They look perplexed, or irritated
You know how pundits and armchair “theologians” like Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton like to pour scorn on the idea that anybody except dopy militant clueless atheists thinks God is an omnipotent supernatural being who answers prayers. Well Paul Cliteur points out in The Secular Outlook (p 176) that there is such a thing as the Apostle’s Creed, and also such a thing as the catechism. That’s an obvious enough point, but it’s fun to see people remind us of it, or to remind us of it oneself.
Cliteur goes on to quote Armstrong in The Case for God:
Surely everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all…
He comments
Apparently Armstrong is opposed to clear definitions of the words she uses so profusely in her books. That results in a situation where “God,” “religion,” “Christianity,” and other key concepts are used interchangeably. This is done with an air of superiority and those who ask for more precision are censured as narrow-minded (if not “fundamentalist”) and asking for the impossible.
That made me laugh. He’s quite right – that “they look perplexed” is very much done with an air of superiority, as of an enlightened nuanced subtle theologian looking down on the poor bewildered literalists at her feet. But it’s Armstrong who is just bullshitting (in the technical sense) and her perplexed auditors who are at least reading the script as it was written.
Imagine the consequences to Armstrong of acknowledging her atheism. Her place in the culture is tied to her association with the Church. She has numerous enemies who would jump at the opportunity to point out that this is what she’s always been. And her friends, theologically ultraliberal Christians like herself, would distance themselves from her lest their own apostasy be exposed.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t reveal the absurdity of her positions; she’s the one who’s chosen to compromise integrity. But I’m happy to have her toiling futilely to define theism out of existence. It’s just fun to watch.
It’s tactical, of course. When Karen Armstrong wants to claim commonality with her fellow believers, her definition of God expands into a large, amorphous cloud to accommodate her. When her beliefs are under attack, her definition of God shrinks down to a dimensionless point, so she can always claim that whatever’s being attacked isn’t what she believes. In both cases, her profession of faith is based not on any clear or consistent set of principles, but whatever suits the apologetic needs of the moment.
Say what you will about the cruelty, bigotry and irrationality of the old creeds: at least their devotees weren’t afraid to state clearly what it was they actually believed.
I just finished “On Evil”, and would apply Ken’s remarks above to Eagleton just as well.
Eagleton is evidently one of God’s most severe critics. If I were out shopping for a spiritual outlook, his (a-)theology would not make an easy convert out of me. I suspect that a fairly good case for Satanism could be made from his views.
As another writer (Edmund Standing maybe?) recently wrote, why isn’t a literal reading of scripture reasonable? Mumblers like Karen Armstrong don’t address this point, at least not satisfyingly. I would think that a thoughtful creator would want to write as plainly and to-the-point as possible, so as not be misunderstood. If that’s not the case, what does that say about Him? That He’s fine with thousands of different interpretation of His words and all of the division it brings?
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The irony with this “sophisticated” theology of Armstrong and others is that once they’ve finished speculating about God, there’s nothing left of God that seems recognizable or worthy of praise.
I’d love to see Armstrong on a stage, live, un-edited, having to face a debate opponent like Cliteur. No, I don’t think debates are good for getting at the truth of anything, but she has been begging to have egg smeared on her face publicly for years, and I’d like to see her get it.
OT
You missed Gaddaffi yesterday.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/article631492.ece/Gaddafi-seeks-EU-cash-to-prevent-black-Europe
I have the sleazy racism angle (Shameless self promotion ahoy):
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/expensive/2010/08/31/looney-toons-gaddaffy/
But he was also being the characteristic sexist sleaze we so know and feel vaguely nauseous about – and remember, this is the douchebag who wants to be president of the United States of Africa.
“Imagine the consequences to Armstrong of acknowledging her atheism.”
You know, I don’t believe that Armstrong is actually an atheist. I think she’s a God believer in the most fundamentalist sense. She–like many liberal religionistas–has realized that the only way to protect her God from the encroachment of reason is to hide it amidst an obfuscatory dust cloud of post-modern sophistry.
She may not even fully realize she’s doing it. Sometimes smart people are very good at outsmarting themselves.
I must confess that I often look perplexed when reading Karen Armstrong.
In the quote
the key phrase is actually point out that; I often look perplexed when she says things like that, and that’s often.
Armstrong’s main technique is to argue by implicature—e.g., if you’re “pointing it out,” then by assumption it’s not just true, but something so evident or well-known that you can just point it out. It is of course an argument by sheer assertion, however implicit.
One of my favorite examples of that from The Case for God is where she says en passant that the ancient Hindu mystics “discovered that” the Atman is identical to Brahman, i.e., that ultimate deep mind-stuff is the same thing as ultimate deep universe-stuff. (And she doesn’t just mean that minds are built out of matter the way materialist scientists think. Oh no; quite the opposite.)
That’s going to be a rather big shock to the particle physicists, cosmologists, cognitive psychologists, and neuroscientists I know; they’re going to be quite red-faced when I proceed to point out that fundamental discovery that they somehow missed. How could they have missed something like that?
Of course Armstrong makes this religious knowledge out to be independent of scientific knowledge. (There’s another nice implicature word she tosses around. Knowledge is justified true belief, so if they know it, it must be true.) Science can’t touch it, and we don’t need to listen to the pesky scientism of mere scientists like Dawkins or God forbid Stephen Weinberg or Stephen Hawking. (What does a Nobel-winning physicist like Weinberg or Hawking know about the ultimate nature of reality, anyhow? Mystics like Armstrong have known the truth all along; they just know. They’re really good at knowing things. That’s their job, and they’re the pros.)
Oddly, though, she likes to toss around ideas from physics in support of her ideas. Quantum physics shows that the ancient mystics were right all along—the mind profoundly affects reality, even constructs it, sort of. They’re inseparable at a deep level. Of course, most physicists these days think that’s a load of hooey, and that the consciousness-dependence of the waveform collapse in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics was a stupid anthropocentric boo-boo. (It’s not a matter of whether the observer is or has a mind, but of scale and lack of isolation. And waveform collapse is maybe not the right way to think of it anyhow…)
Like Deepak Chopra, Armstrong takes advantage of the fact that most people don’t know squat about what quantum physicists actually think about quantum physics. (E.g., that few physicists think that there’s that kind of deep connection between mind and matter anymore. Most think it’s a classic Dumb Idea.) She’s happy to have science be entirely relevant to the truth of her favored mystical “insights” and “discoveries” and “knowledge”; it’s just not relevant to their possible falsity. Funny, that.
Another nice rhetorical technique Armstrong is fond of is arguing by asserted authority. She talks about how in all faith traditions, the good mystics have always known these things, but of course being good at mysticism is hard—a lot of other mystics, a majority even, have done it wrong and gone way off the rails. And of course the non-mystics get it wrong too. The fact that her favored kind of mysticism has generally been a minority among religious authorities in all faith traditions is of no consequence. They’re the ones we should trust, not the ones who think they’re kooks and heretics, because they’re the ones who make the discoveries she’s taking about, and know the things she’s telling us they know.
Of course, if you’re a skeptic, you just won’t get it. And I’m not just talking about atheists and materialists—if you’re a religious person who’s skeptical of mystics, or even a religious mystic of the usual sort who’s skeptical of her sort of mysticism, you’re just not going to know what she knows.
The really interesting thing about The Case for God is that aside from argument by assertion, mostly sneaked in by implicature, one thing it doesn’t contain is a case for God; another thing it doesn’t contain is a consistent description of God, such that you could even make a case for it.
I agree that Armstrong is bullshitting (in the technical sense), but I’m not altogether sure there is a script, as written, if that means that there is some quite straightforward reading of the script that is, in some sense, a forced option.
There is an element of the Trickster in all religions. There has to be, for the simple reason that religion requires a non-standard way of reading the world. Pierre Boyer, for example, points out that the Fang people, in Africa, with whom he worked, know very well how the world works, and that stories of witches and the evil eye are exceptions to this. In order for these to work together, there have to be systems of hermeneutics which make sense of the non-standard spirit world. But these do not answer to the claims of consistency, since the spirit world is capricious, inconstant, and therefore unpredictable.
That is why there is so much ducking and diving in religious language, because it is always in competition with empirical reality. Some people don’t feel the tension so much, and so they can read the script as though it were a simple factual record of the way things are with the transcendent. People like this believe quite easily in the divinity of Jesus, his bodily resurrection, the homely idea of magical creation, and so on. However, if you have a much more complex intellectual picture of the world, with all the subtleties and nuances that this entails, you are bound to read the religious language — which, after all, provides warmth and security amidst the infinite emptiness and silences before and after life that terrified Pascal so much — in a correspondingly nuanced way. Suchn a person will find the demand to read the religious story straightforwardly as a factual account of the transcendent as coarse and insensitive; there is simply nowhere for an intelligent, educated person to hide in that kind of world picture. So, elaborate strategies of obfuscation are developed, so that the sophisticated believer can get lost in the folds, a bit like hiding under rumpled bed-clothes: still comfortable and warm, but with a sense of impermanence. It may look like arrogance, but it’s really insecurity.
It is important, however, to see that the complexities are usually written into the script. This is one problem with Islam, because, so far as I can see, there is no room to hide. The Qu’ran is so desperately simple minded. It’s certainly believable that it is the product of unlettered syncretists. But if you look at the great monuments of scholastic theology, supported, like medieval cathedrals, by elegant buttresses of the most soaringly imaginative leaps of interpretation and rationalisation, or at the Talmud, with its almost painfully minute interpretations and reinterpretations of sacred words, you will find all sorts of nooks and crannies where believers can conceal themselves. The complexity and mesmeric quality of the language is often enough to make the believer think he is speaking about real things and solving real problems. And if you try to winkle them out, the response is one of deeply felt hurt feelings, because anyone should be able to see what a beautiful hiding place it really is.
But we have to bear in mind that the hiding places — like Karen Armstrong’s in apophatic theology — includes all the rest of the structure in which they are found: the Bible, the creeds, the catechisms, the ceaselessly rolling sea of interpretation and reinterpretation, argument and counter-argument, liturgy, life, and even apologetics. The whole thing comprises a way of life, always in uneasy tension with the empirical world in which that life must be lived. The perplexity and the irritation are expressions of this uneasiness. Hiding and self-deception are not comfortable activities, and there are always times and signs when know that you are doing it. Time, then, to dig a bit deeper, and create corruscating patterns that catch the eye and lead one deeper into the labyrinth of self-deception. It can be almost as resonant as poetry there.
Eric,
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing that when you wrote “Pierre Boyer” you meant Pascal Boyer.For anybody who’s not familiar with him, his Religion Explained is excellent.(If you’re anti-“evolutionary psychology” don’t be put off by the jacket blurb. It’s not really evolutionary psychology in the strong sense of having detailed just-so stories. It’s mostly cognitive anthropology, with only a basic and plausible evo psych framework. Even that can be taken pretty weakly, e.g., that the basic schemas can be mostly emergent rather than hardwired, but still pretty much universal and decisive.)
You’re right, I meant Pascal Boyer. Bought the book and read it on holiday back in 2003.
This about ‘sophisticated theology’, isn’t that a bit like sophisticated stupidity (i.e. not being stupid at all), acknowledging that theology is stale old bullshit?
John Mero. Were you talking to me? I didn’t speak of ‘sophisticated theology’, I spoke of ‘sophisticated believers’. Besides, while theology may be about nothing in the sense that there are no supernatural realities to ground theology in — I think it is — that doesn’t make it ‘stupid’ in a straightforward sense. It can be extremely complex, reasoned — within the limits, of course, allowed by its being theology — and sensitive to the nature of being human. In fact, in many ways, ‘good’ theology is a bit like poetry. It can speak intelligently and sensitively about the nature of guilt, regret, compassion and justice. Just as we can see cathedrals or plainsong as great cultural achievements, so the work of great theologians can be seen as significant cultural achievements too, in some cases profound meditations on the human condition and ways of being human. We may sneer at Augustine’s exaggerated sense of guilt at having stolen (when just a boy) some pears from a neighbour’s orchard, but it would scarcely do to dismiss his <i>Confessions</i> as stupid. Such a careful phenomenological study deserves our attention.
It’s not stupidity that troubles me about people like Karen Armstrong, so much as the effort that they make to hide religious belief from criticism. In doing this they actually deny the cultural and intellectual achievements of the great religious thinkers. People like Origen and Augustine, Calvin and Schleiermacher, Aquinas and Barth, may have been wrong about many things, because there simply is no god for their theology to be about, but it does scant justice to them to deny that they said what they said and believed what they believed. Dawkins was right when he said that, in order to show that belief in god is baseless, there is no need to read Occam or Duns Scotus, as Eagleton said he must. But it would be wrong, I think, simply to deny that, because there is no god, what Occam said about metaphysics, or what Augustine said about being human, are worthless and stupid. Lots of theology is just dull scholasticism, just like a lot of articles on philosophy in the philosophy journals. But it would be a serious mistake simply to ignore whole swathes of human thought just because the thinkers lived in ages of faith.
I get annoyed when Armstrong et al. say things like, “Well, Christians don’t actually believe [insert literalist interpretation of choice]” or “Most Christians actually believe in this nebulous idea of God rather than God as a person.” Oh really? Haven’t spent much time in church, have you? Even the most liberal Christians I know believe in a personal God who intervenes in their lives and answers prayers. Not that Armstrong’s idea of Christians don’t exist, but they do seem to be few and far between. (Or perhaps it only appears that way to me since I’m from Alabama…)
This is off topic, OB. However, it’s vital stuff, coming from a priest, who is also a teacher in a large school.
http//www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/priest-urges-chastity-instead-of-cervical-cancer-jab-129383.html
Newman. Exactly! You should be annoyed. As Paul W says, Armstrong’s style is argument by assertion. She doesn’t demonstrate anything. She asserts it over and over, and then she says, ‘It’s like riding a bicycle, you have to do it in order to understand what it is.’ In other words, you have to believe, you have to believe “in” god, whatever that means in Armstrong’s universe, in order to understand what it means.
But then, of course, as Paul W. points out, she mixes her assertions in with so much woo about modern physics, and unexamined statements like ‘Atman and Brahman are identical’, and such like, that in the end the whole thing is a pastiche of disconnected assertions and suppositious nonsense. I should have added to my remarks on theology, that Armstrong is not very bright, though she has a problem with a kind of verbal diarrhea that some people find convincing. I don’t know why, because it doesn’t really make sense. I guess it has something to do with modern media. Her little audio or video clips make it sound as though she actually knows, when it is really just the tail end of a particularly bad case of the “verbal runs”. Theology has fallen on hard times, mainly because, in the face of real knowledge, it has to play a kind of let’s pretend. And that’s why Armstrong has to strive so hard to make it about nothing, because that’s the easiest place to hide.
Eric MacDonald (#17)
It’s convincing because the babble works as a mirror for people’s own fuzzy beliefs. If she were sensible, then people couldn’t as easily invent or inject their own meaning.
I wonder how much of Armstrong’s maundering would have been classified as formal heresies, had she been writing in a less permissive time. (Of course, depending on just how much less permissive it was, she might not have been allowed to write books or study theology in the first place.)