A Good Word about Atheists
A chapel talk originally given October 19, 1989. Happy Thanksgiving!
Chapel may seem an odd place for it, but I’m going to say a good word about atheists. One reason I want to do so is that some of my best friends think of themselves as atheists. Another reason is the unsavory images of God held by some people who think of themselves as theists: I mean those believers who are certain that God is American, anti-communist, English-speaking, macho, and white; or the ones who are absolutely certain that God wants them to condemn, terrorize, and kill in his name; or the ones who are certain that God means for them to serve him by getting rich on the contributions of the faithful poor; or the ones who are certain that the deepest insight God expects from us is, in the words of the Church Lady (played by Dana Carvey on “Saturday Night Live”): “Isn’t that special?”; or the ones who are certain that God damns those who believe differently from them. Atheists are valuable because they tell these theists a truth they need to hear: No such God exists.
Of course many of us hold much better images of God than those I’ve just listed. But we too need our atheist friends. In addition to the rest of the good that they do, atheists keep us humble. For one thing, it is humbling to find that we simply cannot convince them of what is so obvious to us, namely that God exists. What a dramatic proof of the limits of our powers of argumentation! For another thing, the atheist’s resistance to our arguments reminds us that it was not through argument that we ourselves came to faith. His conviction shows us that it is not in our power to dictate who will believe in God and who won’t. But atheists keep us humble in another way, too. They show us that all images of God, even the truest, are limited.
We can all pretty much reject the images of God I mentioned at first. God has no race or political party; he is not a terrorist or a tyrant, a high-pressure salesman or a sentimentalist. But what about the images of him that we embrace—creator and preserver, lawgiver and judge, punisher and destroyer, forgiver and redeemer? We who have these images hold to them on good authority—the authority of revelation. We believe that, in one or more ways, God has revealed himself to humanity, informing us how to imagine him rightly so that we may worship him rightly. The Children of Israel at Mount Sinai, the hearers of the Sermon on the Mount, and other good authorities have testified to meeting face to face with the divine. And on their authority, coupled with our own experience, we trust to the images of God that they have passed down to us. They are good images and true ones, and they provide us a path toward God.
But they are not themselves God. Even the best images of the divine are limited because no revelation to man reveals God in his totality. How could it? Who would be able to receive it? If we are ideas in God’s mind, so to speak, how could God’s fullness be reduced to an idea in ours? No more than Shakespeare could have been conceived of by Hamlet. Revelations reveal God to us as we can perceive him, not as he is in himself, because in comparison with the infinite mystery of God our capacity to experience him is minute. He makes himself knowable through images, but no image can contain him.
Now I don’t say all this on my own authority: Speaking from the whirlwind, God says to Job, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). In other words, who are you to presume to know what I am up to? The great medieval Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar Maimonides writes, “All people, both of past and present generations, declared that God cannot be the object of human comprehension, that none but Himself comprehends what He is, and that our knowledge consists in knowing that we are unable truly to comprehend Him” (Guide for the Perplexed, I.59). Saint Thomas Aquinas says, “God is not to be comprehended, for he is infinite and cannot be contained in any finite being” (Summa Theologiae, Ia.xii.7.ad1). Dante, in his ultimate allegorical vision of God, cries, “O Light Eternal, that alone abidest in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself . . . !” (Paradiso, XXXIII.124–25). And Rav Kook, the twentieth-century Talmudic scholar and mystic, says, “All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or in any other language, give us only a tiny and dull spark of the hidden light to which the soul aspires when it utters the word God” (“The Pangs of Cleansing”).1
For this reason, as good as our image of God may be, even if it is a God-given image, we must not mistake it for God himself. And because no image can convey to us God’s totality, it cannot give us the power to comprehend fully his purposes or his judgments. We do know, of course, more than enough. We know what he wants us to know: that we should do justice and love mercy, for example, that we should worship only him, that our lives come to judgment, that we are unimaginably loved. But even the purest faith does not justify us in speaking for God on subjects about which only he knows his mind—subjects like which of us will be saved and which will not, or how near to God one may go on a path different from our own. That is why we are told to judge not lest we be judged. Because, not being God, we are fallible, and our judgment, unlike his, is imperfect. Therefore, the true theist is a humble theist. He knows that to have a true path to God is not to have the only path to God. As a great Hasidic tzaddik, the Seer of Lublin, put it, what kind of God would it be who could be served in only one way?
Finally, even to apply the word “existence” to God is to reduce his full reality. As Rav Kook says, “whatever we ascribe to the term existence is immeasurably remote from the divine. . . . The divine is the activating influence on existence and is, therefore, obviously above existence” (“The Pangs of Cleansing”).2 This brings us back to the atheists. In arguing against the existence of God, whatever their intentions, the atheists tell a partial truth: namely, there is no such God as any of us can picture. For a God whose existence we could imagine would not be God, the source of existence itself. This being so, who are we to say that his path of negation may not lead even the atheist toward God?
Now, having defended the atheists, I have to add that of course their negative images of God too are limited. To say that “existence” is too small a term to be applied to God is not to say there is no God. Atheists help to purify our faith by reminding us that all our images of God fail to convey the fullness of divine reality. But the atheist still has to choose between believing in that infinite, absolute, unfathomable divine reality, a reality with the power to reveal itself to us, and believing in nothingness. If the atheist’s rejecting is done in the name of a search for truth, he may well find God at the end of his search. If his rejecting is merely a way to exalt his own ego, he will be left with nothing but his ego, and therefore, eventually, with nothing—that is unless God’s mercy intervenes. But since we are not God ourselves, the atheist’s eternal fate, like our own, remains a mystery. For him, as for ourselves, we can only hope and pray for the best. I think we are also permitted to argue with him, but only so long as we don’t permit ourselves to sit in judgment on his soul.
I will conclude with two Hasidic stories about atheism and faith. The first story comes to me from the great tzaddik Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav via Elie Wiesel. It is about getting the facts but missing the point. I should warn you that the meaning of the story is in the story, not in any twist at the end.
“The king had sent a letter to a wise but skeptical man, who, in his faraway province, refused to accept it. He was one of those men who think too much, who complicate their lives by complicating small things. He couldn’t understand, not in the slightest, what the king might want of him: ‘Why would the sovereign, so powerful and so rich, address himself to me, who am less than nothing? Because he takes me for a philosopher? There are more important ones. Could there be another reason? If so, what reason?’
“Unable to answer these question, he preferred to believe the letter a misunderstanding. Worse: a fraud. Worse yet: a practical joke. ‘Your king,’ he said to the messenger, ‘does not exist.’ But the messenger insisted: ‘I am here, and here is the letter; isn’t that proof enough?’—‘The letter proves nothing at all; besides, I haven’t read it. And by the way, who gave it to you? The king in person?’—‘No,’ confessed the messenger. ‘It was given to me by a royal page. In his name.’—‘Are you sure of that? And how can you be sure that it comes from the reigning sovereign? Have you ever seen him?’—‘Never. My rank does not permit or warrant it.’—‘Then how do you know that the king is king? You see? You don’t know any more than I.’
“And without unsealing the letter, the sage and the messenger decided to learn the truth once and for all. They would go to the end of the world, they would question the very last of mortals, but they would know.
“At the marketplace, they accosted a soldier: ‘Who are you and what do you do?’—‘I am a soldier by trade and I am in the king’s service.’—‘What king?’—‘The one to whom we swore allegiance; this land is his. We are all here to serve him.’—‘Do you know what he looks like?’—‘No.’—‘Then you have never seen him?’—‘Never.’
“The two companions burst into laughter: ‘Look at him! This man in uniform insists upon serving someone he has never seen and will never see!’
“Further on, they met an officer: yes, he would willingly die for the king; no, he had never had the honor of seeing him, neither from close by nor from afar.
“A general: same questions, same answers, clear and precise. He, too, thinks of nothing but to serve the king, he lives only for him and by him; and yet, even though he is a general, he cannot boast of ever having set his eyes upon the king.
“‘You see?’ says the skeptical sage to the messenger. ‘People are naïve and credulous, and rather foolish; they live a lie and are afraid of the truth.’”3
The second story is this:4
An atheist and a tzaddik were carrying on a long and complicated debate about the existence of God. As usual, neither was having any success in convincing the other. All of a sudden, the tzaddik became terror-stricken. “My God,” he said, “what if what you say is true?” His momentary terror passed, but the atheist was so frightened by the look in the tzaddik’s eyes that he was instantly converted.
______________________
Notes:
1. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 85; St. Thomas Aquinas, Philosophical Texts, ed. Thomas Gilby (New York: Galaxy, 1960), p. 86; Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Galaxy, 1961), p. 485; Abraham Isaac Kook, The Lights of Penitence [etc.], trans. Ben Zion Bokser (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 261.
2. Kook, p. 266–67.
3. Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 172–74.
4. I cannot find the source for this tale, which I retell here from memory. If anyone knows where it has been printed, I would appreciate your posting a comment with that information.
Chapel may seem an odd place for it, but I’m going to say a good word about atheists. One reason I want to do so is that some of my best friends think of themselves as atheists. Another reason is the unsavory images of God held by some people who think of themselves as theists: I mean those believers who are certain that God is American, anti-communist, English-speaking, macho, and white; or the ones who are absolutely certain that God wants them to condemn, terrorize, and kill in his name; or the ones who are certain that God means for them to serve him by getting rich on the contributions of the faithful poor; or the ones who are certain that the deepest insight God expects from us is, in the words of the Church Lady (played by Dana Carvey on “Saturday Night Live”): “Isn’t that special?”; or the ones who are certain that God damns those who believe differently from them. Atheists are valuable because they tell these theists a truth they need to hear: No such God exists.
Of course many of us hold much better images of God than those I’ve just listed. But we too need our atheist friends. In addition to the rest of the good that they do, atheists keep us humble. For one thing, it is humbling to find that we simply cannot convince them of what is so obvious to us, namely that God exists. What a dramatic proof of the limits of our powers of argumentation! For another thing, the atheist’s resistance to our arguments reminds us that it was not through argument that we ourselves came to faith. His conviction shows us that it is not in our power to dictate who will believe in God and who won’t. But atheists keep us humble in another way, too. They show us that all images of God, even the truest, are limited.
We can all pretty much reject the images of God I mentioned at first. God has no race or political party; he is not a terrorist or a tyrant, a high-pressure salesman or a sentimentalist. But what about the images of him that we embrace—creator and preserver, lawgiver and judge, punisher and destroyer, forgiver and redeemer? We who have these images hold to them on good authority—the authority of revelation. We believe that, in one or more ways, God has revealed himself to humanity, informing us how to imagine him rightly so that we may worship him rightly. The Children of Israel at Mount Sinai, the hearers of the Sermon on the Mount, and other good authorities have testified to meeting face to face with the divine. And on their authority, coupled with our own experience, we trust to the images of God that they have passed down to us. They are good images and true ones, and they provide us a path toward God.
But they are not themselves God. Even the best images of the divine are limited because no revelation to man reveals God in his totality. How could it? Who would be able to receive it? If we are ideas in God’s mind, so to speak, how could God’s fullness be reduced to an idea in ours? No more than Shakespeare could have been conceived of by Hamlet. Revelations reveal God to us as we can perceive him, not as he is in himself, because in comparison with the infinite mystery of God our capacity to experience him is minute. He makes himself knowable through images, but no image can contain him.
Now I don’t say all this on my own authority: Speaking from the whirlwind, God says to Job, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). In other words, who are you to presume to know what I am up to? The great medieval Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar Maimonides writes, “All people, both of past and present generations, declared that God cannot be the object of human comprehension, that none but Himself comprehends what He is, and that our knowledge consists in knowing that we are unable truly to comprehend Him” (Guide for the Perplexed, I.59). Saint Thomas Aquinas says, “God is not to be comprehended, for he is infinite and cannot be contained in any finite being” (Summa Theologiae, Ia.xii.7.ad1). Dante, in his ultimate allegorical vision of God, cries, “O Light Eternal, that alone abidest in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself . . . !” (Paradiso, XXXIII.124–25). And Rav Kook, the twentieth-century Talmudic scholar and mystic, says, “All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or in any other language, give us only a tiny and dull spark of the hidden light to which the soul aspires when it utters the word God” (“The Pangs of Cleansing”).1
For this reason, as good as our image of God may be, even if it is a God-given image, we must not mistake it for God himself. And because no image can convey to us God’s totality, it cannot give us the power to comprehend fully his purposes or his judgments. We do know, of course, more than enough. We know what he wants us to know: that we should do justice and love mercy, for example, that we should worship only him, that our lives come to judgment, that we are unimaginably loved. But even the purest faith does not justify us in speaking for God on subjects about which only he knows his mind—subjects like which of us will be saved and which will not, or how near to God one may go on a path different from our own. That is why we are told to judge not lest we be judged. Because, not being God, we are fallible, and our judgment, unlike his, is imperfect. Therefore, the true theist is a humble theist. He knows that to have a true path to God is not to have the only path to God. As a great Hasidic tzaddik, the Seer of Lublin, put it, what kind of God would it be who could be served in only one way?
Finally, even to apply the word “existence” to God is to reduce his full reality. As Rav Kook says, “whatever we ascribe to the term existence is immeasurably remote from the divine. . . . The divine is the activating influence on existence and is, therefore, obviously above existence” (“The Pangs of Cleansing”).2 This brings us back to the atheists. In arguing against the existence of God, whatever their intentions, the atheists tell a partial truth: namely, there is no such God as any of us can picture. For a God whose existence we could imagine would not be God, the source of existence itself. This being so, who are we to say that his path of negation may not lead even the atheist toward God?
Now, having defended the atheists, I have to add that of course their negative images of God too are limited. To say that “existence” is too small a term to be applied to God is not to say there is no God. Atheists help to purify our faith by reminding us that all our images of God fail to convey the fullness of divine reality. But the atheist still has to choose between believing in that infinite, absolute, unfathomable divine reality, a reality with the power to reveal itself to us, and believing in nothingness. If the atheist’s rejecting is done in the name of a search for truth, he may well find God at the end of his search. If his rejecting is merely a way to exalt his own ego, he will be left with nothing but his ego, and therefore, eventually, with nothing—that is unless God’s mercy intervenes. But since we are not God ourselves, the atheist’s eternal fate, like our own, remains a mystery. For him, as for ourselves, we can only hope and pray for the best. I think we are also permitted to argue with him, but only so long as we don’t permit ourselves to sit in judgment on his soul.
I will conclude with two Hasidic stories about atheism and faith. The first story comes to me from the great tzaddik Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav via Elie Wiesel. It is about getting the facts but missing the point. I should warn you that the meaning of the story is in the story, not in any twist at the end.
“The king had sent a letter to a wise but skeptical man, who, in his faraway province, refused to accept it. He was one of those men who think too much, who complicate their lives by complicating small things. He couldn’t understand, not in the slightest, what the king might want of him: ‘Why would the sovereign, so powerful and so rich, address himself to me, who am less than nothing? Because he takes me for a philosopher? There are more important ones. Could there be another reason? If so, what reason?’
“Unable to answer these question, he preferred to believe the letter a misunderstanding. Worse: a fraud. Worse yet: a practical joke. ‘Your king,’ he said to the messenger, ‘does not exist.’ But the messenger insisted: ‘I am here, and here is the letter; isn’t that proof enough?’—‘The letter proves nothing at all; besides, I haven’t read it. And by the way, who gave it to you? The king in person?’—‘No,’ confessed the messenger. ‘It was given to me by a royal page. In his name.’—‘Are you sure of that? And how can you be sure that it comes from the reigning sovereign? Have you ever seen him?’—‘Never. My rank does not permit or warrant it.’—‘Then how do you know that the king is king? You see? You don’t know any more than I.’
“And without unsealing the letter, the sage and the messenger decided to learn the truth once and for all. They would go to the end of the world, they would question the very last of mortals, but they would know.
“At the marketplace, they accosted a soldier: ‘Who are you and what do you do?’—‘I am a soldier by trade and I am in the king’s service.’—‘What king?’—‘The one to whom we swore allegiance; this land is his. We are all here to serve him.’—‘Do you know what he looks like?’—‘No.’—‘Then you have never seen him?’—‘Never.’
“The two companions burst into laughter: ‘Look at him! This man in uniform insists upon serving someone he has never seen and will never see!’
“Further on, they met an officer: yes, he would willingly die for the king; no, he had never had the honor of seeing him, neither from close by nor from afar.
“A general: same questions, same answers, clear and precise. He, too, thinks of nothing but to serve the king, he lives only for him and by him; and yet, even though he is a general, he cannot boast of ever having set his eyes upon the king.
“‘You see?’ says the skeptical sage to the messenger. ‘People are naïve and credulous, and rather foolish; they live a lie and are afraid of the truth.’”3
The second story is this:4
An atheist and a tzaddik were carrying on a long and complicated debate about the existence of God. As usual, neither was having any success in convincing the other. All of a sudden, the tzaddik became terror-stricken. “My God,” he said, “what if what you say is true?” His momentary terror passed, but the atheist was so frightened by the look in the tzaddik’s eyes that he was instantly converted.
______________________
Notes:
1. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 85; St. Thomas Aquinas, Philosophical Texts, ed. Thomas Gilby (New York: Galaxy, 1960), p. 86; Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Galaxy, 1961), p. 485; Abraham Isaac Kook, The Lights of Penitence [etc.], trans. Ben Zion Bokser (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 261.
2. Kook, p. 266–67.
3. Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 172–74.
4. I cannot find the source for this tale, which I retell here from memory. If anyone knows where it has been printed, I would appreciate your posting a comment with that information.
posted by G.Rap | 1:57 PM
15 Comments:
Dear Anon,
Thanks for the typo correction.
Your Welcome G.Rap,
One question that comes to mind is this, why if God is so mysterious and impossible to fully describe do you use the pronouns him and he? Isn't a bit limiting to assign a gender to God?
Regards,
A Quai-Atheist
Dear Qua[s]i-Atheist,
You're quite right. ANY term or name or reference to God is limiting. But it is WE who are the limited ones, and in order to speak to one another about God, we need to use some words. Shall we call God "It"? or "She" or shall we use no pronouns at all? If you can suggest a better way, I'd like to hear it.
P.S. C.S. Lewis once wrote that in relation to God, ALL of us are feminine (meaning yin in relation to his yang, or receptive in relation to his activity).
I would go with using no pronouns at all. As impractical as that may be, I think it leads to a view of God that is less constrained by our own assumptions. Certainly it is convenient to use gender when speaking of God. However, in light of the anti-machismo sentiment in your post I think it only fair to refrain from pronouns.
-Quasi-Atheist
That's fine, though I don't know how one could say things about God in any reasonable English style without using pronouns. But if you want to try, be my guest.
I am always tempted to reply with "A good word about Theists," except that the older I get, the more firmly I find myself fixed on both sides of the fence. I don't know if God exists - if he does, I am not only greatly relieved but thankful to have someOne to be thankful to. If he does not, yet I am glad for all that Good people do in His name as He is the angel of our better natures. In fact, it may be far nobler of us to honor a God that might not exist than to simply obey a God who does.
My breath is always taken away by the certainly of the Faithful. My mother holds the opposite certainty there is no God or hereafter, and that too takes my breath away. I like to say to her, "How do you know? And besides, don't you think it would be nice if there was!"
The older I get, the better I'm able to hear your sermons. I am thankful for the story with the soldiers in the king's service. Without the king, there is nothing.
Dr. Rap, I am so pleased to hear you admit that there is a need for such a pronoun. God doesn't have a penis! Jhe doesn't have a vagina either! And frankly, groups of people shouldn't be referred to as a single gender either, unless it is a unisex group.
Thank goodness we have a new pronoun in the making:
“Jhe, Jhem, Jhor” are the nominative, objective, and possessive (respectively) non-gender specific first person singular pronouns I (and many others) use in place of “he or she, him or her, his or her”. Despite the fact that this is not yet common grammar usage, I feel that a third person non-gender specific pronoun (which is common to many other languages) is an imperative and essential addition to the English language, necessary to avoid the awkward, bumbling “he/she” which is generally used in place of the sexist specification of a single gender to a mixed group. Although one might be inclined to stick to common, abecedarian grammar structures, I feel that if we concede this particular term, we will only be delaying the necessary induction of this grammar point; so take this word for a jog while the Dictionary catches up with what I hope will soon be the modern, considerate, conscientious, colloquial English.
Dear Gideon et al,
I have to say I really enjoyed this post. I fully agree with the speculations over the fact that belief in God is not something that can be given to anybody through argument. However, I'd put this question to you: if you cannot prove the existence of God to an atheist, and he cannot prove the nonexistence of God to you, then is not either possibility equally viable? In your post I feel as though you were mostly talking with an assumption in the existence (or however you would like to put it) of God--this of course makes sense as you are yourself a believer, but I would like to see you examine the question, "what if there really isn't a God? What if all our religion and practice is not actually being watched by anyone other than ourselves?" I'd like to make it clear that I'm neither an atheist nor a believer, but more of a continual student, who refuses most frustratingly to take anything for granted.
Jack
First of all, I did examine the question “what if there isn’t a God”—by telling the Hasidic tale of the Tzaddik and the Atheist.
Second, though Jack’s comment seems logical on its face, it has an underlying flaw: the idea that we can ever know anything without taking something for granted. I refer him and everyone, once again, to the brilliant “Abolition of Man,” in which C.S. Lewis shows that unless you make certain fundamental assumptions, you can conclude nothing about anything. Science makes fundamental assumptions about physical reality in order to develop its proofs. Math does as well. They are called axioms. Upon them you can build proofs. But proof cannot prove itself. Proof is always a demonstration of something in terms more fundamental that are taken as axioms—that is, on faith.
The same is true about morality. If you don’t assume stealing is wrong, there can be no argument whatsoever about whether one ought or ought not to steal in this or that situation. No moral or ethical judgment is possible. And yet THAT stealing is wrong cannot be proven. Is it a premise, not a conclusion—an axiom.
And so in the discussion of the existence of God. If we do not assume the existence of God, then we must believe in something else, like nature, or nothingness, or our own reason. But each of those too is an axiom, a form of faith.
Let’s say we wish to test every idea, every claim, in the court of our reason. On what grounds can our reason itself be proven to be a valid court? Plato said that the eye cannot see itself. Likewise, reason cannot prove its own rationality. Either we believe in it or we don’t. It cannot be proven to us.
What could possibly prove to Jack that God either does or does not exist? What would serve as the judge of the truth of either claim? And given that there is such a judge, is not Jack’s believing in it an act of faith without proof? Or is there an underlying judging function that judges the judge? Is there an infinite regression of judges, each having to prove its validity in the court of a more fundamental judge? Where would it stop?
The existence of God is not a matter of proof but of faith. And whether anyone likes it or not, everyone lives by faith. Jack seems to be living by the faith that his mind and its taking nothing for granted will yield the truth. That itself is a supreme act of faith based on no proof whatsoever. One may believe in one’s own mind if one wants to do so. Descartes did. But there is no more reason to do so, no more proof that doing so leads to truth, than that belief in God does so. Both are acts of faith, and as such can be discussed but not proven.
My opinion is that if one does not believe in God as axiom, it is impossible to find ultimate grounds on which to base a moral life, a purposeful life, a meaningful life. (Note: I do not say that people who do not believe in God cannot live morally and meaningfully. I’m talking about the awareness of ultimate grounds for morality and meaning. Many people act upon those grounds, even believe in them, without knowing that they do.)
The interesting thing is that human beings simply will not live without meaning. Whether their meaning is found in material things (money, sex, power, health, pleasure) or abstract things (freedom, knowledge, justice, kindness, truth) or the source of all those, the deepest thing of all (God), human beings will not live without some meaning. If we feel it lacking, we will search for it without rest.
To assume God does not exist is to be forced to seek meaning in something further down the scale of creation than the Creator. Any item on the list above may serve for some people. But those looking as deeply as possible into the sources of things, those who find that all secondary meanings depend on the underlying ground of reality and cannot themselves satisfy in its place—those are the God-seekers, and nothing less than that ground of reality will satisfy them. Call it what you will, it is that which you will worship. And being subject to it, you will never be able to find a ground outside of it on which to base a proof of its existence. It can be known only by faith.
The only rational path for such a seeker, then, is not to seek for proof of the ultimate reality, but to strike a relation with it. Perforce, that relation will be a relation of faith.
Here is my response to Evan’s earlier comment, the attempt to enforce what I consider to be a shallow idea of gender-equality upon the English language:
First of all, “he” means more than having a penis. Nor is your solution any more logical than the situation we have in English now. By the same logic, the use of your pronouns would imply that the one referred to has either a penis or a vagina, since it refers to people and presumably not to people with neither the one nor the other.
Why be so reductive? Masculinity and femininity have forever been used not only about genitalia but about qualities. Consider Yin and Yang, if nothing else. C.S. Lewis said “in relation to God, all of us [i.e., men and women, boys and girls] are feminine.” And he did not mean we all have vaginas in relation to the divine penis. He meant we are all in a relation of receptivity to the divine activity of creation, judgment, and grace.
You will acknowledge, won’t you, that the masculine quality in any being is more action-initiator and the feminine more reception-responder? That yin and yang provide a real and useful distinction? This relation is not in itself a matter of power. There are many kinds of power. (Lao-Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching”—“The Book of the Power of the Way”—is devoted to the true and paradoxical power of yin.) Nor is it to say that all women are yin and all men yang. We are each a mixture, of course. But the mixtures in women lean to the yin and in men to the yang. If you don’t want to accept that, if you want to make equality into identity and hold that the only difference between men and women is the penis/vagina thing, then we have no more to discuss. We will simply have to agree to disagree.
The idea that changing our pronouns will right a wrong that has been in operation for millennia until our enlightened selves ignores the real power that women had even in ancient Latin-speaking Rome. It is foolish to believe that voting in the Senate represents the only significant form of power. Women have always had power over men, just as men have had power over women. Only in different ways. It is only in a world tutored by Hobbes and Nietzsche, which believes physical and political power are the only powers, that a whole generation could grow up believing that women have always been powerless until now. It’s just plain ignorant.
Nor is it true that everyone who lived and every speaker of Latin and English before 1968 was misogynistic. Such people did exist, but they have rarely spoken for our civilization. In the West, the parties responsible for anti-feminism were most dramatically the gnostics, and their offshoots, who, though they cultivated the worship of the feminine goddess, nonetheless, through their hatred of the physical world, the body, and sex, gave rise to the misogynistic tradition (not its main stream) within the Catholic church that led to the excesses that serve as the grain of truth to the feminist indictment of the past. It also led to the hatred of the Jews, by the way. Chaucer, makes fun of both the misogynistic tradition among clerics and the false logic of the Wife of Bath who attacks them. Shakespeare gives us some of the greatest and most powerful women in literature, for both good (Rosalind, Isabel, Marina, Hermione, Paulina) and ill (Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra). And he didn’t need the silly “jhe, jhem, jhor” to do it! Nor did the nineteenth-century American women’s movement need them to win political equality.
There have been times in the West when women have been thought of as chattel, but ours is not one of them. Moreover, the form of the doctrine of the equality of women that has led to the so-called “sexual revolution” has in many ways been disastrous for women, as well as for men. When women are invited to run around behaving like bad men, i.e. with complete sexual license, all of society suffers (from disease, disaffection, the collapse of marriage, the abandonment of children, and the profound moral blight of widespread, conscienceless abortion).
In saying this I don’t make men any less responsible than women. Both have colluded in this breakdown of the ideal of right relations between the sexes, an ideal that, but for a fortunate few, has only rarely been achieved but that has nonetheless been present to guide the rest toward civilized behavior.
If one wants to complain about the treatment of women, why not pick on Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Algeria, Khazakstan, and fifty other countries easy to be named instead of making the English pronouns your whipping boy for anti-feminism? It is the West that has liberated women, in fact, starting with the Bible, which among the ancient religions was the first to give women personhood, and Plato, who believed men and women should be educated and serve the polis equally based on their talents. And whether or not our efforts will be successful, you have to admit that it is the English-speaking armies of the West that have opened the door to hope for the political equality of women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You do have one rational argument: Why include women in the masculine gender when referring to mixed groups? It seems illogical, and perhaps it is. However, that is not the only rational argument possible. There are also rational arguments for keeping to the masculine gender to refer to mixed groups. One is that the usage serves as a reminder that women, the preservers of civilization, must themselves come under the protection of men from other men, or else all human beings, and especially the children, suffer.
But even if you want to be politically correct in your language, why invent a gender-neutrality that applies to no one? Why not simply make your statement by using “he or she,” “his or her,” and suffer the challenge of writing well while still being fair to women? No. You want it easy. You want to mangle the language with the invention of nonsense words so that you don’t have to go out of your way to make your (in my view, reductive) political position clear. It reminds me (mutatis mutandis) of the Communists who, instead of struggling to teach mankind to be more fair in the distribution of means of production and economic power, eventually decided simply to kill off the people who believed wrongly and leave the right-thinkers to inherit the earth. It seemed easier. This is what happens when an intellectual’s idea tries to tyrannize over the complex, subtle, mysterious realities that we (and our sexuality and our language) really are.
I think you mistook what I was saying about assumptions. As you know, I have read The Abolition of Man, and I did find it very inspiring. I also do, in fact, believe in right and wrong, and I carry around a miniature Tao Teh Ching with me all the time. I love Lao Tzu's writing because of its adherence to a world of paradox.
What I was driving at before was simply entertaining the idea that, since the existence of God is indeed an "axiom," there is a possibility that God does not exist. It would indeed be a kind of "miracle" (to speak ironically) the way our society works and the immense complexity of human beings, but there is a possibility that despite how much we invest in our beliefs of the divine, everything does ultimately come to massive coincidence.
The story of the tzaddik does catch this idea in part, you are right, but I wonder if it really would be so terrifying to live knowing that God did not exist. Would it change anything? We would be far less able to explain the deepest goings-on of our minds, but those feelings--that there must be a divine, that there is a difference between right and wrong, emotion, beauty, empathy--would not go away. The true atheist in the worst sense of the word is one who rejects any of these strong feelings inside of him (and of course we can never know that he does have the same feelings, but I've come to realize more and more from my training in theatre how much true emotion people constrain).
I'd like to close with a bit of the Tao:
#63
Do the Non-Ado.
Strive for th effortless.
Savour the savourless.
Exalt the low.
Multiply the few.
Requite injury with kindness.
Nip troubles in the bud.
Sow the great in the small.
Difficult things of the world
Can only be tackled when they are easy.
Big things of the world
Can only be achieved by attending to their small
beginnings.
Thus, the Sage never has to grapple with big things,
Yet he alone is capable of achieving them!
He who promises lightly must be lacking in faith.
He who thinks everything easy will end by finding
everything difficult.
Therefore, the Sage, who regards everything as
difficult,
Meets with no difficulties in the end.
--Jack
I like the quotation from the Tao Te Ching though the translation seems a bit iffy. (I like Mair's better.)
Would it change anything not to believe in God? Well, you'd feel a bit sheepish when in a foxhole, having to pray to someone you don't believe in. And one can't have much of a relationship with a "massive coincidence."
I confess that I don't really know what you are asking. You seem to answer the question yourself: We would be less able to explain; the feelings (and I think they are more than feelings) would not go away; we might try to reject or ignore the deepest feelings inside us. These sound like pretty good reasons to believe in God, especially if those "feelings" are put there for a reason. And if God did not exist, what compelling reason could there be not to believe in him? If our idea of truth is only the result of a "massive coincidence," why not believe what we seem deeply to want and need and find meaningful to believe?
But once again, argument is vain. Belief in God is a response to vision, not the conclusion of an argument. The only thing to recommend is "pay attention."
Check out Mr. Kirk's blog for his critique on the atheist Richard Dawkins' new book. My comment there reads as follows:
Thank you for this pointed critique of the prejudiced, polemical, angry, and reductive Dawkins. Your discussion brings together the points that have needed to be made about all Dawkins' attacks on faith in his prejudiced, polemical, angry, and reductive evolutionary-biology books. He cannot get over the idea that religion is nothing more than a bad way of explaining "facts" we now know better how to "explain." And he cannot seem to understand how much his own thinking, as you point out, is founded, like that of Descartes, on a supreme act of faith--in his own intellect! You have helped move the writing of Dawkins a good bit closer to that spot prepared for it on the dustheap of history. Thank you.
Thank God for faith because without it, mere belief is exhausting.
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