The incredible disappearing god
You know how people like Armstrong and Eagleton and – well most of the ‘we hate the new atheists’ crowd are always saying that the ‘new’ atheists are clueless and naïve and stupid and wrong to talk about that literal God that is a person who lives in the sky and answers prayers that nobody believes in and that according to Armstrong most people always did not believe in? You know, right? Well somebody forgot to tell philosophers, apparently, because the ones who wrote essays for Philosophers Without Gods talk about that literal God. They don’t talk about the God that is the ground of being, or the God that is a sign for something beyond whatever – they talk about the familiar God: a supernatural person of some kind who made everything and cares about us and is all-powerful and all-knowing and Good. So apparently they’re all clueless and naïve and stupid and wrong too.
Georges Rey, for instance, in “Meta-Atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception”:
I should say roughly what I shall mean by “God.”…What seems to me essential to most conceptions, and is at issue with atheists, is that God is a supernatural, psychological being, that is, a being not subject to ordinary physical limitations but capable of some or other mental state, such as knowing, caring, loving, disapproving – and indeed, at least in Christianity, is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and necessarily benevolent… (p. 246, italics his)
David Lewis (or Philip Kitcher, who wrote Lewis’s essay from notes and conversation after Lewis’s death) simply takes that God for granted in his “Divine Evil”:
The most ambitious versions of the argument claim that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and completely benevolent deity.
And that’s the God that’s at issue pretty much throughout – probably because no one would be motivated to write an article on doing without a sign that points to the transcendent, or “the ground of being.” You’d be finished before you started – “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean” would cover it, and that’s not an essay. Eaglestrong are being something less than forthright in claiming that that literal God that is omnipotent and watching over us is the God of only about three foolish people who haven’t been paying attention while everyone else switched to the more sophisticated version when Aquinas was in knee-pants. What they say is not correct. The facts are otherwise.
I doubt that she gets much of the history or social science or theology right, but I am quite fond of Armstrong’s unserious God. Try as I might, I just can’t stay mad at the spirit of transcendence. He’s a mischievous puck, that one.
I think I would prefer “Armleton” to “Eaglestrong.” Armelton sounds much more bumbling and ineffectual.
Spinoza’s God was basically a “ground of all being”-type of god.
He was also generally dismissed as an atheist for denying not the existence (which he did not deny) but the “essential attributes” of God.
But of course they don’t talk about the ground of being or ultimate purpose, because, in fact, those locutions don’t make sense, or at least they haven’t been shown to make sense, and, as such, they have practically no religious use. That was the big problem that the Anglican theologian Maurice Wiles faced, the fact that liberal ideas of God had very little religious resonance, and so were useless in religious contexts. What philosophers might do, of course, is both to show that the traditional conception of God – in George Rey’s terms – can be shown to be inconsistent with much that we know, and that the modern replacement for such a god is religiously impotent.
Frankly, I think the Armleton God (excellent suggestion, Parrhesia), no matter how apparently nebulous and content-free and not-signified – even though “God” is without any doubt whatsoever consistently used as a signifier in even their most twisty God-twaddle – is still the sort of entity that one must believe in. That is, God and religion and all that is still a matter of faith, no matter how much linguistic legerdemain is performed by those who profess such postmodern pieties. And because they defend and profess such faith – while simultaneously denying that they are doing any such thing, of course, in all-too-familiar postmodernist fashion – the Armleton contingent are still legitimately vulnerable to every criticism of faith ever made. Greta Christina recently published a wonderful overview/argument on what’s wrong with faith on Alternet, which somewhat redeems that venue for its recent largely uncritical touting of Karen Armstrong’s excrement and this even more appalling dreck from ex-Fundamentalist (but still part-time asshat) Frank Schaeffer.
And guess who else sees Armleton as a single, grotesque two-headed amalgam of assininity? The organizers of the New Humanist Bad Faith Awards 2009.
To be fair, there’s no reason why philosophers wouldn’t be naive and wrong about this. The question of what actual believers mean when they say “God” is more for historians and sociologists and anthropologists, not so much for philosophers.
Of course, from the POV of historical study Armstrong’s non-God God is even weaker.
I know, and I so totally voted for Eaglestrong, even though they’re 50 to 1. They are my PICK for bad faith.
And what’s all this instant approval for Armleton? Eaglestrong sounds so much more boastful! It has its own pejorative meaning, so it’s a better match with “Ditchkins” – which Terry E really does use heavily throughout the book.
I don’t think it’s true that there’s no reason at all that philosophers wouldn’t be naive and wrong about this. The essays in this book are careful and thoughtful – I think there are plenty of reasons the writers as a whole would not bother talking about a pointless strawman.
Armstrong’s non-God God is weaker from every POV except that of “sophisticated” theology. Sophisticated theology is, it seems to me, massively irrelevant to anything but itself.
I’ve read a fair bit of philosophy where the philosopher was careful on thoughtful on philosophical points, but not so much on historical or sociological generalizations.