I thought it would be worthwhile to say a little something about ‘where am I going with this?’ as it may not be clear. Just as my Virgin Birth tirade evolved from what I thought was going to be two posts into a great long series of over a dozen, so too this sequence I now expect to stretch over at least twenty posts. This is how I see the structure of it panning out:
– first some conceptual ground clearing, especially on the difference between atheisms (mostly now done);
– then I’m going to talk about how wisdom is taught, and how ‘wisdom language’ and traditions function, not least in neurological terms;
– then I’m going to talk about the nature of theological language, when it’ll become clearer (I hope) why I’m talking about wisdom so much – I see theological language as a means of forming wise people;
– then I’m going to talk in more specific terms about what it means to be a Christian, not least in terms of the claim that Jesus is wisdom incarnate, and, therefore, what a Christian is actually committed to claiming over against the humourless atheist critique. This is where the ‘meat’ of positive assertion will come; I’m holding it off until the end because I don’t believe it can be properly understood without the prior clarifications.

Along the way I want to disinter some ‘theological mistakes’ made by humourless atheists (and many Christians). This is my list at the moment:
1. Why God does not ‘exist’ (this will explain the basic principle of idolatry).
2. The fallacy of ‘I only don’t believe in one more God than you’.
3. Christians don’t believe in ‘the supernatural’
4. The fallacy of “You’re just a liberal and you don’t believe anything, you’re not really a Christian”.
5. The nature of magic and superstition.
If there are any others that people can think of I’d be happy to add them in.

I don’t propose to spend too long on this part of the question – although I could – because it seems that the following propositions are self-evident:
– the world is in a bit of a mess;
– the answers are not easy; and
– we will have to change our behaviour if we want to get out of the mess.

What I have in mind is all the material I covered in the LUBH sessions, eg Peak Oil, Global Warming, soil erosion, overpopulation, declining water availability, excess pollution, resource wars….

Wisdom, it seems to me, is what enables the change of behaviour to occur. Wisdom is what makes the difference between an alcoholic having just another drink and giving up; what makes a smoker quit; what makes an obese man (like the Mersea Rector) sign up to the gym to become healthier. Wisdom is also what enables communities to function; it provides means of creative conflict resolution; it allows for the full panoply of human flourishing to progress.

So I’m not minded to argue for the virtue of wisdom. What I will argue for, however, is why the humourless atheist is aspect-blind to wisdom and why getting our civilisation out of its present predicament involves abandoning the central tenets of humourless atheism. That is, the commitments made by a humourless atheist (as evidenced in the arguments levelled against Christianity) have the necessary corollary that wisdom is undermined. I think this has two aspects, which are closely interwoven: a lack of respect for narrative and it’s place in human understanding; and an excessively elevated respect for ‘facts’.

MORPHEUS
We are trained in this world to accept only what is rational and logical. Have you ever wondered why?

Neo shakes his head.

MORPHEUS
As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible which is why the younger a mind is the easier it is to free, while a mind like yours can be very difficult.

NEO
Free from what?

MORPHEUS
From the Matrix.

Neo looks at his eyes but only sees a reflection of himself.

MORPHEUS
Do you want to know what it is, Neo?

Neo swallows and nods his head.

MORPHEUS
It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?

The leather creaks as he leans back.

MORPHEUS
The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

NEO
What truth?

MORPHEUS
That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage… kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison – for your mind.

I don’t know who said this (it came to me via Matt Kundert on the MoQ list) but I think it is excellent:

“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.”

The second one, inevitably, is from Wittgenstein:

“Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.”

That’s what I’m aiming for – to express thoughts boldly and clearly, and invite first-rate critical responses.

I want to start a list of common misperceptions that atheists have about Christian language and Christian claims (some of which will be common to other faiths as well). Now I should say right up front that I do not see atheists as culpable for these mistakes, for the most part, simply because they are mistakes that are made by a great number of professed Christians, especially in North America. However, what this means is that most Christians don’t understand their own faith, which is the fault of a) their pastors, and b) the historical development of Modern Protestantism.

When, for example, Davidov comments “Atheism is not trying to provide answers to those questions or indeed any questions. It simply denies that the central proposition of most religiions (God exists) is correct. There are two ways this is put (1) God does not exist; (2) there is no proper evidence that God exists. Only one response is needed – (1) explain the characteristics of the God whose existence you assert; (2) set out the evidence in favour of your assertion that this God exists. You are making a proposition (God exists). It is for you to prove that it is accurate” he is assuming at least two things: a) that it makes sense to attribute existence to God, and b) that this is what Christian thought does. Whereas I want to say that neither are true – it makes no sense to apply the word ‘exist’ to God, and Christian theology does not do so (which means that Christian theology as a whole is not delusional in the sense assumed by that video). I will go into this in more detail in a separate post (I’ve written some material on this elsewhere).

This is why I want to ask of atheists ‘how much theology have you read?’ It’s another way of distinguishing between humourless and sophisticated atheisms. The humourless variety not only hasn’t read much theology, instead taking their understanding of Christianity from popular level publications and TV programmes, but rests content with that level of understanding. Imagine how Richard Dawkins would feel if he ended up in an argument with an atheist who happened to reject the theory of evolution – because he could demonstrate that Lamarckian inheritance was wrong – that would give you an idea of what it regularly feels like to debate with atheists. The assumption is that I am defending something which I don’t actually believe in.

Underlying much of this, however, is a misperception of the grammar of religious faith, in other words, what sort of thing a religious belief is. Too often, the assumption is that religious belief functions in the same way as religious scientific belief, in other words that what is at stake is the existence of something, or some truth about a matter of fact (hence the plea to start out with some agreed facts, which is one way of indicating what counts highest in the hierarchy). Yet religious belief is not at all the same sort of thing as a scientific belief. I’ll say more about this in due course as well.

Anyhow, I’m starting to ramble. What I will do is have a subsection of this series called TM, which is when I’ll point out some of the common errors or misperceptions that get trotted out on a regular basis.

I asked atheists two questions in the comments on my previous post in this series, and I think it is worth bringing them up front:
a) Is wisdom something worth pursuing?
b) If so, how do you pursue it?

I see these questions as a way to swiftly distinguish the humourless from the sophisticated atheist. That is, the humourless will respond to a) with some sort of denial or equivocation, asserting or implying that wisdom doesn’t exist (or can be reductively made equivalent to “just” personal preference). In contrast, the sophisticated atheist will not only answer a) positively but will be interested in exploring the questions that arise from any possible answer to b). (To my mind, this is where the conversations become most interesting – sophisticated atheists will criticise Christianity on the basis of how well it actually functions to cultivate wisdom. This gives rise to criticisms that Christians must listen to.)

So what do I mean by wisdom? I would say something like: wisdom is the capacity to act and choose in a way that enables human flourishing. Which is very Aristotelean: I have in mind the virtue of phronesis, right judgement. Now there is a question to be pursued about what constitutes human flourishing (eudaimonia) but that need not detain us too long. I would argue that the different wisdom traditions embody different answers to that question and what I most want to pay attention to is the difference between all of the different wisdom traditions and the perspective that treats all wisdom traditions as irrational and not worth pursuing. The sophisticated atheist can engage in conversations about what actually does foster human flourishing because the essential premise is accepted (ie a positive answer to my first question). I would then want to go along the lines MacIntyre sketched out in “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” and ask questions about the traditions as a whole.

So what is wrong with reducing wisdom to personal preference, that it’s simply a question of what different people like? Well, lots of things, but let’s begin with the idea that wisdom is something that can be acquired; that it is something which is centrally involved in the formation of a character; and that it therefore cannot be reduced to personal preference for the simple reason that the ‘personal’ element is what is changeable. Wisdom is all about enabling a person to develop their character, in the sense of acquiring virtues (eg honesty, courage, prudence etc) that will turn them into something different – a more honest, courageous and prudent person.

As I understand wisdom, then, it is not dependent upon being placed in a theistic tradition (which is presumably what the on-line dictionaries were drawing on when considering scientia and sapientia). Buddhism, for example, is perfectly capable of generating wise people! You could say that what I want to insist upon, in distinguishing between atheisms, is that some forms of atheism discard too much; that the reasons why they discard too much are open to question; and that there is no necessity to reject wisdom whilst rejecting theism. However, such atheisms are normally most accurately described by the answers given to b), rather than the basically content-free ‘atheist’ label.

Atheism is on my mind at the moment, and I want to start a sequence of posts exploring the reasonableness of atheism. In this first one I want to build further upon the distinction I drew between different forms of atheism here, and which has been on my mind a fair bit recently, as I’ve been commenting on various atheist blogs (see here and here). For reasons that will become clear I want to call the first ‘humourless’, and the second ‘sophisticated’.

The first sort of atheist has a perspective which I would see as descending from Hume via the Logical Positivists (although it has much deeper roots – see this book), and this tends to be the dominant form of atheist expression on the web, at least as I have experienced it. A classic expression of the attitude might be Hume’s declaration about books:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII, iii

This sort of atheism sees no value whatsoever in any religious perspective, considering it ‘illusion’ at best – and a prop for the psychologically inadequate, evidence of neurosis, and fuel for sociopathic behaviour at worst. This is the sort of atheism that I see as aspect blind, in that there is an entire way of seeing the world which is cast away when religious perspectives are cast away. I see this form of atheism as, at best, ignorant of philosophical history (let alone theology) and intellectually crippled at worst. The crippling lies precisely in the way that the wisdom traditions of the different religious traditions in the world become opaque to this perspective, they are simply more or less variable manifestations of the human capacity for self-delusion. This crippling I call asophic, and it ties in with a particular attitude which tends to exalt science as being hard-headed and reasonable, a fit pursuit for strong and manly men; whereas religious flummery is suitable only for weak-willed women who crave emotional gruel to get them through their days. There is a clear historical genealogy for this perspective but, as I’ve said before, philosophically speaking this position is not just inadequate it is manifestly inadequate. I don’t believe that anyone who enquires into the matter, who is equipped with a modicum of good sense, compassion and open-mindedness, could now be persuaded of the rightness of this view.

So why am I calling it ‘humourless’? Simply because it seems analogous to having a sense of humour. You either get the joke or you don’t. You either get the sense of what a wisdom tradition can provide, or you think it’s all meaningless gibberish. The image that best encapsulates the poverty of this perspective is, for me, a story about Wittgenstein (regular readers will not be surprised). In the 1920’s Wittgenstein visited the Vienna Circle, who revered Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as the apotheosis of the Humean perspective. Wittgenstein realised that the Circle had completely failed to ‘get’ what he was driving at (Wittgenstein being very much someone who had a ‘religious point of view’) and so he turned his chair around and began reciting the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore to them.

Now I would really want to emphasise that this form of atheism, whilst common, is not at all the only form of atheism that is intellectually possible and so I want to describe a sophisticated form of atheism, and I’m calling it sophisticated simply because it is distinctly not guilty of adopting an asophic perspective: it is conversant with different wisdom traditions and what they mean, it is clear-sighted about the western intellectual tradition, and, most especially, it doesn’t buy into the mythology of science.

This sophisticated atheism can be distinguished from the humourless sort most clearly by a) a recognition of the need for a wisdom tradition in human life, and (most pertinently from my point of view) b) a willingness to consider seriously the teachings of the different wisdom traditions that exist in the world. They don’t, therefore, see wisdom traditions as by definition meaningless. Examples of this sort of atheist might be Terry Eagleton or Martha Nussbaum (and, possibly or probably, Wittgenstein himself).

Such a person may, for example, ponder the Christian tradition deeply, ponder the problem of evil even more deeply, and come to the considered view that the Christian intellectual tradition is inadequate to serve as a guide within this world. Or they might ponder the historical narratives of the gospels, become persuaded that the resurrection simply didn’t happen in any way related to what is described, and find that they simply cannot believe Christianity. They might therefore adopt one of various non-Christian perspectives, Buddhism perhaps (which is effectively Robert Pirsig’s stance), or – in Nussbaum’s case – a form of Stoicism. Such perspectives are demonstrably atheist, but they are also intellectually sophisticated and humanly rich; they aren’t simply abstract philosophical structures but parameters within which a meaningful life can be pursued.

Humourless atheism is essentially a parasitic exercise: it tends to focus on criticisms of a religious tradition (normally North American fundamentalist Christianity – what I call Modern Protestantism) rather than advancing any positive project of its own; it tends to rely on an inherited epistemology that places scientifically established truth at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge; and it displays no grasp of any theological tradition (whether that be Christian, Buddhist or any other). There are various arguments that get used repetitiously and, more often than not, a failure to actually listen to what is being claimed from a religious perspective. In particular I have often found that when I describe a theological perspective that doesn’t fit with what is being criticised I am described as being ‘modern’ or ‘liberal’ which a) isn’t true as my position is basically orthodox (and rooted in first-millenium faith) and b) serves only to reassure the humourless atheist in their prejudice that Christianity is intellectually defunct, and so cannot evolve in any way.

So, to sum up: humourless atheism is intellectually weak and humanly myopic; sophisticated atheism is well-informed, self-aware and rich with insight and possibility. Whenever I go on a rant about atheism – which I expect to do on a regular basis in this series – it will always be the former that I have in mind. When I discuss the more sophisticated atheisms I will tend to describe them in a more positive way (in both senses) eg as stoicism, buddhism, humanism etc.

I intend to explore various things in this sequence of posts, including some standard responses to the common arguments that humourless atheists make; I’ll go into some depth as to what a wisdom tradition is and why they are essential; and at the end I’ll say something about why, for me, Christianity is not just intellectually reasonable but much more reasonable than humourless atheism. That’s the plan for now anyhow!