The Best Arguments for God's Existence Don't Challenge Atheists | New Republic
The most common critique
leveled at New Atheists is that we attack only puerile, fundamentalist
forms of religion, and never engage with the “best” arguments of the
faithful: those adumbrated by Sophisticated Theologians™. Never mind
that most believers accept a view of God far more anthropomorphic than a
simple “ground of being” or a deistic entity that made the world and
then refused to engage with it further. If you want data to support
this, at least for U.S. Christians, go
here.
Polls consistently show that around 70-80% of Americans believe in the
existence of Heaven, Hell, Satan, and angels. And let’s not even discuss
whether the majority of Muslims think of Allah as a “ground of being”
rather than as a disembodied ruler who tells them how to behave. Anyone
who claims that regular monotheists view God like Karen Armstrong’s
Apophatic Entity or Tillich’s Ground of Being simply hasn’t gotten out
enough.
Further, it’s obvious that the bulk of harm
committed in the name of religion is done by those not who see god as a
Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a
personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral
system. For it is the belief that God has wishes for humanity, and a
code of right and wrong, that drives people to do things like oppose
abortion and stem cell research, deny rights to women and gays, burn
“witches,” throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and torture Catholics
with guilt about masturbation and divorce.
The vast majority of believers don’t even read
theology, and are barely aware of the arguments for God made by
Sophisticated Theologians™. So is it our duty as atheists to refute
those arcane theological arguments, or to prevent instead the harm done
by religion? To me, the latter course is preferable. Still it’s both fun
and intellectually profitable to read and refute the arguments of
theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so
blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided beforehand
must be true. Theology is the only academic discipline where people get
paid not to investigate their beliefs, but to rationalize them.
Certainly it’s more useful for atheists to point out to
“average” believers the lack of evidence for their faith—and that is
precisely what Dawkins did in The God Delusion—but it’s more fun to chase the tails of obscurantists like Alvin Plantinga and John Haught.
And
now, apparently, their ranks include David Bentley Hart, who has
written a new book that’s being touted as the most Sophisticated and
Irrefutable Evidence for God Ever. The book is
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, and although I haven’t yet read it (believe me, I will, and have ordered it), I
posted a critique of Damon Linker’s blurb for the book that appeared in
The Week magazine.
Another encomium has just arrived for Hart’s book, this time from Oliver Burkeman, who writes at the
Guardian that
The Experience of God is “
The one theology book all atheists really should read.”
I’m not sure whether Burkeman is an atheist, but his piece comes across
as pure faitheism: “you atheists won’t make any headway until you come
to grips with the arguments for God made by people like Hart.” For Hart
has presented the Best Case for God, and until we’ve refuted it we lack
all credibility.
As Burkeman argues:
Yet prominent atheists display an almost aggressive lack of curiosity when it comes to the facts about belief. In
The God Delusion,
Richard Dawkins expertly demolishes what he calls ‘the God hypothesis’,
but devotes only a few sketchy anecdotes to establishing that this God
hypothesis is the one that has defined religious belief through history,
or defines it around the world today. AC Grayling insists that atheists
are excused the bother of actually reading theology – where they might
catch up on debates among believers about what they believe – because
atheism
“rejects the premise” of theology. And when The Atlantic ran a piece last year entitled
Study theology, even if you don’t believe in God, Jerry Coyne, the atheist blogosphere’s
Victor Meldrew,
called it “the world’s worst advice.” And on and on it goes.
I had to look up
Victor Meldrew,
who turns out to be a BBC sitcom character known for being a
curmudgeon—though he had every right (like me) to be curmudgeonly. And
does Burkeman realize that I spent several years reading theology before
I decided that it was a mind-numbing and largely worthless exercise?
It’s not like I haven’t heard their Best Arguments. And when you master
one, theologians suddenly decide that there’s an even
better Best Argument. The process is never ending.
But on to our failures, as seen by Burkeman:
My
modest New Year’s wish for 2014, then, is that atheists who care about
honest argument – and about maybe actually getting somewhere in these
otherwise mind-numbingly circular debates – might consider reading just
one book by a theologian, David Bentley Hart’s
The Experience of God,
published recently by Yale University Press. Not because I think
they’ll be completely convinced by it. (I’m not, and I’m certainly not
convinced by Hart’s other publicly expressed views, which
tend towards the implacably socially conservative.)
They should read it because Hart marshals powerful historical evidence
and philosophical argument to suggest that atheists – if they want to
attack the opposition’s strongest case – badly need to up their game.
But what exactly does he mean by “the opposition’s strongest case”? I can think of three ways to construe that:
1. The case that provides the strongest evidence for God’s existence. This
is the way scientists would settle an argument about existence claims:
by adducing data. This category’s best argument for God used to be the
Argument from Design, since there was no plausible alternative to God’s
creation of the marvelous “designoid” features of plants and animals.
But Darwin put paid to that one in 1859. Theologians now rely on
arguments involving the fine-tuning of the universe or the supposed
“innate morality” of human beings, but we have good secular explanations
for these.
2. The philosophical argument that is most tricky, or hardest to refute: in other words, the argument for God that has the greatest degree of sophistry. This used to include the
Ontological Arguments,
which briefly stymied even Bertrand Russell. But we soon realized that
“existence is not a quality,” and that, in fact, claims about an
entity’s existence can be settled only by observation or testing, not by
logic.
3. The argument that is irrefutable because it’s untestable. Given
that arguments in the first two categories are now untenable, people
like Hart have proposed conceptions of God that are so nebulous that we
can’t figure out what they mean. And because they are not only obscure
but don’t say anything tangible about the how God interacts with the
cosmos, they can’t be refuted. To any rationalist or scientist, this
automatically rules them out of rational consideration, for if an
observation comports with everything, and can’t be disproven, it is
totally useless as an explanation for anything. I might as well say that
there’s an invisible teddy bear who sustains the universe, and without
my Ineffable Teddy there would be no cosmos. But nobody can see that
Bear, for he is the Ursine Ground of Being: ineffable and undetectable
even though his Bearness permeates and supports everything. Without that
Bear, the universe could not function, much less exist.
And
this, in fact, is what Hart has apparently done in his new book.
Burkeman summarizes Hart’s Irrefutable God by quoting Linker’s
characterization of it:
… according to the
classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the
unconditioned cause of reality – of absolutely everything that is – from
the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t
even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or
electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent
thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it,
giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything
existing at all.
Reread that paragraph,
particularly the last line, and then see if you can explain it to one of
your friends. Not only is it meaningless (I’ll read Hart’s book to see
if I can suss out any meaning), but it’s also untestable. And there is not an iota of evidence for such a God, so on what ground should we believe it?
Hart claims that this is the conception of God that has prevailed
throughout most of history, but I seriously doubt that. Aquinas, Luther,
Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way. And it’s
certainly not the view that prevails now, as you can easily see by
Googling a few polls. I can make up yet another God with just as much
supporting evidence as Hart’s: assume that God is a deistic God who has
always been there but has done nothing. He didn’t even create
the universe: he let that happen according to the laws of physics, from
which universes can arise via fluctuations in a quantum vacuum. My God
is just sitting there, watching over us all, but only for his amusement.
He’s undetectable, ineffable, indolent, and easily bored.
I
claim that this Coyneian God is just as valid as Hart’s God, for
neither can be tested, and thus there’s no reason to believe in either.
As
Burkeman notes, Hart has removed God from the class of entities that
exist and transformed Him into merely an Idea: a philosophical concept
that can be subject only to philosophical arguments:
God,
in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might
or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among
all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it.
Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question
of why there’s existence to begin with.
. . . Since I
can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn,
it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that
he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If
you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish,
you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific
evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one,
about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence
is and on what it depends.
Hart’s god,
therefore, is immune to refutation. Whether God “is” now depends, as
Bill Clinton anticipated, on what your definition of “is” is.
But
this is all a stupendous confidence game. Not only is Hart wrong in
claiming that his conception of God is the one embraced most
consistently through “the history of monotheism,” but, as everyone
should know, how widely something is accepted is no evidence for its
validity. For the vast majority of modern history, women were viewed as
intellectually inferior beings. But that is simply a
culturally-conditioned belief that supports no argument for female
inferiority. Likewise, just because some Sophisticated Theologians™
agreed on God as a Sustainer of the Universe and Ground of All Being
does not make it so. Why on earth does that argument have any force at
all?
Burkeman (and Hart) note that one way to dismiss
Hart’s argument that only a minority of believers accept the
Ground-of-Being God is “to prove the point with survey data about what
people believe.” Well, I just did that above, and could adduce much more
data of the same sort. Western monotheists usually believe in a
personal and anthropomorphic God—one who has humanlike emotions, cares
about us, and wants us to behave in certain ways. So Hart’s argument
fails in the only way it can be tested. But we’re supposed to dismiss it
on another ground—a dismissal that’s impossible since Hart has made his
concept irrefutable:
But second, even if
you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would
that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a
committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but
only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d
naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they
seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had
concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that. Which is also why atheists should read Hart’s book: to deny themselves the lazy option of sticking to easy targets.
As
I’ve pointed out before, these situations are not comparable. The
arguments for evolution are based on evidence, not philosophy, and can
be comprehended by the average person: one who, for example, read my
book Why Evolution is True. Hart’s arguments are simply made-up
stuff, and even though he’s smart and uses big words, there is no more
evidence for his God than there is for the anthropomorphic Gods of Alvin
Plantinga, Pat Robertson, and Rick Warren.
In other
words, the difference in expertise between theologians and “average”
believers is small—not nearly as great as the difference in expertise
between professional evolutionists and science-friendly laypeople. The
difference between theologians and believers is not their differential
acquaintance with the truth about God, but the greater acquaintance of
theologians with
the history of theology. People like Hart,
despite their intelligence, have no more handle on the nature of God
than do Joe and Sally in the street. Theologians are, as we all know,
simply confecting things about God, and then selling them using fancy
words and their academic credentials. Let Hart give us one bit of
evidence that he has greater insight into God than, say, Rick Warren,
and then I’ll pay attention to what he has to say. Otherwise, I see Hart
as retreating to the Last Redoubt of the Theologian: the definition of
God as something that is immune to all disproof—and thus subject to
Hitchens’ Razor: “what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
Isaac
Chotiner has pointed out some of these problems in a new piece in these
pages that is also based on Linker’s blurb for Hart: “
The case for God’s existence is empowering atheists.”
Chotiner agrees that Hart has simply redefined God in a way that
immunizes Him against disproof, equating God with emotions shared by
many people:
Linker continues with this:
“In a move sure to enrage atheists, Hart even goes so far as to argue
that faith in this classical notion of God can never be ‘wholly and
coherently rejected’ — and not only because it may very well be
self-contradictory to prove the nonexistence of an absolute,
transcendent ground of existence.”
If this is not tautologous enough for you, try [Linker's] comment:
“The
deeper reason why theism can’t be rejected, according to Hart, is that
every pursuit of truth, every attempt to be good, every longing for
beauty presupposes the existence of some idea of truth, goodness, and
beauty from which these particular instances are derived. And these
transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who
simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. That’s why, although it isn’t
necessary to believe in God in some explicit way in order to be good, it
certainly is the case (in Hart’s words) ‘that to seek the good is
already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.’”
Here
I would turn again to Linker’s comment implying that the “major world
religions” have a view of God similar to the one that Linker lays out
above. If you think this is the case, ask yourself how many major world
religions will consider you a believer in their particular faiths just
because you merely state that you “seek the good,” which I would hope
nearly all of us do.
In summary, Linker is unable to
make a case for God that doesn’t define God as such an intrinsic part of
the universe (“truth, goodness, and beauty”) that God exists by
definition. If I were a religious believer, I would likely neither
appreciate the concessions that Linker has made, nor go along with his
account of my beliefs.
Chotiner is
absolutely correct. If you define God as simply the set of our most
admirable aspirations, then of course God exists. But you could also
define God as the set of our most unpalatable aspirations: greed, duplicity, criminality, and so on. And that kind of god could also exist
by definition: as the Ground of All Evil. I claim that, in fact,
there’s just as much evidence for that god as there is for Hart’s “good”
God. The reader might amuse herself by thinking of other kinds of
irrefutable gods.
So if I had to ask Hart three questions, they would be these:
1.
On what basis do you know that God is a Ground-of-Being God instead of
an anthropomorphic God? (In your answer, you cannot include as evidence
the dubious claim that the former God is the one most people have
accepted throughout history.)
2. How do you know that your Ground-of-Being god embodies truth, goodness, and beauty rather than lies, evil, and ugliness?
3. What would convince you that the god you describe doesn’t exist?
Let a theologian, for once, answer the best arguments of atheists: those that involve the question, “How do you know that?”
