I had been incurious about secular humanism, and had not given much attention to the recent debates, promoted by the media, between polar opposite ‘secularists’ and ‘religionists’. But I recently came across a book by a philosopher whose work I knew and respected—it was On Humanism, by Richard Norman, a measured and sober, almost sombre piece of work. Norman did not as some more conspicuous secularists have done lay all our human ills at the door of religion, and nor did he adhere to an easy belief in human progress. On the contrary, Primo Levi’s If this is a Man was for him a crucial text for humanism, which he saw as ‘an attempt to think about how we should live without religion’, as the search for ‘some alternative set of beliefs to live by’. His rejection of religious belief was grounded in the thought that it is false rather than always harmful. Thus Norman writes:
Humanism as I understand it involves not just the rejection of religious belief but, at the very least, the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion. (p 18)
Well, this seemed a familiar and, some may think, an uncontroversial project, though what seems uncontroversial depends on the milieu to which one habituates oneself, but I noticed a slide in Norman’s sentence, from talk of ‘religious belief’ to talk of ‘religion’. I was not sure that one could live a good life without religion, in the sense at least of the resources made available in our religious traditions, although I thought that one could live a good life without ‘religious belief’.
Also quite by chance I came across an article by Nicholas Lash with the provocative title, ‘The Impossibility of Atheism’, provocative if only because the position it announced seemed in the current climate unfashionable and reactionary, a rearguard and hopeless action against a now ascendant secularism. It seemed when I first glanced through it that the paper argued that one could not live a good life without religious belief—or at least that one’s conception of what constitutes a good life is seriously impaired by the absence of belief.
But what is it to reject or embrace ‘religious belief’, or live a good life, with or without religion? One should notice that this talk of ‘rejecting religious belief’ tends to be understood as talk of rejecting theism or belief in God and that theists and secular humanists alike incline towards this assimilation—which makes it difficult for either party to take seriously the idea of a religious attitude or perspective not explicitly or surreptitiously theistic, even though, as I should want to say, such a perspective is not directed, as it were, towards the heavens, but towards life on earth.
1.
The exasperation of theologians has been aroused by secularists who believe they are attacking religious belief and theology as such when in reality, and unawares, they are attacking a form of religious belief contaminated by bad theology—the secularists fail to understand the nature of religious belief and so their rejection of it is suspect, even though it should be admitted that the bad theology is widespread in its influence and humanly damaging to those believers whose lives are informed by it.
Now, if it is true that the project of secular humanism sees itself as founded on a misconception of the religious belief that it rejects then this must have consequences for its self-understanding. But I am not sure that the project is grounded in a misconception: it is grounded, rather more simply, in the absence of belief, in a secular atmosphere in which the question arises, what is it to live a good life? So the humanist project is not necessarily undermined even if it is articulated in terms of the rejection of a misconceived notion of belief: we should at least need to explore further the founding idea that one can live a good life in the absence of belief, even if, as I have hinted, there is some reason for demurring about a good life without religion.
The possibility of rapprochement between secularists and religionists has been enhanced by recent work by the Irish theologian, James Mackey, who repudiates the forms of belief and bad theology rejected by the secularists. He thinks the bad theology, in the form of discredited doctrines of God and creation, still flourishes in the ranks of believers and their ecclesiastical hierarchies, and stand in need of correction by the great secular philosophers of the last two centuries. Perhaps this can be reciprocated— perhaps secular humanism can be corrected by religious modes of thinking, though with no implication in favour of belief. But, as we have seen, there is a complication.
Nicholas Lash follows Karl Rahner in claiming that any conception of the good life cut off from religious belief is disastrously flawed. The message to the secularist appears to be quite blunt. Not only are you wrong about the religious belief that you reject, you cannot have an adequate conception of human nature or what it is to live a good life except under the condition of belief.
Thus Lash cites a view of Rahner’s to the effect that ‘keeping the word ‘God’ in play, even if only as a question, is part of the very definition of what it is to be a human being’, and, more trenchantly:
The absolute death of the word ‘God’ including even the eradication of its past, would be the signal, no longer heard by anyone, that man himself had died.
Now, those of us who are non-believers might be tempted here to sigh, shrug and move on to other things, though perhaps with a slight shiver at that Heideggerian signal no longer heard by anyone, which must be the point of the claim that a conception of the good life cut adrift from religious belief is severely damaged. But I should prefer to pause and dwell on just what Rahner thinks is secured by the use of the word ‘God’ and to see how much of what is thus secured can be appropriated independently of its use, notwithstanding the further comment that the ‘use of this word, and this word alone, brings a person face to face with the single whole of reality and the single whole of their own existence’ (my italics).
There are two things here—one could perhaps agree that the use of this word could bring a person face to face with the single whole of reality and of their own existence, and yet disagree that it is through the use of this word alone that a person might be brought to such a pitch.
But first let us return to the alleged misrepresentation of belief in God that brings the self-understanding of the secular humanist into question. If that is what is involved in belief in God, Rahner seems to imply, then we should all be atheists. He writes as follows:
that God really does not exist who operates and functions as an individual existent alongside other existents, and who would thus be a member of the larger household of all reality. Anyone in search of such a God is searching for a false God. Both atheism and a more naïve form of theism labour under the same false notion of God, only the former denies it while the latter believes it can make sense of it
The passage places the ‘atheist’ on the same footing as the ‘more naïve theist’—as labouring under the same false notion of God. But despite the mild condescension, it offers a reason for abandoning one kind of justifications for non-belief. However, just as few people come to belief through the traditional arguments for God, so it may be that non-belief can survive damage to its own critical narrative about the nature of belief—and find little to recommend a corrected account of its nature. Not all religious belief is contaminated by a false notion of God, and nor need all atheism be so contaminated, though it would then have to give a different account of itself.
What of the true God, the God of sound doctrine? Rahner’s remarks, and those by Lash in support of his position, should remind us of two crucial and connected remarks in Aquinas. St Thomas has told us that we can know by the light of reason that there is a God but not what he is. He goes on to say that God, whom he calls that great ocean of being, is not a being, one among others, but is, rather, supra ordinem omnium entium, beyond the order of all beings— so not part of the ‘household of all reality’, to use the Rahner phrase. He is beyond our understanding, so that ‘every way we have of thinking about God is a particular way of failing to understand him as he is in himself’. This thought is echoed centuries later by an entry recorded in one of Newman’s notebooks and brought to our attention by Lash, that in talking about God we can only set right one error of expression by another. This is not a God that can be searched for as an ‘existent’ within the ‘household of reality’, but is rather the condition or ground of that household and a condition, therefore, of the possibility of any kind of investigation into what belongs within it.
2.
But if these grammatical remarks about ‘God’ are in the classical tradition of St Thomas, they also bear a striking resemblance to the work of the Wittgensteinian philosopher, Dewi Phillips, whose sustained critique of much contemporary philosophy of religion appears continuous with the Thomistic/Rahnerian tradition. If God is not a being among others but beyond the order of all beings, if God does not belong within the household of all reality, then it is a mistake to superimpose upon discourse about God a form of discourse that belongs within the natural order. The main burden of Phillips’ work, as I understand it, is that we are constantly tempted to import an alien model into our thinking about God and belief, superimposing on religious discourse a methodology of evidence, hypothesis and probability (precisely the methodology that Richard Dawkins seeks to impose) that belongs to empirical, particularly scientific investigation.
Once one claims that ‘God’ is not the name of an ‘existent’, whose most general characteristic is its contingency, the question whether there is anything that would constitute an inquiry, let alone a method of inquiry, into his existence becomes conceptually problematic—not on the grounds that it isn’t true that God ‘exists’ but because the nature and form of God’s existence must determine the nature and form of what, if anything, would constitute an inquiry. The very contingency of ‘existents’ determines the possibilities and direction of inquiry, into the conditions upon which their existence depends But if we are talking of an eternal and necessary being, one whose necessity implies that it is not within the order of beings which come into and go out of existence, then I do not think that there can be any inquiry by means of which we can establish to our satisfaction that such a being exists, as we can within empirical discourse. All we can do is to inquire into the conditions under which that concept of eternal being is formed, and then follow such promptings of the heart as may there arise. This is not to deny that we can ask whether such a being exists, only to deny that an answer is available other than in the form of whatever prompts a confession of faith and adoration. To put it another way I find myself here thoroughly in sympathy with a remark made by Phillips, that any ‘inquiry’ would take the form of whatever leads to ‘finding God’ rather than finding out whether there is indeed a God. Nor is this, I think, the famous ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ just because we are talking about the conditions of concept formation rather than an inexplicable and ungrounded commitment to belief, and this must lead us back to Rahner’s reference to the single whole of reality.
But first, Phillips has often been dismissed as an ‘anti-realist’ (wrongly in my view) and it will help our progress if we can look at a recent example of this criticism, made by John Haldane, who, in an assessment of his contribution to the philosophy of religion writes that
His approach to religious discourse is reminiscent of that of a tradition of theologians who have sought to interpret Christian belief and practise in ways that free them from the presumption of realities existing apart from human thought, language and action.
And he concludes that
Phillips is right to refer the sense of religious claims to human practice, but wrong in not allowing them the possibility of “transcendent” reference; or put another way, wrong to think that their full meaning is exhausted by their practice-constituted sense.
Haldane has just accepted as fair an account of his own position on the resurrection of Jesus, that ‘the belief cannot be reasonably understood in any way other than as involving a metaphysical commitment’. It seems plausible initially to say that you fail to understand the religious claims of believers if you do not see that they involve a metaphysical commitment. It seems plausible because it is a concession that doesn’t require you to take a view about the commitment—it is a remark about believers and you do not need to be a believer yourself or to share that commitment, in order to acknowledge its presence.
But when Haldane says that Phillips is wrong not to allow religious claims ‘the possibility of “transcendent” reference’, the complaint is a rather stronger one—that he fails to see something, not about believers, but about the status of their religious claims. But it is only initially plausible to say that you fail to understand the religious claims of believers if you do not see that they involve a metaphysical commitment. It fails to acknowledge that the reductionist makes a revisionist move—effectively proposing an error theory—offering an intellectual re-appraisal of religious discourse. The reductionist doesn’t fail to understand that the religious claims involve a metaphysical commitment but rather sees that very commitment as itself a misunderstanding of the discourse. The point is that the reductionist is already a non-believer and this provides the context in which they offer an explanation of the religious belief they no longer hold, and re-interpret it as, really, and despite appearances, about human life rather than about a divine being. What helps their claim is that such discourse is also about human beings, whatever the status of the claims about God. In the light of that explanation the reductionist sees believers as having a false belief about the nature of their own discourse. The claim is emphatically not that the believers are mistaken in their metaphysical commitment, but that they are mistaken in supposing that there was a metaphysical commitment involved at all. Well, these explanations are often found compelling—they exert over us what Wittgenstein once called ‘charm’. But it is hard to see what would count in favour of the verdict that they are right.
A better route for the secular humanist is to refuse the revisionist theorising of reductionism and simply say that while they do not share the metaphysical commitment there are plenty of insights about human life to celebrate within religious discourse, about how to live, about the interior conditions of action, the subjectivity of moral life and so forth.
But, to return to Haldane, he seems to charge Phillips with a refusal to concede, not that religious claims are about a divine reality, but that there could be a divine being that they are about. This seems close to wanting him to concede that believers could be right in believing in God. And it is surely a modest enough concession. And if Phillips is not, after all, a reductionist, then presumably he would concede that Haldane could be right to believe in God. However, I think that what Phillips ought to reply is that such a concession would be an empty gesture—and to say this is not take a reductionist line after all. It is an empty gesture because there is no procedure for determining that the believer is right.
3.
I should like now to return to the idea that the philosopher can inquire only into the conditions of concept formation and to the idea espoused by Rahner that the word ‘God’ brings a person face to face with the single whole of reality and their own existence. In the preceding article, ‘Where Does The God Delusion Come From?’ Lash remarks of the question why is there anything at all? that it is often said that God is ‘the answer’ and he comments that it a ‘very strange answer because it does not furnish us with information: it simply names the mystery’.
Lash is not here defending the argument for the existence of God, renewed and made familiar by Herbert McCabe, which depends on a series of questions asking why this state of affairs obtains rather than that, questions which are answered by showing that what happens to obtain is contingent upon some particular condition; and the series culminates in the great question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing, as though that there is anything at all were one state of affairs and nothing at all another, with the invitation to find the presence of anything at all a contingency that depends upon a divine condition. One problem I have always had with this argument is that although the principle of sufficient reason impels us forward to look for conditions for why things are as they are and not otherwise, it is always a further question whether we shall find such a condition. But we find a condition which we presume must exist and are confirmed in the principle when we do find it. Even if we believe that there must be a condition upon which everything depends, it is a further question whether we shall find one, and our failure to find it will put pressure on our presumption that there must be such a condition. But it this gap between presuming and finding that makes this a religious quest rather than an argument, and putting it in the form of an argument comes close to misrepresenting the form of that quest, which depends on an experience of contingency, which those of us who are non-believers do not share, though we can have plenty of experience of the contingency of human life, as I shall come to later, not in the sense simply of encountering it, but rather of having the universal displayed in the particular in a vivid apprehension of the human condition. Part of the problem, then, if we think of it as an argument, lies in seeing the very existence of things as a contingency in the first place. This is not a problem for the believer because they are already schooled in such a view, but it is certainly a problem for the non-believer. As I have said, it seems entirely possible for someone to have an experience of contingency that amounts to an access of faith, and perhaps this is the real force of the ‘argument’, that it is a kind of vademecum by which someone is led to acknowledge contingency where previously they had not, and where to acknowledge contingency is already a confession of faith, and where to acknowledge the possibility of contingency is to acknowledge the possibility of faith.
I find it difficult to grasp one particular response here, which says that to refuse to acknowledge the contingency of things is to commit oneself to the absurd idea that it is all a ‘brute fact’. Now there are plenty of contexts in which one is properly indignant if someone claims that some state of affairs is just a ‘brute fact’, but we do not have the stage-setting in this context that makes it arbitrary to insist that something is a brute fact in the face of obviously available, determining conditions. Perhaps this is the point of the famous Wittgensteinian remark about das Mystische, that our language has its foothold in how the world is, and not in that it is. But that it is—is the occasion for poetry, wonder, gratitude, ecstatic song. And the spirit of God moving over the waters is one song, later turned into cruel and ghastly prose.
4.
But Lash is not, as I said, deploying that argument here. He is rather simply making a corrective grammatical remark about how the word ‘God’ is used and misused, a grammatical remark which seeks to correct the secularist misrepresentation of the doctrine of God. The God of the orthodox believer is not of the kind that is denied by the atheist and accepted by the more naïve theist.
But it is in the context of this grammatical remark that we should try to understand Rahner’s striking comments on how the death of this word would also be the signal for the death of man, and to see how the secular humanist ought to respond. Rahner’s comments augment the account of the grammar of the word God in an important way. To understand their significance we need to look at two further, helpful claims made by Lash, the first that the notion of God is better understand by analogy with ‘treasure’, and the second, that the notion of a god is the notion of what is worshipped, of what one’s heart is set on.
This will remind some of us, and it may have been in Lash’s mind also, of the gospel saying that where your treasure is there your heart is also, with its ethical implication that one’s treasure and therefore one’s heart, can be set as it were in the wrong place: whatever one’s view of gods or God, one’s heart (and treasure) is located somewhere or other, one is, to change the idiom, in some particular state of eros.
The implication of these remarks seems to me that our conception of human nature is to be traced along the whole possible trajectory of desire, around the formations and deformations of the heart. The point about the genuine worship of God for our purposes here is that it rules out other forms of worship, eclipses former idolatries, from which one has now turned away, of which one now repents, so it carries an essential reference to metanoia, a turning away from certain forms of conduct in favour of others.
If I may return to my initial scepticism about the assimilation of ‘religious belief’ and ‘religion’, and to the idea that one can live a good life without religious belief but not perhaps without religion, I should want to say here that ‘religion’ in the sense of our religious traditions is one of the repositories of human wisdom. We can, I think, find a use for the term ‘religious’ which carries no commitment to belief in God, though the term itself, as opposed to its use, is dispensable. A religious perspective is not a perspective upon a transcendent object, but rather a perspective upon the earth and the human condition. The perspective is in this sense itself transcendent, though it is also an ordinary human experience, and is better perhaps seen as essentially twofold, as the vision of a possibility of liberation that at the same time and integrally looks back at human suffering and its causes. When Siddhartha has had his first shattering vision of the human condition through encountering the sick man, the old man and the corpse, the universal mediated by the particular, he famously becomes aware of the fourth sight, that of the mendicant disappearing into the forest, which becomes for him the image of possible liberation, again a particular image that represents a universal possibility. We all of us more or less participate in such visions and perspectives, represented perhaps by the figure of the Bodhisattva or of Rilke’s Angel, and they visit and then leave us, but we recall them as standards of judgment as we continue our progress through mortal life. I can see no reason why a secular humanist should not celebrate such perspectives, even if they are properly wary of using forms of language that owe their origin to traditions they no longer find tenable: except that it is not, on this view, the tradition that is not tenable, but rather that certain aspects of it, possibly misunderstood, possibly not, have been let go of, though there is a whole language of interiority that needs to be kept hold of. But according to Rahner it is the use of this word ‘God’ and, allegedly, this word alone, that leads us to the single whole of reality and the single whole of our own existence. Actually, in one sense Rahner is right—it is the use of this word that leads us to the contemplation of our condition, rather than as it were the use of the word God. If I understand Lash, the claim is that the adequacy of our conception of what it is to be a human being depends upon the extent to which we come fully to realise our creatureliness and radical contingency, and I use that phrase ‘fully to realise’ as my own gloss on his comment that learning the word ‘God’ is a matter of life-long learning, and the worship and adoration of God is the fundamental form not just of one’s knowledge of God but also and therefore of one’s knowledge of oneself as creature. But that formulation is already too individualist, of course—we are talking about the fundamental form of our knowledge of God and of ourselves as creatures. One is not talking of one’s own, personal, private, dependence on the mystery of the Godhead, but our common dependence, and a vital aspect of this realisation is the growth of our mutual solidarity and sense of kinship. And one reason that Lash is right to talk about life-long learning is presumably that we are confronted by all the egocentric and partisan obstacles to realising this solidarity—realising in the sense both of coming to see and making real. This would also explain the Johannine criterion for whether someone genuinely loves God—that they love and do not hate their brother—and it also explains St Paul’s explosive comment about stupid Galatians—since the gifts of the flesh and the gifts of the spirit determine the form of a community, and the community that is supposed to represent the church is intended precisely as an image of human solidarity, and a bulwark against the gross cruelties that undermine and destroy it. But surely, surely at this point one needs to say that the whole project of humanism is not an exercise in hubris but a compassionate solidarity with one’s fellow mortals, from a point of view that visits us, though not in obedience to our will, and leaves its traces in our memory and standards of judgment. This seems to me to represent a vision which one may or may not want to call religious, though that hardly matters, but it is one which is entirely available to the good atheist, and it is a vision of a possibility that is secured by its embodiment in practice and by the keeping alive a language of poetic evocation that expresses the horrors and suffering of humanity in a spirit of compassion.
5.
I said that the visitations of this perspective did not depend upon our will, and I did so because I had in mind a serious reservation that John Haldane had about the whole reductionist enterprise that he associated with Phillips, ‘a certain de-spiritualisation … a form of naturalised pelagianism’. But I wish to end with a defence of Phillips, as a kind of memoriam.
Haldane cites the example of Phillips’ treatment of the expression ‘eternal life’, and comments as follows:
a noun phrase such as “eternal life” that might have been taken to refer to an existential state or condition is transformed into a series of verbal expressions such as “participating in the life of God”, “dying to the self”, “seeing that all things are a gift”, with these in turn being referred to such activities as forgiving, thanking and loving”.
I think that the point of Haldane’s drawing our attention to the transition from the ‘noun phrase’ to the ‘series of verbal expressions’ is that the latter seem evasive of the idea that there is some reality, some condition of existence, that the noun phrase stands for, which exists (or doesn’t exist) quite independently of our beliefs about the matter, and is not reducible to our attitudes and activities. Such a transition would, I think, be evasive in the way Haldane suggests. But it seems to me that the whole point about eternal life, to use the noun phrase, is that what belongs within the series of verbal expressions actually constitute the condition of existence that is called ‘eternal life’. But the orthodox view is that such a condition of existence may be enjoyed and anticipated here as well as being the hope and promise of the life to come. Phillips has no need to deny, and nor does the secular humanist need to deny, that Christians live in the expectation of this promise. But for the secular humanist at least some of the content of that condition of existence is available here whatever one may think about lives to come.
Humanism as I understand it involves not just the rejection of religious belief but, at the very least, the positive affirmation that human beings can find from within themselves the resources to live a good life without religion. (p 18)
Well, this seemed a familiar and, some may think, an uncontroversial project, though what seems uncontroversial depends on the milieu to which one habituates oneself, but I noticed a slide in Norman’s sentence, from talk of ‘religious belief’ to talk of ‘religion’. I was not sure that one could live a good life without religion, in the sense at least of the resources made available in our religious traditions, although I thought that one could live a good life without ‘religious belief’.
Also quite by chance I came across an article by Nicholas Lash with the provocative title, ‘The Impossibility of Atheism’, provocative if only because the position it announced seemed in the current climate unfashionable and reactionary, a rearguard and hopeless action against a now ascendant secularism. It seemed when I first glanced through it that the paper argued that one could not live a good life without religious belief—or at least that one’s conception of what constitutes a good life is seriously impaired by the absence of belief.
But what is it to reject or embrace ‘religious belief’, or live a good life, with or without religion? One should notice that this talk of ‘rejecting religious belief’ tends to be understood as talk of rejecting theism or belief in God and that theists and secular humanists alike incline towards this assimilation—which makes it difficult for either party to take seriously the idea of a religious attitude or perspective not explicitly or surreptitiously theistic, even though, as I should want to say, such a perspective is not directed, as it were, towards the heavens, but towards life on earth.
1.
The exasperation of theologians has been aroused by secularists who believe they are attacking religious belief and theology as such when in reality, and unawares, they are attacking a form of religious belief contaminated by bad theology—the secularists fail to understand the nature of religious belief and so their rejection of it is suspect, even though it should be admitted that the bad theology is widespread in its influence and humanly damaging to those believers whose lives are informed by it.
Now, if it is true that the project of secular humanism sees itself as founded on a misconception of the religious belief that it rejects then this must have consequences for its self-understanding. But I am not sure that the project is grounded in a misconception: it is grounded, rather more simply, in the absence of belief, in a secular atmosphere in which the question arises, what is it to live a good life? So the humanist project is not necessarily undermined even if it is articulated in terms of the rejection of a misconceived notion of belief: we should at least need to explore further the founding idea that one can live a good life in the absence of belief, even if, as I have hinted, there is some reason for demurring about a good life without religion.
The possibility of rapprochement between secularists and religionists has been enhanced by recent work by the Irish theologian, James Mackey, who repudiates the forms of belief and bad theology rejected by the secularists. He thinks the bad theology, in the form of discredited doctrines of God and creation, still flourishes in the ranks of believers and their ecclesiastical hierarchies, and stand in need of correction by the great secular philosophers of the last two centuries. Perhaps this can be reciprocated— perhaps secular humanism can be corrected by religious modes of thinking, though with no implication in favour of belief. But, as we have seen, there is a complication.
Nicholas Lash follows Karl Rahner in claiming that any conception of the good life cut off from religious belief is disastrously flawed. The message to the secularist appears to be quite blunt. Not only are you wrong about the religious belief that you reject, you cannot have an adequate conception of human nature or what it is to live a good life except under the condition of belief.
Thus Lash cites a view of Rahner’s to the effect that ‘keeping the word ‘God’ in play, even if only as a question, is part of the very definition of what it is to be a human being’, and, more trenchantly:
The absolute death of the word ‘God’ including even the eradication of its past, would be the signal, no longer heard by anyone, that man himself had died.
Now, those of us who are non-believers might be tempted here to sigh, shrug and move on to other things, though perhaps with a slight shiver at that Heideggerian signal no longer heard by anyone, which must be the point of the claim that a conception of the good life cut adrift from religious belief is severely damaged. But I should prefer to pause and dwell on just what Rahner thinks is secured by the use of the word ‘God’ and to see how much of what is thus secured can be appropriated independently of its use, notwithstanding the further comment that the ‘use of this word, and this word alone, brings a person face to face with the single whole of reality and the single whole of their own existence’ (my italics).
There are two things here—one could perhaps agree that the use of this word could bring a person face to face with the single whole of reality and of their own existence, and yet disagree that it is through the use of this word alone that a person might be brought to such a pitch.
But first let us return to the alleged misrepresentation of belief in God that brings the self-understanding of the secular humanist into question. If that is what is involved in belief in God, Rahner seems to imply, then we should all be atheists. He writes as follows:
that God really does not exist who operates and functions as an individual existent alongside other existents, and who would thus be a member of the larger household of all reality. Anyone in search of such a God is searching for a false God. Both atheism and a more naïve form of theism labour under the same false notion of God, only the former denies it while the latter believes it can make sense of it
The passage places the ‘atheist’ on the same footing as the ‘more naïve theist’—as labouring under the same false notion of God. But despite the mild condescension, it offers a reason for abandoning one kind of justifications for non-belief. However, just as few people come to belief through the traditional arguments for God, so it may be that non-belief can survive damage to its own critical narrative about the nature of belief—and find little to recommend a corrected account of its nature. Not all religious belief is contaminated by a false notion of God, and nor need all atheism be so contaminated, though it would then have to give a different account of itself.
What of the true God, the God of sound doctrine? Rahner’s remarks, and those by Lash in support of his position, should remind us of two crucial and connected remarks in Aquinas. St Thomas has told us that we can know by the light of reason that there is a God but not what he is. He goes on to say that God, whom he calls that great ocean of being, is not a being, one among others, but is, rather, supra ordinem omnium entium, beyond the order of all beings— so not part of the ‘household of all reality’, to use the Rahner phrase. He is beyond our understanding, so that ‘every way we have of thinking about God is a particular way of failing to understand him as he is in himself’. This thought is echoed centuries later by an entry recorded in one of Newman’s notebooks and brought to our attention by Lash, that in talking about God we can only set right one error of expression by another. This is not a God that can be searched for as an ‘existent’ within the ‘household of reality’, but is rather the condition or ground of that household and a condition, therefore, of the possibility of any kind of investigation into what belongs within it.
2.
But if these grammatical remarks about ‘God’ are in the classical tradition of St Thomas, they also bear a striking resemblance to the work of the Wittgensteinian philosopher, Dewi Phillips, whose sustained critique of much contemporary philosophy of religion appears continuous with the Thomistic/Rahnerian tradition. If God is not a being among others but beyond the order of all beings, if God does not belong within the household of all reality, then it is a mistake to superimpose upon discourse about God a form of discourse that belongs within the natural order. The main burden of Phillips’ work, as I understand it, is that we are constantly tempted to import an alien model into our thinking about God and belief, superimposing on religious discourse a methodology of evidence, hypothesis and probability (precisely the methodology that Richard Dawkins seeks to impose) that belongs to empirical, particularly scientific investigation.
Once one claims that ‘God’ is not the name of an ‘existent’, whose most general characteristic is its contingency, the question whether there is anything that would constitute an inquiry, let alone a method of inquiry, into his existence becomes conceptually problematic—not on the grounds that it isn’t true that God ‘exists’ but because the nature and form of God’s existence must determine the nature and form of what, if anything, would constitute an inquiry. The very contingency of ‘existents’ determines the possibilities and direction of inquiry, into the conditions upon which their existence depends But if we are talking of an eternal and necessary being, one whose necessity implies that it is not within the order of beings which come into and go out of existence, then I do not think that there can be any inquiry by means of which we can establish to our satisfaction that such a being exists, as we can within empirical discourse. All we can do is to inquire into the conditions under which that concept of eternal being is formed, and then follow such promptings of the heart as may there arise. This is not to deny that we can ask whether such a being exists, only to deny that an answer is available other than in the form of whatever prompts a confession of faith and adoration. To put it another way I find myself here thoroughly in sympathy with a remark made by Phillips, that any ‘inquiry’ would take the form of whatever leads to ‘finding God’ rather than finding out whether there is indeed a God. Nor is this, I think, the famous ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ just because we are talking about the conditions of concept formation rather than an inexplicable and ungrounded commitment to belief, and this must lead us back to Rahner’s reference to the single whole of reality.
But first, Phillips has often been dismissed as an ‘anti-realist’ (wrongly in my view) and it will help our progress if we can look at a recent example of this criticism, made by John Haldane, who, in an assessment of his contribution to the philosophy of religion writes that
His approach to religious discourse is reminiscent of that of a tradition of theologians who have sought to interpret Christian belief and practise in ways that free them from the presumption of realities existing apart from human thought, language and action.
And he concludes that
Phillips is right to refer the sense of religious claims to human practice, but wrong in not allowing them the possibility of “transcendent” reference; or put another way, wrong to think that their full meaning is exhausted by their practice-constituted sense.
Haldane has just accepted as fair an account of his own position on the resurrection of Jesus, that ‘the belief cannot be reasonably understood in any way other than as involving a metaphysical commitment’. It seems plausible initially to say that you fail to understand the religious claims of believers if you do not see that they involve a metaphysical commitment. It seems plausible because it is a concession that doesn’t require you to take a view about the commitment—it is a remark about believers and you do not need to be a believer yourself or to share that commitment, in order to acknowledge its presence.
But when Haldane says that Phillips is wrong not to allow religious claims ‘the possibility of “transcendent” reference’, the complaint is a rather stronger one—that he fails to see something, not about believers, but about the status of their religious claims. But it is only initially plausible to say that you fail to understand the religious claims of believers if you do not see that they involve a metaphysical commitment. It fails to acknowledge that the reductionist makes a revisionist move—effectively proposing an error theory—offering an intellectual re-appraisal of religious discourse. The reductionist doesn’t fail to understand that the religious claims involve a metaphysical commitment but rather sees that very commitment as itself a misunderstanding of the discourse. The point is that the reductionist is already a non-believer and this provides the context in which they offer an explanation of the religious belief they no longer hold, and re-interpret it as, really, and despite appearances, about human life rather than about a divine being. What helps their claim is that such discourse is also about human beings, whatever the status of the claims about God. In the light of that explanation the reductionist sees believers as having a false belief about the nature of their own discourse. The claim is emphatically not that the believers are mistaken in their metaphysical commitment, but that they are mistaken in supposing that there was a metaphysical commitment involved at all. Well, these explanations are often found compelling—they exert over us what Wittgenstein once called ‘charm’. But it is hard to see what would count in favour of the verdict that they are right.
A better route for the secular humanist is to refuse the revisionist theorising of reductionism and simply say that while they do not share the metaphysical commitment there are plenty of insights about human life to celebrate within religious discourse, about how to live, about the interior conditions of action, the subjectivity of moral life and so forth.
But, to return to Haldane, he seems to charge Phillips with a refusal to concede, not that religious claims are about a divine reality, but that there could be a divine being that they are about. This seems close to wanting him to concede that believers could be right in believing in God. And it is surely a modest enough concession. And if Phillips is not, after all, a reductionist, then presumably he would concede that Haldane could be right to believe in God. However, I think that what Phillips ought to reply is that such a concession would be an empty gesture—and to say this is not take a reductionist line after all. It is an empty gesture because there is no procedure for determining that the believer is right.
3.
I should like now to return to the idea that the philosopher can inquire only into the conditions of concept formation and to the idea espoused by Rahner that the word ‘God’ brings a person face to face with the single whole of reality and their own existence. In the preceding article, ‘Where Does The God Delusion Come From?’ Lash remarks of the question why is there anything at all? that it is often said that God is ‘the answer’ and he comments that it a ‘very strange answer because it does not furnish us with information: it simply names the mystery’.
Lash is not here defending the argument for the existence of God, renewed and made familiar by Herbert McCabe, which depends on a series of questions asking why this state of affairs obtains rather than that, questions which are answered by showing that what happens to obtain is contingent upon some particular condition; and the series culminates in the great question, why is there anything at all rather than nothing, as though that there is anything at all were one state of affairs and nothing at all another, with the invitation to find the presence of anything at all a contingency that depends upon a divine condition. One problem I have always had with this argument is that although the principle of sufficient reason impels us forward to look for conditions for why things are as they are and not otherwise, it is always a further question whether we shall find such a condition. But we find a condition which we presume must exist and are confirmed in the principle when we do find it. Even if we believe that there must be a condition upon which everything depends, it is a further question whether we shall find one, and our failure to find it will put pressure on our presumption that there must be such a condition. But it this gap between presuming and finding that makes this a religious quest rather than an argument, and putting it in the form of an argument comes close to misrepresenting the form of that quest, which depends on an experience of contingency, which those of us who are non-believers do not share, though we can have plenty of experience of the contingency of human life, as I shall come to later, not in the sense simply of encountering it, but rather of having the universal displayed in the particular in a vivid apprehension of the human condition. Part of the problem, then, if we think of it as an argument, lies in seeing the very existence of things as a contingency in the first place. This is not a problem for the believer because they are already schooled in such a view, but it is certainly a problem for the non-believer. As I have said, it seems entirely possible for someone to have an experience of contingency that amounts to an access of faith, and perhaps this is the real force of the ‘argument’, that it is a kind of vademecum by which someone is led to acknowledge contingency where previously they had not, and where to acknowledge contingency is already a confession of faith, and where to acknowledge the possibility of contingency is to acknowledge the possibility of faith.
I find it difficult to grasp one particular response here, which says that to refuse to acknowledge the contingency of things is to commit oneself to the absurd idea that it is all a ‘brute fact’. Now there are plenty of contexts in which one is properly indignant if someone claims that some state of affairs is just a ‘brute fact’, but we do not have the stage-setting in this context that makes it arbitrary to insist that something is a brute fact in the face of obviously available, determining conditions. Perhaps this is the point of the famous Wittgensteinian remark about das Mystische, that our language has its foothold in how the world is, and not in that it is. But that it is—is the occasion for poetry, wonder, gratitude, ecstatic song. And the spirit of God moving over the waters is one song, later turned into cruel and ghastly prose.
4.
But Lash is not, as I said, deploying that argument here. He is rather simply making a corrective grammatical remark about how the word ‘God’ is used and misused, a grammatical remark which seeks to correct the secularist misrepresentation of the doctrine of God. The God of the orthodox believer is not of the kind that is denied by the atheist and accepted by the more naïve theist.
But it is in the context of this grammatical remark that we should try to understand Rahner’s striking comments on how the death of this word would also be the signal for the death of man, and to see how the secular humanist ought to respond. Rahner’s comments augment the account of the grammar of the word God in an important way. To understand their significance we need to look at two further, helpful claims made by Lash, the first that the notion of God is better understand by analogy with ‘treasure’, and the second, that the notion of a god is the notion of what is worshipped, of what one’s heart is set on.
This will remind some of us, and it may have been in Lash’s mind also, of the gospel saying that where your treasure is there your heart is also, with its ethical implication that one’s treasure and therefore one’s heart, can be set as it were in the wrong place: whatever one’s view of gods or God, one’s heart (and treasure) is located somewhere or other, one is, to change the idiom, in some particular state of eros.
The implication of these remarks seems to me that our conception of human nature is to be traced along the whole possible trajectory of desire, around the formations and deformations of the heart. The point about the genuine worship of God for our purposes here is that it rules out other forms of worship, eclipses former idolatries, from which one has now turned away, of which one now repents, so it carries an essential reference to metanoia, a turning away from certain forms of conduct in favour of others.
If I may return to my initial scepticism about the assimilation of ‘religious belief’ and ‘religion’, and to the idea that one can live a good life without religious belief but not perhaps without religion, I should want to say here that ‘religion’ in the sense of our religious traditions is one of the repositories of human wisdom. We can, I think, find a use for the term ‘religious’ which carries no commitment to belief in God, though the term itself, as opposed to its use, is dispensable. A religious perspective is not a perspective upon a transcendent object, but rather a perspective upon the earth and the human condition. The perspective is in this sense itself transcendent, though it is also an ordinary human experience, and is better perhaps seen as essentially twofold, as the vision of a possibility of liberation that at the same time and integrally looks back at human suffering and its causes. When Siddhartha has had his first shattering vision of the human condition through encountering the sick man, the old man and the corpse, the universal mediated by the particular, he famously becomes aware of the fourth sight, that of the mendicant disappearing into the forest, which becomes for him the image of possible liberation, again a particular image that represents a universal possibility. We all of us more or less participate in such visions and perspectives, represented perhaps by the figure of the Bodhisattva or of Rilke’s Angel, and they visit and then leave us, but we recall them as standards of judgment as we continue our progress through mortal life. I can see no reason why a secular humanist should not celebrate such perspectives, even if they are properly wary of using forms of language that owe their origin to traditions they no longer find tenable: except that it is not, on this view, the tradition that is not tenable, but rather that certain aspects of it, possibly misunderstood, possibly not, have been let go of, though there is a whole language of interiority that needs to be kept hold of. But according to Rahner it is the use of this word ‘God’ and, allegedly, this word alone, that leads us to the single whole of reality and the single whole of our own existence. Actually, in one sense Rahner is right—it is the use of this word that leads us to the contemplation of our condition, rather than as it were the use of the word God. If I understand Lash, the claim is that the adequacy of our conception of what it is to be a human being depends upon the extent to which we come fully to realise our creatureliness and radical contingency, and I use that phrase ‘fully to realise’ as my own gloss on his comment that learning the word ‘God’ is a matter of life-long learning, and the worship and adoration of God is the fundamental form not just of one’s knowledge of God but also and therefore of one’s knowledge of oneself as creature. But that formulation is already too individualist, of course—we are talking about the fundamental form of our knowledge of God and of ourselves as creatures. One is not talking of one’s own, personal, private, dependence on the mystery of the Godhead, but our common dependence, and a vital aspect of this realisation is the growth of our mutual solidarity and sense of kinship. And one reason that Lash is right to talk about life-long learning is presumably that we are confronted by all the egocentric and partisan obstacles to realising this solidarity—realising in the sense both of coming to see and making real. This would also explain the Johannine criterion for whether someone genuinely loves God—that they love and do not hate their brother—and it also explains St Paul’s explosive comment about stupid Galatians—since the gifts of the flesh and the gifts of the spirit determine the form of a community, and the community that is supposed to represent the church is intended precisely as an image of human solidarity, and a bulwark against the gross cruelties that undermine and destroy it. But surely, surely at this point one needs to say that the whole project of humanism is not an exercise in hubris but a compassionate solidarity with one’s fellow mortals, from a point of view that visits us, though not in obedience to our will, and leaves its traces in our memory and standards of judgment. This seems to me to represent a vision which one may or may not want to call religious, though that hardly matters, but it is one which is entirely available to the good atheist, and it is a vision of a possibility that is secured by its embodiment in practice and by the keeping alive a language of poetic evocation that expresses the horrors and suffering of humanity in a spirit of compassion.
5.
I said that the visitations of this perspective did not depend upon our will, and I did so because I had in mind a serious reservation that John Haldane had about the whole reductionist enterprise that he associated with Phillips, ‘a certain de-spiritualisation … a form of naturalised pelagianism’. But I wish to end with a defence of Phillips, as a kind of memoriam.
Haldane cites the example of Phillips’ treatment of the expression ‘eternal life’, and comments as follows:
a noun phrase such as “eternal life” that might have been taken to refer to an existential state or condition is transformed into a series of verbal expressions such as “participating in the life of God”, “dying to the self”, “seeing that all things are a gift”, with these in turn being referred to such activities as forgiving, thanking and loving”.
I think that the point of Haldane’s drawing our attention to the transition from the ‘noun phrase’ to the ‘series of verbal expressions’ is that the latter seem evasive of the idea that there is some reality, some condition of existence, that the noun phrase stands for, which exists (or doesn’t exist) quite independently of our beliefs about the matter, and is not reducible to our attitudes and activities. Such a transition would, I think, be evasive in the way Haldane suggests. But it seems to me that the whole point about eternal life, to use the noun phrase, is that what belongs within the series of verbal expressions actually constitute the condition of existence that is called ‘eternal life’. But the orthodox view is that such a condition of existence may be enjoyed and anticipated here as well as being the hope and promise of the life to come. Phillips has no need to deny, and nor does the secular humanist need to deny, that Christians live in the expectation of this promise. But for the secular humanist at least some of the content of that condition of existence is available here whatever one may think about lives to come.
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