Nicholas Lash skewers The God Delusion.
As Lash’s perspective generally is one with which I feel a deep agreement, this is rather satisfying.
(HT AKMA)
BTW there will be something going up about Halloween soon – promise!
Category Archives: atheism
TBTM20070727
I think one of the most important reasons why atheism no longer holds any intellectual attraction for me is because it is dull. It is not a wisdom tradition. It has nothing to say to how to live a life in a rich and fulfilling fashion. As I’ve said elsewhere, if I wasn’t a Christian – if I became convinced that, eg, Christ did not rise from the dead in any meaningful sense – then I’d become a Buddhist. I’d swap one wisdom tradition for another. I wouldn’t kill myself – which is what atheism amounts to.
A bit more bull
I’ve been reflecting on the ‘dialogue’ that was taking place over at Stephen Law’s site, about the problem of suffering and so on. A few things come to mind, the first a quotation that I may well have shared before:
The ‘third rate’ critic attacks the original thinker on the basis of the rhetorical consequences of his thought and defends the status quo against the corrupting effects of the philosopher’s rhetoric. ‘Second rate’ critics defend the same received wisdom by semantic analyses of the thinker which highlight ambiguities and vagueness in his terms and arguments. But ‘first rate’ critics “delight in the originality of those they criticise…; they attack an optimal version of the philosopher’s position”–one in which the holes in the argument have been plugged or politely ignored.
I don’t know who originally wrote it, but it was Matt K who posted it on the MD discussion board about five years ago when I came across it. It has more and more resonance with me as time goes on. (NB I’m thinking in this post primarily of the other commenters, not Stephen himself, who seems more circumspect).
The second thing that strikes me, in a sort of ‘background awareness’ sort of way – that is, I might be wrong but haven’t yet seen any reason to suspect that I am – is that my interlocutors mistake the nature of religious language. I have written elsewhere about there being different sorts of knowledge or belief – compare for example ‘Mrs Jones has committed adultery’ and ‘your wife has committed adultery’ – and the point is the embedded nature of religious beliefs within certain practices and forms of life. In other words, the depth grammar of religious belief is not the same as the depth grammar of, eg, a scientific debate. Scientific or philosophical language is simply not the same sort of thing as religious language. My interlocutors seemed to believe that if they could point out an inconsistency or gap in my thinking, in an abstract sense, then this would be enough for my whole way of life to come crumbling down around my ears. Hence the discussion rather rapidly seemed unreal. There is, here, I suspect, a commitment to an Enlightenment-era model of rational discourse, which gives rationality the primary place in shaping a world view. In my view rationality has very definite uses, but there comes a time when it is redundant in assessing truth.
One aspect of this is something I call John Locke’s ghost – that is, I believe that my interlocutors are haunted by seventeenth century terrors. John Locke advanced the argument that we are morally accountable for our beliefs (see this book), and the context for this was the way in which the peace of Europe had been sundered by (supposedly) religious warfare through the preceding 150 years or so. There is therefore a peculiar static charge associated with accepting ambiguity in a world-view – if you quite happily accept that there is something not fully understood in your belief system then you are fall under a judgement of moral failure – and thus a fear for life and property. I think this is often completely unconscious – it’s been absorbed into general Western culture (especially academic culture) – but it isn’t a perspective that can sustain much rational scrutiny itself. It’s a ghost that could do with a proper burial.
Which leads into the final thing I would want to say – the incomprehension and ridicule of mystery. Mystery seems to be assessed as the complete abdication of rational faculties, rather than their fulfilment (which is how mysticism is understood in the Christian tradition). To bring out this point it’s worth making a comparison with the way that science evolves. No scientific view or theory is perfect; each has flaws and gaps; but these are not seen as things which necessarily overwhelm the system as a whole. What causes the system as a whole to collapse – ie a paradigm shift – is when the framework itself is no longer seen as fruitful for further enquiry. This was one of the points at stake in the Galileo debate – even though a heliocentric model was less accurate than the Ptolemaic one in use at the time, the heliocentric model held out the prospect of being much more fertile, which was why the scientific approach embraced it. The same thing applies to the embrace of a religious faith – here there is the possibility of ‘fruitful lines of enquiry’ which, translated from scientific language into religious language means ‘here I can grow as a person’, ‘this is not sterile for me’, ‘this is food for my soul, not just my intellect’. That doesn’t mean that there are no gaps or mysteries – but religious faith is not unique in that – it means that these particular gaps aren’t overwhelming in the context of everything else in play. More than this – it is precisely the intellectual tradition of religious mysticism that gives a proper understanding of what to do in the face of these gaps.
I think my dominant impression – and it is a sad realisation – is that not only do I feel that my point of view was not understood but that there was no desire to understand it. No sense of a genuine dialogue and interchange of views, no sense that a religious believer might be something other than dishonest, intellectually crippled and emotionally cowering. There was a distinct flavour of ‘real men don’t eat quiche’ in the comment thread – where the religious are by definition the quiche-eaters, as compared to the red blooded atheists who are the brave pioneers into the intellectual wilderness. (This despite the fact that this particular wilderness has now been so well travelled that Tesco has decided to open a new store there). My interlocutors seem content to keep their noses pressed to their well-thumbed critiques and have no desire to engage in an honest exploration of what a religious perspective entails. There seemed very little intellectual curiosity on display (and surely curiosity is linked to courage?).
I’ll finish with one more quotation – again, I suspect I’ve quoted it before, but it is a good one – from Denys Turner, in his ‘how to be an atheist’ essay:
“…since today my purpose is to encourage the atheists to engage in some more cogent and comprehensive levels of denying, I shall limit my comment to saying that thus far they lag well behind even the theologically necessary levels of negation, which is why their atheisms are generally lacking in theological interest… such atheists are, as it were, but theologians in an arrested condition of denial: in the sense in which atheists of this sort say God ‘does not exist’, the atheist has merely arrived at the theological starting-point. Theologians of the classical traditions, an Augustine, a Thomas Aquinas or a Meister Eckhart, simply agree about the disposing of idolatries, and then proceed with the proper business of doing theology.”
Rev Sam, bull$4!t artist
At two of the establishments where I studied Philosophy and Theology I was tutored by Stephen Law, who I found to be a great teacher and a very nice man. He’s also a very intelligent and committed atheist. I’ve just managed to get snagged in a discussion about evil and suffering on his blog, where one of his regulars says “I don’t think you’re a theist. I think, based on the arguments you’ve given that you’re nothing but a bullshit artist”.
Ho hum. From my perspective the conversation is revealing the great gulf that exists between theologians and secular philosophers of religion. We seem to be talking past each other rather painfully, which is a shame. See posts here, here and here.
Dawkins disembowelled (again)
(HT Bryan Appleyard. Again. That man has had a disturbingly large influence on my thought.)
Da Vinci Code: the real challenge to the church
Final Learning Church session of the ‘academic year’ last Saturday, and it was on ‘Debunking the Da Vinci Code’. Not that difficult… Then on Sunday beloved and I went off to watch the film, which was fine – less anti-Christian than the book, if anything; competently directed and acted. I suspect most of the criticism of it (as a film) is driven by the media’s desire to have something different to say about the phenomenon, not from any unprejudiced assessments of the film’s merits themselves.
Anyhow, what I wanted to say was something which I emphasised in my LC talk, which is that the Da Vinci Code phenomenon is holding up a mirror to the church, and I believe we should pray and ponder seriously how we should respond. In particular, I think that the implications are much more radical than what the church, in its various parts, has undertaken so far.
My point is this: all of the dramatic charge in the Da Vinci Code comes from echoing the Reformation-era controversies against the Roman Catholic church; in particular, however, it is seen as radical and controversial to argue that Jesus was human. (Same thing that drove the reaction to The Last Temptation of Christ).
Why is this at all interesting? The orthodox teaching is that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine – therefore, anything which is simply spelling out an implication of his humanity, ie that he could have been married to Mary Magdalene, is perfectly in tune with Christian doctrine. There is nothing shocking about it.
So why do people believe that there is?
The implication is that church teaching is functionally docetic. Whatever we might officially say, the wider world hears the church presenting Jesus as someone who was wholly divine, and who only seemed to be (Greek: dokei) human.
In other words, the world hears the church teaching that Jesus was a Superman figure. Jesus put on his humanity in the way that Kal-El puts on a pair of glasses, in order to pass amongst us. Yet his true and authentic nature is other than human.
It is a catastrophe that the church has allowed this to happen. It is a rebuke to the church: it is a prominent signal of the church’s failure to communicate the truth of the gospel and to allow itself to be caught up in ephemera and adiaphora – all the things which are ultimately of no importance, which have obscured that which is of paramount and eternal importance.
Underlying this is an understanding of God which sees the Greek philosophical attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence etc) as determinative, and as standing over against the human, where the human lacks all these attributes. Christianity is about the overthrow of that conception of both the divine and the human – that is precisely what the Incarnation is about – demonstrated symbolically by the tearing of the curtain in the temple. In other words, being a Christian is about allowing Jesus to teach us what divinity and humanity are – it is not about importing our understandings of divinity and humanity, and trying to use them to understand Jesus.
Given that the world hears the church teaching a heresy, and yet – as the response to DVC demonstrates – there is a tremendous search for the truth about Jesus, and a fascination with Him – what is the church to do?
It must stop using language that is interpreted docetically. When we claim that Jesus is the Son of God, however orthodox we may understand that language to be (and it is!) we must never forget that it is heard docetically. I suggest that in all of our conversations with non-Christians we should abandon that language. Completely. All that it does is reinforce error. Our language instead should emphasise that Jesus is truly one of us, that we should begin to approach Him on that basis, and that we should then allow Him to teach us about our humanity, and about our own divinity – our inheritance as children of God, fellow-heirs with Christ.
We must begin from the wholly orthodox truth that Jesus was fully human, and build from there, allowing his humanity, as we enter more deeply into it, to teach us about his divinity, and therefore what divinity truly is.
We do not need to abandon orthodoxy – that is the liberal error – but nor is the aggressive reassertion of orthodoxy sufficient, for the consequence of that is simply to apply fertiliser to the weeds of DVC and its ilk.
We must allow our language to be broken up and recreated. It is not our words which will lead us to God. It is the Word. To be true to him requires a letting go of words, however wonderful and meaningful, and an embrace of the Word. He will lead us into the truth, if we let Him.
Anglican Liberalism, and the interpretation of Scripture
My mother-in-law lives near Lampeter, where there is a university with a good theological faculty (indeed, should I ever be enabled by God to scratch the theological itch and finish a PhD I may well end up doing it there). Whilst on holiday I attended a lecture given by Professor Paul Badham on Anglican Liberalism. After a promising start, it was deeply disappointing.
The promising start was the argument that Anglican liberalism was not driven by the agenda of the Continental Enlightenment. Badham pointed out that in the dispute over Henry VIII’s divorce, the salient question became ‘what is the authority to interpret Scripture?’ In other words, if the authority of the Pope was rejected, what was to be put in its place?
Cranmer’s answer was: ‘the consensus of the universities in Europe’. From this Badham argued that the Anglican tradition had developed a liberal ethos on a different track to that of the Continental theologians, arguing, amongst other things, that Schleiermacher’s writings were not translated into English until very late in the day (some 20th Century) and that Anglican Liberals “derived their views direct from their Biblical and theological work”. The continental theologian that Badham felt was most influential was von Harnack, whose work ‘What is Christianity’ was apparently the best-selling theological work before John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’. In addition to that, Badham alleges that the Enlightenment critique of religion had been considered answered within British culture by the writings of Joseph Butler, especially his ‘Analogy of Religion’ in 1736.
Badham sees the Liberal tradition as defined by an acceptance of Modern Biblical Criticism (MBC), and he went on to run through the key stages by which influence of the Liberal tradition within the Anglican establishment developed – so 1862 marked the legal acceptance of MBC by clergy, and 1864 saw the right of clergy to deny substitutionary atonement and the doctrine of hell; 1917 saw the appointment of Henslow as Bishop of Hereford despite his denial of the Virgin Birth; 1938 saw the publication of a Church Doctrine Commission affirming the place of Liberalism within the Anglican church; 1995 saw the same Doctrine Commission denounce the doctrine of Hell as ‘incompatible with belief in the love of God’. So Badham argues that Liberalism is now the broad mainstream of church opinion within the Church of England: all theological faculties accept the validity of MBC, and consequently (after Cranmer), the Church of England is a Liberal church.
Some of Badham’s historical material was interesting, and plugged a few gaps in my knowledge, especially in terms of the 19th century. Yet on the whole his argument seemed weak, almost vacuous. One suspected a desire to protect his flank from contemporary criticisms, given his beginning with a distancing from the continental enlightenment, yet – although I believe a significant argument could be made supporting the point – Badham did not succeed in persuading this particular listener that Anglican Liberalism was not hugely influenced by the mores and assumptions of the Enlightenment. In large part that is because I follow Roy Porter’s analysis of the Enlightenment, rooting it in English culture of the seventeenth century, most especially the influence of John Locke. (The links between Locke and the Anglican church, esp Clarke, are an area of much interest for me.) Badham, for example, cites Paley as being ignorant of the Enlightenment – and thus an instance of the ‘separation’ from the Continent of the English tradition – due to his deployal of an argument from design, despite Kant having ‘demolished’ such arguments a generation previously. This argument does not achieve what Badham wants it to achieve. Irrespective of its relationship to Kant, Paley’s argument is saturated with Enlightenment assumptions, not least the notion that the correct analogue for the creation is a mechanism, viz a watch, thus betraying the thorough-going Newtonian perspective governing his approach. To say that the lack of reference to Kant demonstrates the independence of English thought from Enlightenment presuppositions is vapid.
My suspicions were confirmed at the end of the lecture when I asked Badham about his beginning with Cranmer. Was it not the case, I asked, that when the church accepts an authority outside of itself (the interpretation of Scripture no longer being a matter for the church to determine, but for the ‘consensus of the universities in Europe’ to establish) it has lost something essential, that it has ‘sold its soul’? Badham was robust in his response: No! the church is accountable to Reason!
The voice of the mid-twentieth century could be heard clearly in the seminar room, on this January evening in 2006.
There was nothing in Badham’s lecture that could not have been said and argued fifty years previously. Fifty years previously this may have been stimulating. A young theologian would have found much to ponder – and not much room for disagreement. The theological consensus was overwhelming – there was no middle ground between fundamentalism and the relentless march of MBC – and so Liberalism would indeed have been the accepted consensus.
Yet these last fifty years have witnessed a tremendous transformation of the terms of the debate, and the greatest disappointment of the lecture, especially given the promise of its beginning, was the complete lack of attention given to the way these debates are now shaped, not least through a more developed suspicion of MBC, and an awareness of what the church as a whole has lost through its ‘delegation’ of the authority to interpret Scripture. To make an appeal to ‘Reason’ as an arbiter of Biblical interpretation is vacuous – it merely marks the argument as one long past its sell-by date. More than this, it seems a virtual dereliction of duty to be making such an argument in the context of teaching undergraduates for a university degree in theology. All the most interesting theology of the last thirty years – most especially Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank, but there are many others – has been concerned with overhauling this naïve construal of ‘Reason’. In such a context Badham’s arguments meet a far worse fate than being wrong, they have become dull.
Thomas Kuhn argued that a paradigm shifts not so much from force of argument as from a generational change. Where there is a dispute over the most fundamental framings of discussion, the old guard do not change, they die out, and new students coming in to a discipline simply don’t engage with the assumptions of the fading paradigm. The new one holds out much more interest.
It seems to me that the core debate within the church as a whole remains the question which Cranmer pondered – how to interpret Scripture? What authority governs the interpretation of Scripture? Fundamentalism is itself a creature of the Enlightenment, and offers very little in the way of theologically creative hermeneutics – and thus is of no service to the church community, proving by its lack of compassion the terminal absence of the Holy Spirit. Nor does the delegation of authority to the universities meet the need: this may, conceivably, have had some merit in an environment where theological faculties were staffed by committed Christians, where you had to take Holy Orders in order to teach – but now? The vast majority of theological faculties are wholly captured by secularity, both in terms of governing intellectual attitudes and the more obviously malign forces of government funding and bureaucracy. For the church to remain beholden to the interpretations of such a community is for it to remain in Babylon. How can we sing a love song in a strange land?
I am more convinced than ever that the centre of theological gravity must return from the academy to the cloister; that no coherent understanding of the faith can be formed apart from a viable eucharistic community. It is this line of thinking that every so often makes me wonder whether I should become a Roman Catholic, for there the lines of authority are much clearer – it is the Magisterium which provides for the definitive understanding of Scripture (a structure which, despite the most strenuous denials, is replicated in substance within the various Protestant establishments; so it seems to me, and at least the RC has [some] history on its side!).
Yet this offers not much more than the removal of one problem by the imposition of another: the Reformation was not without abiding purpose, after all. So the Anglican system, as developed by Hooker, with its three-fold division of authority between Scripture first and foremost; then the teachings of the early church; and then finally the application of our reason – there is something here that is beautiful, and is perhaps the distinctive gift of the Church of England to the wider church. A way in which to negotiate the hazards of premature closure to discussion; an openness to the continual promptings of the One who leads us into all Truth. That is the via media which seems authentically liberal; not one which takes its bearings from Modernist epistemology and Enlightenment secularity, but one which is centred upon the ongoing inspiration of the church; which takes the fruits of the Spirit seriously, not least in the gift of Scripture itself, the ordering of the church, and the creeds; and is therefore one which gives freedom, for it is for freedom that we have been set free.
This side of the eschaton, the final resting place for the interpretation of Scripture is, for me, the consensus fidelium – the considered and settled opinion of the faithful – and that settled opinion can itself develop over time, and change. It is expressed, most of all, through worship – lex orandi, lex credendi – this is why it must be rooted within the communion, when we sing our love songs to Jesus and renew our marriage vows. It is when we break the bread and renew the new covenant that we are authentically the church, that we are authentically the Body, and that we can authentically listen to His voice. It is when we are enabled to truly hear the word that we are enabled to interpret the word; and then to speak that word within the world. Scripture belongs to the church – it was formed by the church for the church, and it is for the church to interpret it, so help us God.