,” to quote the Qur’an. A vicious polemic is likely to exacerbate already existing tensions. We have seen that when they feel under attack, fundamentalists almost invariably become more extreme. Hitherto Muslims had little problem with Darwin, but a new hostility toward evolutionary theory is now developing in the Muslim world as a direct response to Dawkins’s attack. In a world that is already so dangerously polarized, can we really afford yet another divisive discourse?

In the past, theologians found that extended dialogue with atheists helped them to refine their own ideas. An informed atheistic critique should be welcomed, because it can draw our attention to inadequate or idolatrous theological thinking. The written discussion of the atheistic philosopher J. J. C. Smart and his theist colleague J. J. Haldane is a model of courtesy, intellectual acumen, and integrity and shows how valuable such a debate can be—not least in making it clear that it is impossible to settle either the existence or nonexistence of God by rational arguments alone.
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A scientific critique of conventional “beliefs” can also be helpful in revealing the limitations of the literalistic mind-set that is currently blocking understanding. Instead of arguing that an ancient
mythos
is factual, perhaps it would be better to
study the original meaning of the ancient cosmologies and apply it analogically to our own situation. Instead of clinging to a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis, it could be helpful to face up to the implications of the Darwinian vision of nature “red in tooth and claw.” This could become a meditation on the inescapable suffering of life, make us aware of the inadequacy of any neat theological solution, and give us a new appreciation of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, “Existence is suffering
(dukkha)”
—an insight that in nearly all faiths is indispensable for enlightenment.

There is much to be learned from older ways of thinking about religion. We have seen that far from regarding revelation as static, fixed, and unchanging, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all knew that revealed truth was symbolic, that scripture could not be interpreted literally, and that sacred texts had multiple meaning, and could lead to entirely fresh insights. Revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity. They understood that revelation did not provide us with infallible information about the divine, because this would always remain beyond our ken. We have seen that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo made it clear to Christians that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, and that the Trinity taught them that they could not think of God as a simple personality. Even the supreme revelation of Christ, the incarnate Word, showed that the reality that we call “God” was as elusive as ever. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars all insisted on the paramount importance of intellectual integrity and thinking for oneself. Instead of clinging nervously to the insights of the past, they expected people to be inventive, fearless, and confident in their interpretation of faith. Religion must not be allowed to impede progress but should help people embrace the uncertainties of the future. There could be no question of a clash between science and theology, because these disciplines had different spheres of competence; science, Calvin insisted, must not be obstructed by the fears of a few ignorant and “frantic persons.” If a biblical text appeared to contradict current scientific discoveries, the exegete must interpret it differently.

We must not idealize the past. Every age has its bigots, and there have always been people who were less theologically skilled than others and interpreted the truths of religion in a prosaic, factual manner.
When as a young nun I was being especially obtuse, my superior used to tell me that I was “a literal-minded blockhead.” There have always been such. But the theologians who promoted a more apophatic approach to God were not marginal thinkers. The Cappadocians, Denys, and Thomas; the rabbis, the Kabbalists, and Maimonides; al-Ghazzali, Ibn Sina, and Mulla Sadra were all major carriers of tradition. Before the modern period, this was the orthodox position. We now have such a different view of faith that this may be difficult to accept, because it is always hard to transcend the limitations of our own time. We cannot, perhaps, ever become fully aware of our own cultural mood precisely because we are
in
that mood, and as a result we tend to absolutize it. Today we assume that because
we
rationalize faith and regard its truths as factual, this is how it was always done. But this involves a double standard. “The
past
is relativised, in terms of this or that socio-historical analysis. The
present
, however, remains strangely immune to relativisation,” the American scholar Peter Berger has explained. “The New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in
their
time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of
his
time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.”
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We tend to assume that “modern” means “superior,” and while this is certainly true in such fields as mathematics, science, and technology, it is not necessarily true of the more intuitive disciplines—especially, perhaps, theology.

We now understand basic religious terms differently and in a way that has made faith problematic. “Belief” no longer means “trust, commitment, and engagement” but has become an intellectual assent to a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious leaders often spend more time enforcing doctrinal conformity than devising spiritual exercises that will make these official “beliefs” a living reality in the daily lives of the faithful. Instead of using scripture to help people to move forward and embrace new attitudes, people quote ancient scriptural texts to prevent any such progress. The words “myth” and “mythical” are now often synonymous with untruth. “Mystery” no longer refers to a ritualized initiation but has been routinely decried as mental laziness and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo. The Greek fathers used the word
dogma
to describe a truth that could not be put readily into words, could be understood only after long immersion in ritual, and, as the understanding of the community deepened,
changed from one generation to another. Today in the West “dogma” is defined as “a body of opinion formulated and authoritatively stated,” while a “dogmatic” person is one who “asserts opinions in an arrogant and authoritative manner.”
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We no longer understand Greek
theoria
as the activity of “contemplation” but as a “theory,” an idea in our heads that has to be proved. This neatly demonstrates our modern understanding of religion as something that we think rather than something that we do.

In the past, religious people were open to all manner of different truths. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars were ready to learn from pagan Greeks who had sacrificed to idols, as well as from one another. It is simply not true that science and religion were always at daggers drawn: in England, the Protestant and Puritan ethos were felt to be congenial to early modern science and helped its advance and acceptance.
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Mersenne, who belonged to a particularly austere branch of the Franciscan order, took time off from his prayers to conduct scientific experiments, and his mathematical ideas are still discussed today. The Jesuits encouraged the young Descartes to read Galileo and were fascinated by early modern science. Indeed, it has been said that the first scientific collective was not the Royal Society but the Society of Jesus.
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But as modernity advanced, confidence dimmed and attitudes hardened. Thomas Aquinas had taught Aristotelian science when it was controversial to do so and had studied Jewish and Muslim philosophers while most of his contemporaries reflexively supported the Crusades. But the defensive post-Tridentine Church interpreted his theology with a rigidity that he would have found repugnant. The modern Protestant doctrine of the literal infallibility of scripture was first formulated by Hodge and Warfield in the 1870s, when scientific methods of biblical criticism were undermining “beliefs” held to be factually true. Like the new and highly controversial Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, defined in 1870, it expressed a yearning for absolute certainty at a time when this was proving to be a chimera.

Today, when science itself is becoming less determinate, it is perhaps time to return to a theology that asserts less and is more open to silence and unknowing. Here, perhaps, dialogue with the more thoughtful Socratic forms of atheism can help to dismantle ideas that have become idolatrous. In the past, people were often called “atheists”
when society was in transition from one religious perspective to another: Euripides and Protagoras were accused of “atheism” when they denied the Olympian gods in favor of a more transcendent theology; the first Christians and Muslims, who were moving away from traditional paganism, were persecuted as “atheists” by their contemporaries. When we have eaten a strong-tasting dish in a restaurant, we are often offered a sorbet to cleanse our palate so that we can taste the next course properly. An intelligent atheistic critique could help us to rinse our minds of the more facile theology that is impeding our understanding of the divine. We may find that for a while we have to go into what mystics called the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. This will not be easy for people used to getting instant information at the click of a mouse. But the novelty and strangeness of this negative capability could surprise us into awareness that stringent ratiocination is not the only means of acquiring knowledge. It is not only a poet like Keats who must, while waiting for new inspiration, learn to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

But is there no way of grounding commitment to the unknown and indefinable God? Are we doomed to the perpetual regression of postmodern thought? Perhaps the only viable “natural theology” lies in religious experience. By this, of course, I do not mean fervid emotional piety. We have seen that in the past scholars and spiritual directors had little time for this religious positivism. Instead of seeking out exotic raptures, Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Rahner, and Lonergan have all suggested that we should explore the normal workings of our minds and notice how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence. Instead of looking for what we call God “outside ourselves” (
foris
) in the cosmos, we should, like Augustine, turn within and become aware of the way quite ordinary responses segue into “otherness.” We have seen how the inherent finitude of language was regularly exploited by teachers like Denys to make the faithful aware of the silence we encounter on the other side of speech. It has been well said that music, which, as we saw at the beginning of this book, is a “definitively” rational activity, is itself a “natural theology.”
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In music the mind experiences a pure, direct emotion that transcends ego and fuses subjectivity and objectivity.