God – John Lennon
For someone with politics that I share, Amanda Marcotte manages to write a lot of things that infuriate me. One example:
But the debate between religious people and atheists exists on a plane beyond whether or not one should be allowed to believe what you want (which most people agree, outside of religious fundamentalists). Whether or not there is a god is not a matter of personal preference or inherent tendencies. It’s a truth claim. It’s less like being gay or straight, and more like claiming that you believe that gravity works or that E=MC2. If there is a god, there is one and atheists are wrong. If there’s not, atheists are right. And the anger about how ungentle atheists are comes from this inescapable conclusion, or at least the unwillingness of some atheists to say, “Well, even if there isn’t a god, your wishing makes it true for you.” And that appears to be Prothero’s argument—the best atheists are the ones who pretend that the truth claims of religion are something they aren’t.
As someone who doesn’t believe in God, and who is working pretty hard to think about how it’s possible to secularize politics, this sort of comment just drives me nuts.
It embodies all the things that atheists purport to hate about religion: the insistence on simple responses to questions that are important precisely because they can’t be answered. It’s the sort of statement that’s true in a sense – but the way in which it’s true renders it completely pointless.
Of course no one is going to be able to offer empirical proof for the existence of God. The wide-eyed breathlessness with which this point is made by a lot of the more evangelist atheists–as if theological scholars over thousands of years hadn’t ever considered it–makes you start to wonder if they have any interest in seeking to understand the subject on which they consider themselves to be experts.
The basic concern of theology is how we it can be that we possess the capacity for making judgments when our empirical existence suggests that we are simply subjective beings. After all, judgment implies a position from which two issues might be considered. If existence is only material–and is found through the realm of experience–then there can be no vantage point capable of issuing authoritative judgments among the various perspectives. There are only individual perspectives.
In order to make a normative statement with objective validity, you need to be able to identify the perspective that exists outside of perspectives. The one perspective which isn’t a subjective opinion but is valid fact. Theology is the field of human thought trying to grapple with this idea.
The argument you hear from the religious side in these sort of debates (“how can there be morality without God?”) is a base representation of a very real problem. The thing is that they’re right–but only in the sense that Marcotte is right in her argument (i.e. – in a question-begging fashion that makes it pointless to try and argue on the terms they set out). It is impossible to have morality without God, if by God we mean that fundamentally super-empirical idea that gives us a means for organizing and relating to an otherwise chaotic universe.
The move made in the 16th-18th centuries was to try and sever the thread between God and value-production. This was in some sense a move forced by history. The religious wars of the Reformation meant that a general acceptance of one particular interpretation of God was not going to function as the universally accepted standard of validation. But it’s also an intellectual problem. A problem of epistemology. How, exactly, can you declare that something has been established? That’s why you get Descartes and his cogito, ergo sum. It’s why you get Kant trying to find a way to establish a priori concepts able to stand where God once did. It’s why you get Hegel thinking about geist.
For all of them, science and and philosophy were inter-connected. After all, even something as simple and clearly ‘provable’ as the statement “X caused Y” depends on a prior determination of what counts as an agent capable of making that judgment. The eventual splitting of philosophy and science shouldn’t obscure that they both come from the same place. And, of course, the problem with both of them is their assumption that once you took God out of your equations, you had left the terrain of theology.
All philosophies are theologies. They all require some sort of foundational premise–one which takes place outside of the empirical realm but which is itself the means by which material facts can be translated into meaningful concepts.
The key point made by atheists is that all theologies are also political. They serve individual interests, and derive their legitimacy from them. One perspective on God wins not because it’s more correct, but because it is capable of declaring itself victorious. Indeed, the question of more or less ‘correct’ is a totally meaningless one when it comes to meta-theology. The whole premise of theological thinking is that it deals with questions that can’t simply be reduced to empirical study.
That’s why I think, more and more, that the rejoinder to “atheism is just a new religion” should be “why do you think that’s a criticism?”
The problem isn’t with theology as such, it’s the narrowly constructed terrain of acceptable concepts of value-production that we’ve allowed within theology.
The failure to understand this produces people like Christopher Hitchens calling religion the cause of horrific violence. Once again, that’s true, but only to the extent that it’s a useless contribution. Of course, religion is the basis for horrific violence. Religion is a concept, a way of recognizing the fundamental tension built into a being capable of thinking of itself as being: how is it that there is an ‘I’ and that there are also ‘not-Is’? When you decide that someone deserves to have war waged on them, you are establishing a religious community (those on your side – a particular concept of ‘I’) and therefore justifying the destruction of those on the other side.
Religion is the means by which that destruction is enabled, but it’s simplistic and silly to say in a declarative sense that religion CAUSED the conflict. Instead, religion is the terrain on which a particular type of violence–they type made possible by the existence of beings who believe themselves to have a Will (as opposed to pure instinct)–takes place.
The practical/political variation on this is: how is it that I am made to suffer, rather than simply feel pain? Pain is inevitable, eternal. It could not be other than it is. Suffering is pain that which we are capable of understanding could have been different. The question ‘why do I feel pain’ is meaningless. You feel it because it’s there. Pain could theoretically be quantified–“I experienced three pain-units when I hit my finger with the hammer.” Suffering can’t. It’s a theological matter, not one subject to empirical answers. Pain is the experience of nerves; suffering is the experience of a self.
So the question is: ‘why do I suffer?’ One answer is simply “because God wills it.” Another one is “because the political order which permits that suffering is just.” Both are theological answers the difference is in where they locate the ineffable, external justification for suffering. A secular approach might say that pain is inevitable, but we may call unjust the suffering that could be prevented.
As usual, John Lennon saw this more clearly than just about anyone: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
The message atheists need to be thinking about is how to convince people that the type of measurement that are in favor of is better than the God-as-Man-in-the-sky versions. But they need to recognize that ‘better’ is (again) a theological question.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that atheism is going to do a lot better when it back off the rigid scientism, stops framing itself as an attack on the whole concept of theology, and focuses on practical statements about how morality and justice and meaningfulness can be achieved in more productive and life-affirming ways. Certainly one part of that is pointing out the empirical problems with literal theology, but only because that forces the debate BACK to theology. It is necessary to make the scientific/empirical case, obviously, but part of that is being able to convince people that there’s something behind the curtain, too.
Which is why I love the Atheist Bus Campaign. And also why I enjoy the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They’re political in a playful–rather than vindictive–way. They reference these sort of debates about the existence of God, but don’t treat it as the whole kit and kaboodle.