I’ve just read A.C. Grayling’s book, The God Argument; The Case against Religion and for Humanism (his emphasis). It’s really a polemic against all deistic religions, even though he claims it’s not a polemic, while acknowledging it probably comes across as one.
His basic argument, which he iterates in many different ways, is that any belief in God or Gods is irrational, starting with the gods of Norse and Greek mythology and including the Biblical God. It’s a sound argument, because, depending on your culture, you tend to treat one variant as fiction and the other as having personal and spiritual significance. Grayling doesn’t address it in this way: instead, arguing that a belief in God is no different to a belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy; one you grow out of and the other you don’t. The inference is that you are immature or unintelligent or, at best, delusional.
I’ve said before that all the Gods I know about have cultural ties and that includes the Abrahamic one. But comparing them to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is like comparing them to fictional characters like Superman and Tarzan, or Luke Skywalker. So, what’s the difference? The difference is in the potency that you give them. A God or Goddess is something internal that only has meaning for you. I’ll return to this idea throughout, because I think that God has no meaning outside someone’s mind.
I rejected the biblical God in my teens, after a childhood spent immersed in its teachings. But the decision was more an emotional one than an analytical one. Grayling acknowledges, by the way, that religious belief is emotional, which, for him, is just another reason to dismiss it. I rejected God because I grew to really, really dislike Him. He was the worst type of tyrant: he ruled by fear and terror; he practised genocide on a global scale (the Noahic flood); he sent his ‘children’ to everlasting torment for disobedience; he tortured Job to win a bet with the Devil. Oh, almost forgot: he was going to get Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, to test his loyalty.
I once commented that the question: Does God exist? is the wrong question. The real question, which enters the consciousness of any rational person is: What’s the point? Is there a higher purpose to our existence? This is what religions have attempted to address, and in consequence, some have invoked deities.
Grayling, in a philosophical sleight of hand, categorises some Eastern philosophies, like
Buddhism and Confucianism as not being religions, because they don’t invoke gods. I think it’s fair to categorise Confucius as a philosopher in the same mould as teachers like Plato and Aristotle. But, like Jesus, both Buddha and Confucius had disciples, and they were all iconoclasts, challenging the social mores of their day, which they believed to be unfair and iniquitous. In fact, I would put Jesus in the same category as Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, who were all persecuted for challenging the status quo.
But Grayling conveniently overlooks that the Chinese, who adopted both Buddhism and Confucianism, culturally worshiped their ancestors, which is surely a religious practice. Perhaps Grayling doesn’t know many Chinese, whereas I have lived with Chinese individuals, and they definitely have deities as part of their traditional culture.
I’ve argued previously that science is neutral on the existence of God. In other words, science does not rule out a ‘creator’, yet there is obvious conflict between science and religious texts. Science is an epistemology and religion is not – they don’t compare. Some people argue that religion explains what science cannot, but that’s an argument from ignorance. There will always be things we don’t know – I’ve written extensively on that point – but no religious text can provide an explanation to a question that contemporary science can’t answer.
I think the notion of an omniscient God has problems with logic. Clifford A Pickover wrote a very thought-provoking book, The Paradox of GOD and the Science of Omniscience. To give examples: even God doesn’t know the last digit of pi, because it doesn’t exist; and God can’t make a prime number non-prime. Some people argue that God created logic and I argue that God is restrained by logic the same as us. The Universe obeys logic not because God created the logic but because logic transcends the Universe.
When I say that science does not rule out ‘God’, I mean it doesn’t rule out a ‘purpose’ that may be beyond our kin. We really don’t know. That doesn’t make me agnostic, as I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic creator, but neither does it mean that people who do, are axiomatically irrational, as Grayling contends. I’ve argued before that, in fact, it’s a non sequitur to believe the God you find inside your mind is the creator of the entire universe.
The major problem I have with polemical texts against religion is that, whether intentional or not, they promote intolerance. Back in 2010, I quoted Grayling where he seemed to be promoting religious tolerance.
And people who didn't have a religious commitment wouldn't mind if other people did privately and they wouldn't attack or criticise them.
So there was an unwritten agreement that the matter was going to be left quiet. So in a future where the religious organisations and religious individuals had returned to something much more private, much more inward looking, we might have that kind of public domain where people were able to rub along with one another with much less friction than we're seeing at the moment.
I believe this is fundamentally the society I live in (in Australia) where, for the most part, people don’t care what you believe, and where religion is not part of our political landscape. In fact, despite having religion as part of my education, I was brought up with the tacit understanding that religious belief was personal and therefore only shared with others under the mutual understanding that it was confidential and deeply private. A secular society is not an atheistic society; it’s a tolerant society or it doesn’t work.
I know people with completely different religious beliefs to me, best friends, in fact. What’s more, in our current society, I’d say political beliefs are far more divisive than religious beliefs. It puts a lie to the argument, proposed by Grayling and other militant atheists, that if we eliminated religion, ‘at its root’, then we would overcome the world’s conflicts. It’s not only simplistic, but naive, even dangerous. Religion does contribute to conflicts but only when it is politicised, which is what we witness in places where religion demarcates territorial disputes or differences in status. Religion is just one marker of ingroup-outgroup discrimination, with race, language and wealth being more likely contenders.
Grayling is contemptuous of people who adapt their religious beliefs to their circumstances, arguing that they ‘cherry-pick’ and are ‘hypocrites’. Well, I readily admit that I cherry-pick all the time - just read my blog - but I don’t see that as hypocrisy.
Don Cupitt provides a different perspective, which is the opposite point of view:
The only ideas, thoughts, convictions that stay with you and give you real support are ones you have formulated yourself and tested out in your own life… In effect, the only religion that can save you is one you have made up for yourself and tested out for yourself: in short, a heresy.
Grayling addresses the teleological arguments and the ontological argument and the cosmological argument, all in some detail, which I won’t go into. Paul Davies spent considerable time on them as well in his book, The Mind of God.
But there is one argument that Grayling addressed which I found interesting, and that was Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument based on modal logic. I’ve come across this before, which is based on the premise that if something necessarily exists in a possible world then it must exist in all possible worlds (my emphasis). The problem is with the premise that God must necessarily exist in a possible world. I’ve always thought that this argument is somewhat circular, because it seems to assume that God necessarily exists, which is what it’s trying to prove, via logic alone. Grayling goes into it in some detail and claims that Plantinga eventually gave it up, falling back on an even less credible argument that we know that God exists in the same way we know that the past exists. I may have oversimplified it, but that’s the analogy that Grayling used.
The teleological argument comes from Aristotle, as Grayling expounds, because he argued that everything manmade has a ‘final cause’, which is the cause that prompted someone to make it, and you could apply this to the whole universe. I have my own response to this. If humans are the ‘final cause’ of God’s ‘creation’, then, without humans, God has no reason to exist. And this leads me to argue a reverse logic that God is dependent on humans rather than the other way round.
This is related to the fine-tuned argument that the Universe is ‘just right’ for complex life to emerge and leads to the anthropic principle. Grayling doesn’t mention the anthropic principle, probably because it tacitly allows teleology back into the picture. Grayling makes an analogy by saying that his antecedents only existed so he could exist, which is a good argument. But the point I like to make is that without conscious entities, the Universe may as well not exist. And we are special in as much as we have the unique ability to comprehend the Universe, as Einstein famously pointed out. Or, as Paul Davies said, ‘we can unravel the plot’. The alternative is what Davies calls the ‘absurd universe’, which appears to be the one Grayling plumps for: we give it a meaning because we are predisposed to providing meanings, but there is no reason to think one should exist.
But this goes to the heart of the debate for me. The whole reason we have religion of any type is because humans wondered if there was something beyond the mortal realm. No one can answer that, but it’s why we created gods in all their manifestations. So gods become a part of a collective consciousness, which is why they can seem real to us. In this context, God is a projection that we laden with all our prejudices and hopes beyond death. One cannot dissociate any notion of God from the human psyche, as Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out in the 19th Century. God is always in human image, not the other way round. Grayling doesn’t discuss this at all, but I fail to see how one can address God independently of a human context. In effect, we get the God we deserve. And by God, I mean the ideal we imagine we should aspire to. This is why we deify mortal humans like Jesus and Buddha, because they represent an ideal that they could only achieve beyond death.
The second half of his book talks about humanism. He spends a chapter on the importance and interdependence of authenticity and truth, and another on human rights. They remind me of my 3 rules for humans. He spends an entire chapter on the ethics of sexual conduct and how it’s been perverted by civilised societies. The book is worth acquiring for that alone.
Anyone who reads my blog, knows that I think God is subjective, not objective. Anyone who is a believer, will tell you that God came to them, meaning that God only exists in their mind, not out there. I have no issue with this idea of God; but it’s not what religions tell you. Anyone who has a religious experience is an iconoclast, including Jesus and Buddha. I think the idea that God evolves as a product of our consciousness is far more logical than the idea that He (why he?) created us in his image, as potential companions.
I make a distinction between non-theists and atheists. In Australia, there are a lot of non-theists, meaning they don’t care what you believe. Going by this tome (2013), Grayling is ‘anti-theist’, though he claims it’s not a religious belief; it’s the opposite of belief. However, his polemic indicates that he cares about whether someone believes in God or not and, like Dawkins, Harris and others, he proselytises atheism. This is not a non-theistic attitude. Anti-theism may not be a religion, but it’s anti-religious in its rhetoric.
I will leave the last word to Einstein, who talks about religion with no mention of God.
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.
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