What I Believe and Why
Self-understanding has never been my
strong suite. For this reason, I have any number of beliefs and attitudes to
the world that I am always in the process of rationalizing. Part of this is
simply how I am situated practically. I am a professor at a publicly funded
university and so some of my aims and attitudes are the product of what I think
to be my professional duty as an educator. If I were a clergyman I would, no
doubt, say all kinds of things that would be reprehensible if I said them as a
professor. As a clergyman I would have to preach from a confessional standpoint
and what I said would be subject to certain kinds of review or even censure. Of
course, as a secular academic, I am also subject to review and censure on a
whole different set of principles. The fact of the matter is, though, that I
could simply not do my job unless I were some sort of pluralist. I have to take
on the education of 18-22 year olds across an entire spectrum of ethnic,
religious and sexual identity. I have to treat each of these students exactly
the same. My classroom is not and cannot be a church. I am not here to divide
sheep from goats but must accept input from all comers. This I could not do if
I were any kind of committed pre-modern or indeed modern style absolutist. So,
multiple discourses from incommensurate perspectives are absolutely my
business. If I were in the sciences this would be very different. I would have
to convey an orthodoxy about certain basic theoretical constructions like
evolutionary theory or quantum dynamics that function more or less as
theological paradigms and models function in churches. I could no more be a
Lamarkian in a biology department than I can be a Unitarian in the Orthodox
Church. Well, I could be a Lamarkian, I suppose, but I would get no grants and
publish only in marginal journals if I did not devolve into self-publishing!
Plus, as a scientist I would be bound to certain a language game and to certain
institutional and social processes: I would be bound to the ‘referential’ game
to cite Lyotard and not the narrative one.
As a non-scientist, though, I cannot
make this kind of exclusion. One reason is where I am situated geographically.
A quarter of the students at my institution are of Miq’maw ancestry and as
indigenous peoples they deeply value narrative and story as encoding their
understanding of the world. This means I cannot be a hard core ‘modernist’ or
‘secularist’ if I am to give these students their due. I have to accept that
there are multiple ways of engaging with the world and that narrative, even
sacred narrative, is one of these. A secular humanist or ‘scientistic’ pulpit
would be as antithetical to my job as a Christian confessional one. I am, by
dint of my very job, a kind of post-modernist and perpsectivalist. By this I
mean it is not my job to assert or enforce any kind of hegemony cultural or
otherwise to the extent that this is a realizable ideal (there are of course
certain constraints to this).
This includes a Christian hegemony. I
am an intellectual and cultural historian (of a sort) and, though I have my
personal predilections, I am not a theologian and do not speak for or on behalf of
any religious confession. I am not the faintest bit interested in arguing about
the Virgin Mary any more than I am concerned about how to fit a diplodocus into
Noah’s ark. The basic reason for this is that I find the history of theology
and doctrine too fraught and too historically determined to ground firm
confessional judgments of this sort. I wish it were otherwise but this is how I
see it. We can have doctrinal preferences; we can gravitate to one tradition or
another but we cannot make triumphalist pronouncements about the one true faith
such as modern Christians have long sought. Or, to put it another way, I as a
public intellectual see no path to such judgments though confessional
theologians can pursue the matter as they see fit (after all that is their
peculiar expertise which I lack). I
should note one thing though. Intellectual history has a tendency to push me in
a historicist direction. If there is a timeless, eternal truth (a thing I don’t
categorically deny by any means) I possess only glimpses of it. Most of the
time we pushing claims and arguing in terms of what Foucault called (at one
point) an episteme: a historically specific constellation of modes of reason
and inquiry that simultaneously liberates and limits our perceptions of the
world. We are historical beings now and always have been. We live and think and
speak within a paradigm of reason and culture that may have no ultimate necessity
underlying it. Constellations may well re-constellate and this will happen in
the future as it has in the past.
Does this make me that dreaded thing
a relativist? I think not. For one thing I am a Christian. By this I mean that
I believe in the Kingdom of God as the New Testament teaches it: a community of
love founded on the absolute dignity of the human person.[1]
This is a community to which an atheist can belong as much as theist but I will
get to this below. This means a couple of things to me. The first is that if I
dig down to the bottom of my thoughts they coalesce into a theistic
affirmation. There is a highest standard of value and that value is objectively
real for the human intellect. In other words, when I climb out of the cave I
perceive the Good as the highest principle. Of course, I am frequently IN the
cave and if I am any kind of believer I am certainly the worst one. That said,
this is where I end up whenever my introspection is sufficiently deep and
comprehensive and that makes me not only a Christian but a Platonist too. This
makes me very much NOT what we now call an evangelical Christian. As I said
above, I do not care about Noah and diplodocus. Nor, I must add, does this make
me a so called liberal Christian. This is because I take the text of the Bible
seriously in a way that neither group would recognize or understand. I think
the Bible IS a revelation. I think this because it encodes symbols and anagogic
structures that encapsulate the fundamental truths of spiritual life. On this
point I am an ‘internalist’ as by and large I do not care to what extent these
structures refer to specific events that happened in a determinate time and
place though here and there they may (I think there very likely were Moses and
Abraham type figures for instance). Or, to put it another way, I think the full
realization of these archetypes was in the life of Christ who gave them the
only flesh they require. Thus, while I absolutely take The Bible to be constructed of symbols, metaphors and archetypal
patterns I do not think it is adequate to simply gesture lazily at that fact
without reading the symbols and uncovering that patterns of revelation they conceal
and reveal.
This is as much as to say that I am a
radical theocentrist by way of being a radical humanist and vice versa. Now, I
will disappoint some of you by saying that radical theocentric/humanism or
humanist/theocentrism is a radical political stance towards economic and social
justice. Generations of thinkers, great thinkers in fact, have tried to
reconcile theocentrism with notions of ‘order and degree’ in the external
privileges of life. It seems to me that they have failed. Theocentrism is
egalitarianism and the good of a CEO and the good of a worker count for exactly
the same thing in heaven and on earth. This truth is not compatible with any
system of exploitation or alienation economic, political or otherwise. No human
being is, or can serve, as the mere condition of another person’s freedom or prosperity.
I would add that a world in which there is an intrinsic, as opposed to
accidental, DIFFERENCE between a CEO and a worker is an anti-humanist and
anti-Christian one: CEOs should exist only to the extent that they serve the
community and for that reason their existence is a concession not a moral or political
necessity. If I think there is a culmination to Christian history I think it is
this one. This, though, is part and parcel of what I above called my
historicist stance. St. Paul could not possibly have known what he was
unleashing on the world when he said that in Christ there was neither slave nor
free but we have seen the outworking of this principle culminate in the
personalism of a progressive political culture (which is not as yet a perfectly
achieved thing though that is another matter). This is why I am a social
democrat if not an out and out socialist though I have no idea of what the
future looks like. In the future we may well turn away from humanism and
personalism or reconfigure them in some way I can’t anticipate. That said, one
must stand somewhere and this is where I stand: I accept Plato’s claim that the
Good is the ground of thinking and being and I also accept that the life of
Jesus is the fullest embodiment of what Plato meant by the good as he himself directly
prophesied. As for why I think this, it is at its core a commitment of the heart
and will to radical justice as revealed in these sources (my thing is text not
nature).
This puts me in an awkward place
where current discussions of religion are concerned. Listening to atheists[2]
and evangelicals recycle the same talking points over and over reminds me of
listening to two people arguing over whether Marlowe or Bacon wrote the plays
of Shakespeare: arguments of some subtlety may be offered but the entire
framing of the discussion seems wrong. As the current framing of discussions of
‘Theism’ seems simple, necessary and inevitable to so many people I should take
some time to indicate just why I think it is off base and counter-productive. I
suppose this reflects the fact that I am neither an atheist nor an evangelical
Christian and not a direct party in what seems to me an in house dispute
between fundamentalists and their embittered exes. My first problem, of course, is that the ‘debate’ between evangelical apologists and their critics is a self-reinforcing echo
chamber. Evangelicals and atheists talk to each other far too often and so, to
outsiders not a party to their dispute, look more and more the same, echoing
each’s others rhetoric, style and even music.[3]
In this echo chamber we have a marked emphasis on eristics as opposed to
dialogue. Arguments and scripted responses are memorized and employed as
‘bombs’ and ‘mic drops’ which ‘destroy’ opponents. How many times have I seen a
click bait caption promising one simple argument that will ‘destroy’ Atheism or
Christianity and shaken my head at the sad naiveté of people who can think this
possible so late in the day? Alas, discursive reason employed agonistically in
this way is no generator of truth. Argument must always be supplemented empathy,
imagination and above all intellectual humility. People need to be able to
formulate good questions and respond to other speakers rather than spinning the
same hamster wheel over and over in their heads or trying to have the ideal
argument they wish they were having not the one before them.
One problem is that much of the
conversation about atheism and theism proceeds on the basis of a series of
structural oppositions which make for dramatic clashes but poor philosophy and
worse politics. One of these is the supposed opposition of ‘faith’ and
‘evidence’. Evidence, alas, is not all it is cracked up to be. This takes a bit
of explaining. A scientific theory or proposition is typically said to be based
on empirical data. This is why many people suppose casually that scientific theories
and propositions are ‘better’ than non-scientific ones. However, the claim that
‘science’ is based on ‘data’ (while other things are not?) needs to be
seriously qualified if not outright rejected. As we have known since Hume, no
finite data set can justify any general proposition or universal law.
Justification of a scientific claim involves meeting criteria and standards internal to the institutions and
practices of the scientific community. A scientific theory needs to meet
internal criteria because we cannot say how approximately it conforms to
external fact without comparing it to another theory (and even that process can
be vexed). Where facts are concerned two theories might be approximately true.
In fact, the theory of Copernicus might be accepted over that of Brahe even
though the latter was just as empirically accurate if not more so. This is
because theories have to do with much more than just conformity to ‘evidence’.
Indeed, we can accept two theories, quantum dynamic s and relativity which say
conflicting things about the external world because in all other respects they
are both successful theories.
The problem is that this does not
differentiate scientific theories from any others at the end of the day.
Religious and philosophical traditions also judge of data and experience by
standards that are internal though such data may, in these instances, be more
introspective and directly experiential. This is all what we might call
filtered knowledge. Science is the activity of finding useful regularities in
carefully curated, pre-selected slices of experience. The vast realm of
experience and reality is something it leaves mostly untouched. This is not a
criticism it is just science’s job description. ‘Out there’, if we want to use
that language, is a host of noise: unobserved, uncorrelated, anomalous and
unforeseen data. There is no line from this noise to any given theory without
internalist standards and social, institutional criteria intervening. This is
much as to say that all our theories about the world are the mutual product of
data and the intellectual assumptions and social processes we bring to it. They
are also a product of data and the current state of optics, machine tooling or
computing. They are the product of data and the tightly controlled conditions
set out in an experiment. The speed of light is in part a function of the world
AND the instruments we use to measure it. To that extent all of them are
imperfectly rationalized. One might, of course, do as the ancient skeptics did,
and argue that if we cannot fully rationalize our beliefs then we should
suspend all judgment. If one does not do this, however, one must admit is that
scientific discourses are produced by criteria and means comparable to how
other discourses are produced including metaphysical, theological and religious
ones. All are an amalgam of experience and internal and communal standards of
judgment, traditions and terms of art. In this sense a theological judgment may
be produced by as objective and critical a process as a legal or scientific
one. This as much as to say that science is an art just as literary criticism
is an art: it is a process for producing practical judgments which at the end
of the day cannot be fully formalized. An excellent example of this has been
provided to me by a colleague: anyone who deals with the behavior of fish knows
that how fish behave in a fish tank in a lab is not how they behave in the wild
and thus any student of fish behavior needs to possess the ‘art’ of ‘translating’
the results of classically contrived experiments back into natural conditions.
Of course in the fundamental matter
of physics we ONLY observe the sub-atomic realm under conditions we define and
carefully construct. This is not a problem to my mind but it does remind us of certain
structural limits to our discourse about nature that may be fundamental and irreducibly
basic. For one thing, we seem to have a macro-scale science (General and
Special Relativity) which is not fully consistent with our micro-scale science
(Quantum Dynamics). To some degree they are different descriptions of the ‘external
world’ though we accept them both because they are successful theories. This is
how little theoretical success may have to do with correspondence to the world.
Of course there are theoretical constructs like string theory which attempt to
make these inconsistencies good though these face the problem that their claims
are too fundamental to test empirically. This may be a limit past which our
understanding of nature cannot go: it may well be that our exploration of the
physical realm must end in antimony. But what, then, is outside our currently
inconsistent theories? Presumably the ‘world in itself’ which we cannot ultimately
access to measure how well or badly our theories approximate it. We cannot,
alas, measure both the location and velocity of an electron. Even in mathematics
we must choose between the completeness and the consistency of a system. Where
does that leave religion, philosophy, art, myth and other basic human endeavors?
Exactly where science found them except in the very specific, localized
contexts where science performs its operations (such as a cyclotron or
operating room). However far the mind can reach though (and we can always debate
that) the will can reach beyond it to the good and that is where I stand on the
matter. As for science, well, I have no problem with it but I am not,
spiritually or morally speaking, going to bet the farm on any localized, highly
contextual, regional iteration of it.[4]
There are multiple domains of
knowledge, then, which produce judgments by analogous if not quite identical
means. I begin from the standpoint that there is a rough equality between these
depending on which sort of ‘data’ one is interested in and nothing I have seen
or heard has ever persuaded me otherwise. I do this because this is the world
in which we live. There are discourses in science, politics, economics, the
arts and religion. These discourses interface both positively and negatively.
They sometimes overlap and sometimes clash at least around their edges. I know
many of you will hate me bringing this up but the post-modern condition, alas,
is that none of these discourses automatically
supervene over the others at least where public reason is concerned.
Conflicts between them are the subject of local adjustments that allow give and
take between different domains. There is space to move between referential,
prescriptive, narrative, symbolic and emancipatory discourses. One reason for
this is that any discourse is bound up with relations of power and as relations
of power shift, as they are doing now, so do discourses. The institutional
structures and epistemic privileges that defined Anglo-white supremacy in
relation to minority communities have to be rethought. What is of permanent
value in the discourses that define this supremacy, if recuperated, must be
recuperated in new forms for the current ones have run their course. This means
that, to a certain extent at very least, discourses may have to confront other
discourses without the assumption of an external standard to which both must
bow. Judgments arrived at by criteria internal to one discourse will confront
judgments arrived at by processes internal to another. This is not simply a negative thing either as
any two discourse sets can find useful analogies, surprising convergences and
useful models of co-existence and co-operation. Now though let us return to our
main subject.
Judgements in the sphere of religion,
such as the decision to convert to a particular faith tradition, are the
product of a certain kind of data: usually of an affective, pragmatic and
introspective sort. The ultimate ‘evidence’ for any religious system is the
life you lead within it. Not everyone has access to all this data: some of it
is personal for instance. This, of course, breaks a rule of science. Science
depends upon publicly observed facts and replicable experiments (a form of
intersubjective agreement that exists in other disciplines by the way- you can
check the text of Hamlet and replicate my interpretation of it). It is founded
on data and criteria that can in principle (if not in practice) be accessed by
anybody. However, is this basic rule of science also a rule of general reason?
It seems to me it is not. Of course, somebody like Aquinas or Shankara can make
discursive arguments about a theological or religious assertion and anyone in
principle can understand and evaluate those arguments if they have the
experience and required expertise. Not all expressions of reason work in this
way however. There are people to whom music is a closed book, for instance, yet
clearly historians, critics and theorists can still have intelligent
discussions on the subject and reach well founded judgments. The same is true
of sommeliers though the data they deal with is even more personal and
subjective. Thus, a religious standpoint is an expression of what moves you to
the core of your being and what does not. The discursive arguments which you
add to the fundamental orientation of the person or will are a kind of window
dressing, a series of useful props and aids which function fine in their
context but are not the core of your commitment. On my death bed it is God’s
hands I will be putting myself in not the ontological argument because,
frankly, I will probably not be able to recall the argument of the paper I
wrote on it (being drugged and in pain).
This is as much as to say that at the
core of any religious commitment is a decision or movement of the will whether
explicit or implicit. One might surround this commitment with a web of
motivations, experiences, inferences, arguments theoretic or practical and so
on which justify or explain it to others. Some of these might actually be persuasive to others though they need
not be as such judgments are highly individuated (rather like determinations of
taste). The more one does this the more intelligible one’s beliefs are to
others and, more importantly, the more disciplined and ordered one’s own
thinking about them. Giving justifications in this sphere (which admittedly
only a small minority of people are effectively capable of) is an important
limit on subjectivism, bias and fantasy, which can too easily hijack our
thoughts if we do not submit them to the consideration of others, both within
our epistemic community and outside of it. The purpose of such apologetics is
not conversion, to my mind. In fact, I have little to no desire to convert
anyone to anything. It is about disciplining our thoughts by submitting them to
the measure of discourse to the extent this is possible. If the core of
religious decision, the personal commitment, has a certain incommunicable
character the considerations that surround it can and should be communicated to
others when appropriate (as when people express sincere curiosity about them).
Of course this brings up the question
of faith. Faith, I can assure anyone curious about it, is a structural feature
of human experience in that we all believe things, and must believe things,
that are underdetermined by the evidence we can marshal for them at any given
time. Some of the premises of a religious stance are of such a character that I
must accept or reject them in the absence of strict apodictic necessity (though
there are other forms of justification besides this). That said, I don’t over
emphasize faith as a virtue. For one thing if we confine the word faith (as too
many do) to the realm of ‘beliefs’ or even ‘propositions’ we find that there
are any number of religious traditions which do not particularly value it and
many others which do not even have a word for it. These are the ones which
emphasize action and behavior (like the religion of ancient Rome) or put direct
intuition or experience in the place of faith (as with certain Christian
Gnostics). Secondly, my religion is far more about charity than about faith in
line with what Paul says on the matter. Faith that does not blossom into
charity is of no particular interest to me and charity, to be frank, is a
self-authenticating experience to those truly possessed by it. The good
Samaritan has no need to stop and consider who is his neighbor and who is not. Once
he has decided to love the kingdom is within him and he lives in its light.
Indeed, he need not make any other inference on the subject. Of course, it is
my view that making sense of the stance of charity involves certain theistic
affirmations that it is better to make than not, but, we do not need to progress
this far to begin. I also think, as I have said in many places, that I
distinguish the stance of charity from the moralistic stance that animates too
many who call themselves Christians and indeed progressives. Atheists too are
often aggressive moralizers, informing everybody who will listen that they are
‘good without God’ and funding studies to prove the superior morality of well
off and educated non-believers over opioid users in the poverty ridden deep
south or immiserated Palestinians in Gaza[5].
Christ said he came for the sick and not the well and I take him at his word. I
also note that he chose the company of riff-raff over morally good pillars of
society. A self-focused concern for one’s own righteousness is inconsistent
with radical identification with the need and the brokenness of the other and
any atheist who comes to that realization, by whatever means, is much higher in
the kingdom than an upright prig who subscribes to every word of the creed or
believes in the plenary inspiration of scripture.
At this point we must face another
issue which is the inconsistency of atheism (in the iterations of it that concern ME) with general progressive discourse. I mentioned emancipatory discourses above
and atheism is, considered practically, one of these. The structural
oppositions erected by atheistic discourse serve the obvious, and to a point
legitimate, purpose of liberating people from certain fundamentalist
communities they find oppressive of human freedom and human good. That said, atheism is still very much a regional discourse bound up with relations of
power and dominance to others. It is, especially in its current 'new' form, a defense
of the epistemic privilege of posh brits like Hitchens or neo-con trust fund
babies like the egregious Sam Harris. Atheistic discourse is hegemonic
culturally and even, at times, sexually and racially. It defends the
‘enlightenment’ as a project for white European male dominance as evidenced by
the convergence of atheist and alt-right discourse on Islam, women, race and a
host of other topics (to say nothing of the genocidal rage of Christopher
Hitchens and Harris’ flirtation with the Bell
Curve). This is not accidental. As the stock phrase now goes it is a
feature not a bug. This is because there is only one discourse to be liberated
by atheism and that is its own: a discourse founded on the supposed superiority
of western constructions of science and western constructions of instrumental
rationality. We in the west are the teachers from whom the other must learn.
Indeed, they must learn from us the path to liberation at the very same time as
we bomb and exploit them and poison the soil and air on which they depend.
There may well be much in the western
tradition that might commend itself to others but, of course, the reverse may
also be the case and a true global exchange of ideas and values CANNOT be
underwritten by imperial violence and gross exploitation. The exchange must be
free and must be mutual in a way it simply cannot be now. No western person has
the right to hector other nations and cultures about ‘reason’ while killing and
robbing them and atheism must come to terms with its fan boy fetishizing of
imperialist warmongers like Hitchens and Harris. Again, I say this because it
is germane to the place I am situated. I live in a community where indigenous
people are struggling to reclaim themselves from paternalistic and colonial
relations founded on the supposed immaturity and inferiority of their culture
and its grounding in tradition, narrative and stewardship. Of course, many
atheists decry this sort of violence and I commend them for doing so. My
quarrel concerns how they continue to perform the very structure of rhetorical
violence that underwrites and justifies it.
The discourse that forms the parameters of the ‘atheist identity’ (which
I distinguish from casual unbelief) is structured by oppositions that mirror
actual relations of power and domination that exist in the world. Their
uncritical application of these categories (which I would only problematize not
unconditionally reject) can only have the effect of reinforcing these
relations. If Atheism actually IS about liberating human potential, it has to
liberate those discourses in which human energies and core human concerns can express
themselves. These discourses might be ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ in a purely
regional sense but in other contexts, like the one I live in, they might be mythic
or religious. In others they might engage with imagination, fantasy, desire,
ethnicity, introspection and so on.
One such opposition is that between
reason and history. As a historicist I cannot really assent to a-historical
constructions of science and reason such as the Whig ‘march of science’
discourse would require. Nor, and much more importantly, can I consider
Christian doctrine a-historically. There seems to be an assumption shared by
fundamentalist and atheists that revelation is an all or nothing all at once
thing. Why should revelation be anything but immediate and total without any
taint of ambiguity, imprecision or historical/cultural limitation or
determination? This is simply not the nature of texts and not the nature of the
sign. Even miracle must interface intelligibly with nature as the early Fathers
held when they insisted the Phoenix anticipated the resurrection (i.e. the
resurrection was an intensification of a process already immanent in nature). Revelation
must interface intelligibly with the mind and faculties to which it is
addressed. This means its language is signs and symbols. The most basic of
signs looks back to a previous sign and forward to the next. Its meaning is
always being determined as its context expands and it interacts with other
signs in other systems. No sign or set of signs signifies by itself. This means
that all meaning is projected historically.
To illustrate this, I will refer to
an issue that seems to animate discourse in both atheist and evangelical
communities and that is slavery. Not of course, that either group seems much
exercised by the plight of millions of enslaved people today. Slavery comes up
as a debating point which the atheist side will pull out as a ‘gotcha’: “Well
what about slavery in The Bible!”
someone will say. A revelation from God, surely, would contain a clear
condemnation of such a basic moral fact as the evil of slavery. As I said above, this is not really how ‘revelation’ works as even Christ himself says when he
points out that the Mosaic law contains concessions to human hardness (and
Jeremiah says more or less the same thing; the law on stone is not the law that
will reign in our hearts). At any rate we first confront the question of
slavery in the Christian canon in Paul’s epistle to Philemon. Paul is sending a
runaway slave back to his master with a recommendation. Why? What does his
gesture mean? Is he affirming the validity of bondage as a social institution
and thus preaching a piece of social doctrine? Is he simply giving the best practical
advice for a person of that time when fugitive slaves had poor prospects? We
might say that in itself the gesture is indeterminate and the READER must give
it a significance. The community that uses the text must determine the significance
of the text in light of the spirit that animates it. This spirit is one of
charity and over time this can have only one result: the movement for abolition
of slavery from Christian societies which culminated in the 19th
Century. I say this though many Christians dragged their feet on the question
where charity affected their worldly interests. These people (Boswell but not
Johnson!) might have been more ‘correct’ where the letter of the texts are concerned
but are we really going to argue that they were better, stronger Christians for
taking the text (of Exodus say) more 'seriously'?[6]
Does anyone really think it a good idea to tell Christians they should own
slaves? Some of them would surely take it seriously! This makes as little sense
as trying to convince Muslims it is their religious duty to be terrorists. All
this is part and parcel of a larger point which is that forms alter the
conditions of their instantiation. Historicism is not only a legacy of
Darwinism but of Burke, Newman and a host of other figures. Traditions mutate, grow
and develop: this is the core pattern of things and because of this there is a hermeneutics
of nature exactly as there is a hermeneutics of the sign.
Thus, the next time someone issues
the challenge ‘what do you believe and why’ I have something to point to
instead of trying to cobble together an answer on the spot. Another question
would concern my doubts for in every statement of belief or creed, there are
ambiguities, ambivalences and even outright aporias. These, though, I do not consider
a cause for existential panic as they are just the problems that make a belief system
grow and a theory without problems is a dead theory. That is why you can’t
refute a religious or scientific system simply by pointing out a flaw in it as
so many people on You Tube seem to
think. THAT by the way, dear Evangelicals, applies to evolution as much as it
does to Christianity. At any, I think I have been sufficiently clear that I can now
drop the boring subject of myself and move on to some more fruitful topic.
[1]
This kingdom has not been and may never be actual or realized in the world and that
is why, contrary to the ‘death of God’ theologians I maintain the language of
religion when I speak about it. It belongs still, to the realm of ideals and
archetypes and I am actually quite reserved in my hopes for translating it into
a secular society. This is because secular revolutions that promise us the Kingdom
on earth or a return to the golden age do not, so far, have an entirely
admirable track record. However, I will happily be proved wrong on this
subject. This of course bring up the theological virtue of hope. A faith that
acts in love also acts in hope: the hope that the good will prevail in spite of
so much evidence to the contrary. Of course, any REAL discussion of faith will
consider it as part of a triad it cannot simply be abstracted from. If I am a
Christian, I act in faith and hope that love will prevail.
[2] By
‘Atheist’ I mean the discourse and identity formed by the confluence of secular
humanism and new atheism in the English speaking world. This ideological
construction is identifiably different from what we might call ‘continental’
atheism. The atheism of post-modern continental thinkers concerns the presumed
inability to mediate discursively fundamental conditions of discourse like
being, difference, power, otherness, ‘differance’ etc. which the continental atheist refuses to figure in term of an onto-theological God. Derrida is an atheist in
this sense though his engagement with religion has been consistent and deep.
The problem for continental thinkers of difference and otherness is
distinguishing their discourse from that of negative theology. Anglo-Saxon ‘truth’
atheism, though, is a different kettle of fish. This ideological construct is
onto-theology of the most radical kind grounded as it is on scientism, direct
realism and a univocal discourse of pure signification. This scientism grounds
in turn utilitarianism and secularism as well as a tacit or explicit political
elevation of the West (and indeed white Anglo-Saxons) as the embodiment of
reason and enlightened values. In this latter sense I could never call myself
an atheist and this would be true if I ceased all belief in God or the world to
come tomorrow.
[4] In
spite of claims that science ‘works’ or that science is ‘reliable’ in some
unique way it is actually quite a fallible enterprise. This is true on the
simple level of sociology. For one thing it is riddled with gender and racial
biases which skew results. It is shaped, even warped, by commercial, military
and political pressures. It is shaped by personal rivalries between individuals
and labs. It is even tinged by all the usual factors of careerism that underlie
the production of the kind of marginal academic hack work needed to quickly
enhance one’s tenure file. At any rate all one needs to do to see the general fallibility
of science is to consider the speed with which published research dates. Of
course, all of this is simply to say that science is a messy process in which internal
processes and pressures interface with the world. Philosophy, religion and art
may be in NO better a case than science in this regard but as far as I can tell
they are in no worse.
[5]
Indeed, the ‘historical discourse’ of Atheism (such as it is) is full of
bombastic moralizing. Texts are never altered they are ‘corrupted’. Myths and
stories are never borrowed or transmitted they are ‘stolen’. Theologians and
churchmen never make mistakes they ‘tell lies’. The absurdity of this a-historical
moralizing comes to light when you ask the simple question of what intellectual
property laws governed the use of the story of Utnapishtim such that the
Hebrews ‘stole’ it when they created the story of Noah.
[6] I
have to make a very basic point here. While the Jewish law as laid out in the
Pentateuch accepts the basic existence of slavery (as did all other ancient
societies) what a disciplined READER will notice (as opposed to a mere controversialist
or apologist) is that these laws are embedded in narrative whose overall theme
is liberation from slavery. Of course if you are determined to reduce textual
meaning to a set of propositions one has no place for dramatic ironies of this
sort or, indeed, for any other productive, polysemic tensions.
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