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Systems of Religious and Spiritual
Belief
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The dialectic of the argument between
forms of belief and unbelief raises questions concerning the most perspicuous
delineation, or characterization, of atheism, agnosticism, and theism. It is
necessary not only to probe the warrant for atheism but also carefully to
consider what is the most adequate definition of atheism. This section will
start with what have been some widely accepted, but still in various ways
mistaken or misleading, definitions of atheism and move to more adequate
formulations that better capture the full range of atheist thought and more
clearly separate unbelief from belief and atheism from agnosticism. In the
course of this delineation the section also will consider key arguments for and
against atheism. |
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A central, common core of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam is the affirmation
of the reality of one, and only one, God. Adherents of these faiths believe that
there is a God who created the universe out of nothing and who has absolute
sovereignty over all his creation; this includes, of course, human beings--who
are not only utterly dependent on this creative power but also sinful and who,
or so the faithful must believe, can only make adequate sense of their lives by
accepting, without question, God's ordinances for them. The varieties of atheism
are numerous, but all atheists reject such a set of beliefs. (see also idealism,
humanism) |
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Atheism, however, casts a wider net and
rejects all belief in "spiritual beings," and to the extent that
belief in spiritual beings is definitive of what it means for a system to be
religious, atheism rejects religion. So atheism is not only a rejection of the
central conceptions of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, it is, as well, a
rejection of the religious beliefs of such African religions as that of the
Dinka and the Nuer, of the anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece and Rome,
and of the transcendental conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Generally atheism is a denial of God or of the gods, and if religion is defined
in terms of belief in spiritual beings, then atheism is the rejection of all
religious belief. |
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It is necessary, however, if a tolerably
adequate understanding of atheism is to be achieved, to give a reading to
"rejection of religious belief" and to come to realize how the
characterization of atheism as the denial of God or the gods is inadequate. |
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To say that atheism is the denial of God
or the gods and that it is the opposite of theism,
a system of belief that affirms the reality of God and seeks to demonstrate his
existence, is inadequate in a number of ways. First, not all theologians who
regard themselves as defenders of the Christian faith or of Judaism or Islam
regard themselves as defenders of theism. The influential 20th-century
Protestant theologian Paul Tillich,
for example, regards the God of theism as an idol and refuses to construe God as
a being, even a supreme being, among beings or as an infinite being above finite
beings. God, for him, is "being-itself," the ground of being and
meaning. The particulars of Tillich's view are in certain ways idiosyncratic, as
well as being obscure and problematic, but they have been influential; and his
rejection of theism, while retaining a belief in God, is not eccentric in
contemporary theology, though it may very well affront the plain believer. |
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Second, and more important, it is not
the case that all theists seek to demonstrate or even in any way rationally to
establish the existence of God. Many theists regard such a demonstration as
impossible, and fideistic believers (e.g.,
Johann Hamann and Søren Kierkegaard) regard such a demonstration, even if
it were possible, as undesirable, for in their view it would undermine faith.
If it could be proved, or known for certain, that God exists, people would not
be in a position to accept him as their sovereign Lord humbly on faith with all
the risks that entails. There are theologians who have argued that for genuine
faith to be possible God must necessarily be a hidden God, the mysterious
ultimate reality, whose existence and authority must be accepted simply on
faith. This fideistic view has not, of course, gone without challenge from
inside the major faiths, but it is of sufficient importance to make the above
characterization of atheism inadequate. (see also fideism) |
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Finally, and most important, not all
denials of God are denials of his existence. Believers sometimes deny God while
not being at all in a state of doubt that God exists. They either willfully
reject what they take to be his authority by not acting in accordance with what
they take to be his will, or else they simply live their lives as if God did not
exist. In this important way they deny him. Such deniers are not atheists
(unless we wish, misleadingly, to call them "practical atheists").
They are not even agnostics. They do not question that God exists; they deny him
in other ways. An atheist denies the existence of God. As it is frequently said,
atheists believe that it is false that God exists, or that God's existence is a
speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. |
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Yet it remains the case that such a
characterization of atheism is inadequate in other ways. For one it is too
narrow. There are atheists who believe that the very concept of God, at least in
developed and less anthropomorphic forms of Judeo-Christianity and Islam,
is so incoherent that certain central religious claims, such as "God is my
creator to whom everything is owed," are not genuine truth-claims; i.e.,
the claims could not be either true or false. Believers hold that such
religious propositions are true, some atheists believe that they are false, and
there are agnostics who cannot make up their minds whether to believe that they
are true or false. (Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other
but believe that it is not possible to determine which.) But all three are
mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not
sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or
false. In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, though
there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting illusion that
there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some conceptions of
God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes sense to say, has
been strongly resisted by some pragmatists
and logical empiricists. |
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While the above considerations about
atheism and intelligibility show the second characterization of atheism to be
too narrow, it is also the case that this characterization is in a way too
broad. For there are fideistic believers, who quite unequivocally believe that
when looked at objectively the proposition that God exists has a very low
probability weight. They believe in God not because it is probable that he
exists--they think it more probable that he does not--but because belief is
thought by them to be necessary to make sense of human life. The second
characterization of atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer (a Blaise
Pascal or a Kierkegaard) or an agnostic (a T.H. Huxley or a Leslie Stephen) from
an atheist such as Baron d'Holbach or Thomas Paine. All believe that "There
is a God" and "God protects humankind," however emotionally
important they may be, are speculative hypotheses of an extremely low order of
probability. But this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers
and does not distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate
characterization of atheism. |
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It may be retorted that to avoid
apriorism and dogmatic atheism the existence of God should be regarded as a
hypothesis. There are no ontological (purely a priori) proofs or disproofs of
God's existence. It is not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense
to say that God exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is
no evidence that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be
justified in asserting that there is no God. It has been argued, however, that
it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible evidence could
ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists should justify
their unbelief by showing (if they can) how the assertion is well-taken that
there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If atheism is
justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no adequate
evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part of his task
to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the existence of God. If
the atheist could somehow survive the death of his present body (assuming that
such talk makes sense) and come, much to his surprise, to stand in the presence
of God, his answer should be, "Oh! Lord, you didn't give me enough
evidence!" He would have been mistaken, and realize that he had been
mistaken, in his judgment that God did not exist. Still, he would not have been
unjustified, in the light of the evidence available to him during his earthly
life, in believing as he did. Not having any such postmortem experiences of the
presence of God (assuming that he could have them), what he should say, as
things stand and in the face of the evidence he actually has and is likely to be
able to get, is that it is false that God exists. (Every time one legitimately
asserts that a proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false.
"Knowing with certainty" is not a pleonasm.) The claim is that this
tentative posture is the reasonable position for the atheist to take. |
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An atheist who argues in this manner may
also make a distinctive burden-of-proof argument. Given that God (if there is
one) is by definition a very recherché reality--a reality that must be
(for there to be such a reality) transcendent to the world--the burden of proof
is not on the atheist to give grounds for believing that there is no reality of
that order. Rather, the burden of proof is on the believer to give some evidence
for God's existence; i.e., that there
is such a reality. Given what God must be, if there is a God, the theist needs
to present the evidence, for such a very strange reality. He needs to show that
there is more in the world than is disclosed by common experience. The empirical
method, and the empirical method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a
reliable method for establishing what is in fact the case. To the claim of the
theist that there are in addition to varieties of empirical facts
"spiritual facts" or "transcendent facts," such as it being
the case that there is a supernatural, self-existent, eternal power, the atheist
can assert that such "facts" have not been shown. |
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It will, however, be argued by such
atheists, against what they take to be dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the
atheist should be a fallibilist and remain open-minded about what the future may
bring. There may, after all, be such transcendent facts, such metaphysical
realities. It is not that such a fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who
believes that he is not justified in either asserting that God exists or denying
that he exists and that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the
contrary, such an atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as
things stand, for denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second
conceptualization of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be
otherwise and that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or
at least would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there
is a God. Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing
matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe to
make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, the
most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the atheistical
conclusion (also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument) that God does not
exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion deny the existence of
God. He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist. |
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Such a form of atheism (the atheism of
those pragmatists who are also naturalistic humanists), though less inadequate
than the first formation of atheism, is still inadequate. God in developed forms
of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not, like Zeus or Wotan, construed
in a relatively plain anthropomorphic way. Nothing that could count as
"God" in such religions could possibly be observed, literally
encountered, or detected in the universe. God, in such a conception, is utterly
transcendent to the world; he is conceived of as "pure spirit," an
infinite individual who created the universe out of nothing and who is distinct
from the universe. Such a reality--a reality that is taken to be an ultimate
mystery--could not be identified as objects or processes in the universe can be
identified. There can be no pointing at or to God, no ostensive teaching of
"God," to show what is meant. The word God can only be taught
intralinguistically. "God" is taught to someone who does not
understand what the word means by the use of descriptions such as "the
maker of the universe," "the eternal, utterly independent being upon
whom all other beings depend," "the first cause," "the sole
ultimate reality," or "a self-caused being." For someone who does
not understand such descriptions, there can be no understanding of the concept
of God. But the key terms of such descriptions are themselves no more capable of
ostensive definition (of having their referents pointed out) than is
"God," where that term is not, like "Zeus," construed
anthropomorphically. (That does not mean that anyone has actually pointed to
Zeus or observed Zeus but that one knows what it would be like to do so.) |
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In coming to understand what is meant by
"God" in such discourses, it must be understood that God, whatever
else he is, is a being that could not possibly be seen or be in any way else
observed. He could not be anything material or empirical, and he is said by
believers to be an intractable mystery. A nonmysterious God would not be the God
of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. |
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This, in effect, makes it a mistake to
claim that the existence of God can rightly be treated as a hypothesis and makes
it a mistake to claim that, by the use of the experimental method or some other
determinate empirical method, the existence of God can be confirmed or
disconfirmed as can the existence of an empirical reality. The retort made by
some atheists, who also like pragmatists remain thoroughgoing fallibilists, is
that such a proposed way of coming to know, or failing to come to know, God
makes no sense for anyone who understands what kind of reality God is supposed
to be. Anything whose existence could be so verified would not be the God of
Judeo-Christianity. God could not be a reality whose presence is even faintly
adumbrated in experience, for anything that could even count as the God of
Judeo-Christianity must be transcendent to the world. Anything that could
actually be encountered or experienced could not be God. |
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At the very heart of a religion such as
Christianity there stands a metaphysical belief in a reality that is alleged to
transcend the empirical world. It is the metaphysical belief that there is an
eternal, ever-present creative source and sustainer of the universe. The problem
is how it is possible to know or reasonably believe that such a reality exists
or even to understand what such talk is about. |
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It is not that God is like a theoretical
entity in physics such as a proton or a neutrino. They are, where they are
construed as realities rather than as heuristically useful conceptual fictions,
thought to be part of the actual furniture of the universe. They are not said to
be transcendent to the universe, but rather are invisible entities in the
universe logically on a par with specks of dust and grains of sand, only much,
much smaller. They are on the same continuum; they are not a different kind of
reality. It is only the case that they, as a matter of fact, cannot be seen.
Indeed no one has an understanding of what it would be like to see a proton or a
neutrino--in that way they are like God--and no provision is made in physical
theory for seeing them. Still, there is no logical ban on seeing them as there
is on seeing God. They are among the things in the universe, and thus, though
they are invisible, they can be postulated as causes of things that are seen.
Since this is so it becomes at least logically possible indirectly to verify by
empirical methods the existence of such realities. It is also the case that
there is no logical ban on establishing what is necessary to establish a causal
connection, namely a constant conjunction of two discrete empirical realities.
But no such constant conjunction can be established or even intelligibly
asserted between God and the universe, and thus the existence of God is not even
indirectly verifiable. God is not a discrete empirical thing or being, and the
universe is not a gigantic thing or process over and above the things and
processes in the universe of which it makes sense to say that the universe has
or had a cause. But then there is no way, directly or indirectly, that even the
probability that there is a God could be empirically established. |
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The gnostic may reply that there is a
nonempirical way of establishing or making it probable that God exists. The
claim is that there are truths about the nature of the cosmos neither capable of
verification nor standing in need of verification. There is, gnostics
claim against empiricists, knowledge of the world that transcends experience and
comprehends the sorry scheme of things entire. |
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Since the thorough probings of such
epistemological foundations by David
Hume and Immanuel Kant,
scepticism about how, and indeed even that, such knowledge is possible is very
strong indeed. With respect to knowledge of God in particular, both Hume and
Kant provide powerful critiques of the traditional attempts to prove the
existence of God (notwithstanding the fact that Kant remained a Christian).
While some of the details of their arguments have been rejected and refinements
rooted in their argumentative procedure have been developed, there is a
considerable consensus among philosophers and theologians that arguments of the
general type as those developed by Hume and Kant show that no proof of God's
existence is possible. Alternatively, to speak of "intuitive
knowledge" (an intuitive grasp of being or of an intuition of the reality
of the divine being) is to make an appeal to something that is not sufficiently
clear to be of any value in establishing anything. |
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Prior to the rise of anthropology and
the scientific study of religion, an appeal to revelation and authority as a
substitute for knowledge or warranted belief might have been thought to have
considerable force. But with a knowledge of other religions and their associated
appeals to revealed truth, such arguments are without probative force. Claimed,
or alleged, revelations are many, diverse, and not infrequently conflicting;
without going in a small and vicious circle, it cannot be claimed, simply by
appealing to a given putative revelation, that the revelation is the "true
revelation" or the "genuine revelation" and that others are
mistaken or, where nonconflicting, mere approximations to the truth. Similar
things need to be said for religious authority. Moreover, it is at best
problematic whether faith could sanction speaking of testing the genuineness of
revelation or of the acceptability of religious authority. Indeed, if something
is a "genuine revelation," there is no using reason to assess it. But
the predicament is that plainly, as a matter of anthropological fact, there is a
diverse and sometimes conflicting field of alleged revelations with no way of
deciding or even having a reasonable hunch which, if any, of the candidate
revelations is the genuine article. But even if the necessity for tests for the
genuineness of revelation is allowed, there still is a claim that clearly will
not do, for such a procedure would make an appeal to revelation and authority
supererogatory. It is, where such tests are allowed, not revelation or authority
that can warrant the most fundamental religious truths on which the rest depend.
It is something else--that which establishes the genuineness of the revelation
or authority--that guarantees these religious truths (if such there be),
including the proposition that God exists. But the question returns, like the
repressed, what that fundamental guarantee is or could be. Perhaps such a belief
is nothing more than a cultural myth. There is, as has been shown, neither
empirical nor a priori knowledge of God, and talk of intuitive knowledge is
without logical force. |
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If these considerations are near to the
mark, it is unclear what it means to say, as some agnostics and even atheists
have, that they are sceptical God-seekers who simply have not found, after a
careful examination, enough evidence to make belief in God a warranted or even a
reasonable belief. It is unclear what it would be like to have, or for that
matter fail to have, evidence for the existence of God. It is not that the
God-seeker has to be able to give the evidence, for if that were so no search
would be necessary, but that he, or at least somebody, must be able to conceive
what would count as evidence if he had it so that he (and others) have some idea
of what to look for. But it appears to be just that which cannot be done. |
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Perhaps there is room for the retort
that it is enough for the God-seeker not to accept any logical ban on the
possibility of there being evidence. He need not understand what it would be
like to have evidence in this domain. But, in turn, when one considers what kind
of transcendent reality God is said to be, there seems to be an implicit logical
ban on there being empirical evidence (a pleonasm) for his existence. It would
seen plausible to assert that there is such a ban, though any such assertion
should, of course, be made in a tentative way. |
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Someone trying to give empirical
anchorage to talk of God might give the following hypothetical case. (It is,
however, important in considering the case to keep in mind that things even
remotely like what is described do not happen.) If thousands of people were
standing out under the starry skies and all saw--the thing went on before their
very eyes--a set of stars rearrange themselves to spell out "God,"
they would indeed rightly be utterly astonished and think that they had gone
mad. Even if they could somehow assure themselves that this was not in some way
a form of mass hallucination--how they could do this is not evident--such an
experience would not constitute evidence for the existence of God, for they
still would be without a clue as to what could be meant by speaking of an
infinite individual transcendent transcendent to the world. Such an observation
(the stars so rearranging themselves), no matter how well confirmed, would not
ostensively fix the reference range of "God." Talk of such an infinite
individual is utterly incomprehensible and has every appearance of being
incoherent. No one knows what he is talking about in speaking of such a
transcendent reality. All they would know is that something very strange indeed
had happened. The doubt arises whether believers, or indeed anyone else in terms
acceptable to believers, can give an intelligible account of the concept of God
or of what belief in God comes to once God is de-anthropomorphized. |
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Reflection on this should lead to a more
adequate statement of what atheism is and indeed as well to what an agnostic or
religious response to atheism should be. Instead of saying that an atheist is
someone who believes that it is false or probably false that there is a God, a
more adequate characterization of atheism consists in the more complex claim
that to be an atheist is to be someone who rejects belief in God for the
following reasons (which reason is stressed depends on how God is being
conceived): for an anthropomorphic God, the atheist rejects belief in God
because it is false or probably false that there is a God; for a
nonanthropomorphic God (the God of Luther and Calvin, Aquinas, and Maimonides),
he rejects belief in God because the concept of such a God is either
meaningless, unintelligible, contradictory, incomprehensible, or incoherent; for
the God portrayed by some modern or contemporary theologians or philosophers, he
rejects belief in God because the concept of God in question is such that it
merely masks an atheistic substance--e.g., "God" is just another name for love, or
"God" is simply a symbolic term for moral ideals. |
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This atheism is a much more complex
notion, as are its various reflective rejections. It is clear from what has been
said about the concept of God in developed forms of Judeo-Christianity that the
more crucial form of atheist rejection is not the assertion that it is false
that there is a God but instead the rejection of belief in God because the
concept of God is said not to make sense--to be in some important way incoherent
or unintelligible. |
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Such a broader conception of atheism, of
course, includes everyone who is an atheist in the narrower sense, but the
converse does not obtain. Moreover, this conception of atheism does not have to
say that religious claims are meaningless. The more typical and less paradoxical
and tendentious claim is that utterances such as "There is an infinite,
eternal creator of the universe" are incoherent and that the conception of
God reflected in such a claim is unintelligible, and in that important sense the
claim is inconceivable and incredible--incapable of being a rational object of
belief for a philosophically and scientifically sophisticated person touched by
modernity. It is this that is a central belief of many contemporary atheists.
There are good empirical grounds for believing that there are no Zeus-like
spiritual beings, and as this last, more ramified form of atheism avers, if
there are sound grounds for believing that the nonanthropomorphic or at least
radically less anthropomorphic conceptions of God are incoherent or
unintelligible, the atheist has the strongest grounds for rejecting belief in
God. |
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Atheism is a critique and a denial of
the central metaphysical beliefs of systems of salvation involving a belief in
God or spiritual beings, but a sophisticated atheist does not simply claim that
all such cosmological claims are false but takes it that some are so problematic
that, while purporting to be factual, they actually do not succeed in making a
coherent factual claim. The claims, in an important sense, do not make sense,
and, while believers are under the illusion that there is something intelligible
to be believed in, in reality there is not. These seemingly grand cosmological
claims are in reality best understood as myths or ideological claims reflecting
a confused understanding of their utterers' situation. |
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It is not a well-taken rejoinder to
atheistic critiques to say, as have some contemporary Protestant theologians,
that belief in God is the worst form of atheism and idolatry, since the language
of Jewish and Christian belief, including such sentences as "God
exists" and "God created the world," is not to be taken literally
but symbolically and metaphorically. Christianity, as Reinhold
Niebuhr, a theologian who defends such views, once put it, is "true
myth." The claims of religion are not, on such account, to be understood as
metaphysical claims trying to convey extraordinary facts but as metaphorical and
analogical claims that are not understandable in any other terms. But if
something is a metaphor it must at least in principle be possible to say what it
is a metaphor of. Thus metaphors cannot be understandable only in metaphorical
terms. There can be no unparaphrasable metaphors or symbolic expressions though,
what is something else again, a user of such expressions may not be capable on
demand of supplying that paraphrase. Moreover, if the language of religion
becomes simply the language of myth and religious beliefs are viewed simply as
powerful and often humanly compelling myths, then they are conceptions that in
reality have only an atheistic substance. The believer is making no cosmological
claim that the atheist is not; it is just that his talk, including his
unelucidated talk of "true myths," is language that for many people
has a more powerful emotive force. |
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Agnosticism
has a parallel development to that of atheism. An agnostic, like an atheist,
asserts either that he does not know that God exists--or, more typically, that
he cannot know or have sound reasons for believing that God exists--but unlike
the atheist he does not think that he is justified in saying that God does not
exist or, stronger still, that God cannot exist. Similarly, while some
contemporary atheists say that the concept of God in developed theism does not
make sense and thus that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic beliefs must be
rejected, many contemporary agnostics believe that the concept of God is
radically problematic. They maintain that they are not in a position to be able
to decide whether, on the one hand, the terms and concepts of such religions are
so problematic that such religious beliefs do not make sense or whether, on the
other, though the talk is indeed radically paradoxical and in many ways
incomprehensible, such talk has sufficient coherence to make reasonable a belief
in an ultimate mystery. Such an agnostic recognizes that the puzzles about God
cut deeper than perplexities concerning whether it is possible to attain
adequate evidence for God's existence. Rather, he sees the need to exhibit an
adequate nonanthropomorphic, extralinguistic referent for "God." (This
need not commit him to the belief that there are any observations independent of
theory.) Believers think that, though God is a mystery, such a referent has been
secured, though what it is remains a mystery. Atheists, by contrast, believe
that it has not been, and indeed some of them believe that it cannot be,
secured. To talk about mystery, they maintain, is just an evasive way of talking
about what is not understood. Contemporary agnostics (those agnostics who
parallel the atheists characterized above) remain in doubt and are convinced
that there is no rational way of resolving the doubt about whether talk in a
halting fashion of God just barely secures such reference or whether it, after
all, fails and that nothing religiously acceptable is referred to by
"God." (see also myth) |
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Intense religious commitment, as the
history of fideism makes evident, has sometimes gone hand in hand with deep
scepticism concerning man's capacity to know God. It is agreed by all parties to
the dispute between belief and unbelief that religious claims are paradoxical.
Furthermore, criteria for what is meaningless and what is not or for what is
intelligible and what is not are deeply contested. It is perhaps fair enough to
say that there are no generally accepted criteria. |
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Keeping these diverse considerations in
mind in the arguments between belief, agnosticism, and atheism, it is crucial to
ask whether there is any good reason at all to believe that there is a personal
creative reality that is beyond the bounds of space and time and transcendent to
the world. Is there even a sufficient understanding of such talk so that such a
reality can be the object of religious commitment? (One cannot have faith in or
take on faith what one does not at all understand. People must at least in some
way understand what it is that they are to have faith in to be able to have
faith in it. If a person is asked to trust Irglig, he cannot do so no matter how
strongly he wants to take something simply on trust.) |
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It appears to be a brute fact that there
just is that indefinitely immense collection of finite and contingent masses or
conglomerations of things and processes the phrase "the universe"
refers to. People can come to feel wonder, awe, and puzzlement that there is a
universe at all. But that fact, or the very fact that there is a world at all,
does not license the claim that there is a noncontingent reality on which the
world (the sorry collection of things entire) depends. It is not even clear that
such a sense of contingency gives an understanding of what such a noncontingent
thing could be. Some atheists think that the reference range of "God"
is so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic that it is impossible
for someone fully aware of that reasonably to believe in God; believers, by
contrast, think that, though the reference range of "God" is
indeterminate, it is not so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic
as to make belief irrational or incoherent. It is known, they claim, that talk
of God is problematic, but it is not known, and cannot be known, whether it is
so problematic as to be without a religiously appropriate sense. Agnostics, in
turn, say that there is no reasonable decision procedure. It is not known and
cannot be ascertained whether or not "God" secures a religiously
adequate referent. What needs to be kept in mind, in reflecting on this issue,
is whether a "contingent thing" is a pleonasm and "infinite
reality" is without sense and whether, when people go beyond
anthropomorphism (or try to go beyond it), it is possible to have a sufficient
understanding of what is referred to by "God" to make faith a coherent
possibility. |
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Finally, it will not do to take a
Pascalian or Dostoyevskian turn and claim that, intellectual absurdity or not,
religious belief is necessary, since without belief in God morality does not
make sense and life is meaningless. That claim is false, for even if there is no
purpose to life there are purposes in life--things people care about and want to
do--that can remain perfectly intact even in a godless world. God or no God,
immortality or no immortality, it is vile to torture people just for the fun of
it, and friendship, solidarity, love, and the attainment of self-respect are
human goods even in an utterly godless world. There are intellectual puzzles
about how people know that these things are good, but that is doubly true for
the distinctive claims of a religious ethic. The point is that these things
remain desirable and that life can have a point even in the absence of God. (K.E.N.) |
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