SCENE. The conference room of my mind. The floor and sky are blank white (to prevent distractions) and extend to a distant horizon. There is grey table in the centre, around which I am sat with A.C. GRAYLING, JOSH MCDOWELL, LUCRETIUS, and KAREN ARMSTRONG.
ME: Welcome, all of you. I have gathered you here so that we can discuss humanity's religions. You are each going to give a short summary of your views on the topic, then we'll discuss our differences and hopefully reach a conclusion that we all agree on.
The God Argument by A.C. Grayling
ME: A.C. Grayling, professor of philosophy and Master of the New College of the Humanities, you're up first. Just give us a short overview of The God Argument.
(GRAYLING stands)
 |
GRAYLING: Pleasure to be here.
Firstly, the word 'religion' is a difficult one to pin down; it is used to denote a wide range of phenomena. I define 'religion' as a set of beliefs or practices focused on a god or gods, a non-natural agency or agencies with significant interests in human activity on this planet, or whose existence makes some necessary material difference to human beings. Religions advocate certain values and practices that are required in response to the existence of the divine being or beings, including worship and praise of it or them, submission to the commands taken to emanate from it or them, etc.
(ARMSTRONG sighs)
Religious faith has many manifestations. Religion has inspired some of the loveliest art in the world; for some, religion is a source of powerful meaning, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that binds people together. In other forms, religion is not so nice. Inter-religious hatreds have driven people to atrocity and war; religions have convinced people that they are sinful for having perfectly natural desires; religions have been used to justify bigotry and killing. Throughout history, the religion-inspired suppression of women has robbed humanity of at least half its potential creativity and genius. The consolations of religion are mainly personal, but its burdens are social and political, as well as personal.
Furthermore, the claims of religion do not stand up to scrutiny. Critical examination puts religion in the same class as astrology and magic. These beliefs date from mankind's less knowledgeable early history, and have been superseded by advances in our understanding of the world and ourselves. Or should have been superseded. Everywhere that science and education has advanced, religion has dwindled in influence. Where it retains influence, it almost always does so in a modified modern form.
The major reason for the continuance of religious belief is the indoctrination of intellectually-defenceless children before they reach the age of reason, together with all or some combination of emotion, social pressure and reinforcement, and ignorance of science and history. Religions inculcate a mindset in which criticism or questioning, and the recognition of contradiction or unacceptability, is suppressed. That is especially the case with the fundamentalists. Non-fundamentalists cherry-pick the religion's doctrines, discarding the uncongenial teachings. There is a word for this kind of cherry-picking: 'hypocrisy'.
People mean different things when they refer to a god. The usual view is of an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and morally perfect being who created everything. Often when you're in a discussion with a religious person, they will shut down the debate by claiming that the deity is ineffable, indescribable, incomprehensible, etc. This doesn't help the religious person, because religious people talk about, describe, and claim to comprehend the deity on some level. For example, they claim to know with a great deal of precision what behaviours and commitments it requires of mankind. This does not appear to strike them as contradictory, which it clearly is.
Some people deduce the existence of a deity from the appearance of design in nature. Strictly speaking, this argument is only entitled to attempt to prove the existence of a designer, not a creator. It is a big leap to assume that the designer of something also created the raw materials, and then it's an even bigger leap from a creator-designer to a deity of a particular religious tradition.
There are other and better explanations for design in nature than the idea of a supernatural designer being. The designer hypothesis is implausible because it purports to offer an explanation by invoking something itself unexplained. It adds an extra layer of complexity to simple ignorance; explaining something by something unexplained is no explanation at all. The argument is also inconsistent with the myriad examples of bad design in nature. Some suggest that the deity works indirectly, by creating the natural laws and leaving them to create nature. This is still a non-explanation.
A more contemporary form of this argument is based on the fact that the universe appears to be 'fine-tuned' for life to appear on this planet. Had something been different, life as we know it could not have happened - this is the 'Goldilocks enigma'. How could all of the conditions for our existence be just right, if it wasn't the work of an intelligent agent that wanted humankind to exist?
Consider: if all of my great-great-great-great-great grandparents (64 of them) had not lived where they lived and did what they did, pretty much exactly as they did them, I would not exist. This is my personal 'Goldilocks enigma'. It is a retrospective observation, and while it may fill me with wonder when I think of the millions of coincidences that resulted in me, I do not think that my existence was the purpose of all those events. The universe's parameters are not fine-tuned for us to exist; we exist because the universe happens to be as it is.
Some defenders of religion infer the existence of a deity from the fact that everything is governed by causation: everything is caused by something, so the causal chain must either go back infinitely or end with first cause. Since the former makes no sense, the apologist makes the giant leap from a first cause to the deity of a particular religious tradition. Something other than a supernatural deity could be the first cause, or maybe the universe works in ways that do not comply with our intellectual preferences.
Those are the main theistic arguments; there are some other silly ones which I need not mention here. That is a brief summary of The God Argument's first half. In the second half, I explain how you can have a life of meaning, morality, consolation, inspiration, etc, without religion, because a lot of religious people seem to find this concept difficult. The short answer is: easily.
The case against religion shows it to be a hangover from the infancy of modern humanity, persistent and enduring because of the vested interests of religious organisations, proselytisation of children, complicity of states requiring the social and moral policing that religion offers, and human psychology itself. Yet even a cursory overview of history tells us that it is one of the most destructive forces plaguing humanity. This remains true despite the positives of art, inspiration and consolation. Even at a personal level, it is too often a tormentor as well, plunging people into agonies of guilt over sins and fears of damnation. Religions give easy answers to life's difficult questions, and the answers they give are wrong.
I say this in full recognition of the fact that many religious organisations carry out charitable works that do much good. That is not in question. But non-religious people and organisations also engage in charitable work and do so without the strings often attached to religious charity. If I see two men do good, one because he takes himself to be commanded to it by a supernatural agency and the other solely because he cares about his fellow man, I honour the latter infinitely more.
Thankyou.
(GRAYLING sits)
ARMSTRONG: Disappointingly shallow, Professor. Very basic. You should read some more theology.
People mean different things when they refer to a god. The usual view is of an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and morally perfect being who created everything. Often when you're in a discussion with a religious person, they will shut down the debate by claiming that the deity is ineffable, indescribable, incomprehensible, etc. This doesn't help the religious person, because religious people talk about, describe, and claim to comprehend the deity on some level. For example, they claim to know with a great deal of precision what behaviours and commitments it requires of mankind. This does not appear to strike them as contradictory, which it clearly is.
Some people deduce the existence of a deity from the appearance of design in nature. Strictly speaking, this argument is only entitled to attempt to prove the existence of a designer, not a creator. It is a big leap to assume that the designer of something also created the raw materials, and then it's an even bigger leap from a creator-designer to a deity of a particular religious tradition.
There are other and better explanations for design in nature than the idea of a supernatural designer being. The designer hypothesis is implausible because it purports to offer an explanation by invoking something itself unexplained. It adds an extra layer of complexity to simple ignorance; explaining something by something unexplained is no explanation at all. The argument is also inconsistent with the myriad examples of bad design in nature. Some suggest that the deity works indirectly, by creating the natural laws and leaving them to create nature. This is still a non-explanation.
A more contemporary form of this argument is based on the fact that the universe appears to be 'fine-tuned' for life to appear on this planet. Had something been different, life as we know it could not have happened - this is the 'Goldilocks enigma'. How could all of the conditions for our existence be just right, if it wasn't the work of an intelligent agent that wanted humankind to exist?
Consider: if all of my great-great-great-great-great grandparents (64 of them) had not lived where they lived and did what they did, pretty much exactly as they did them, I would not exist. This is my personal 'Goldilocks enigma'. It is a retrospective observation, and while it may fill me with wonder when I think of the millions of coincidences that resulted in me, I do not think that my existence was the purpose of all those events. The universe's parameters are not fine-tuned for us to exist; we exist because the universe happens to be as it is.
Some defenders of religion infer the existence of a deity from the fact that everything is governed by causation: everything is caused by something, so the causal chain must either go back infinitely or end with first cause. Since the former makes no sense, the apologist makes the giant leap from a first cause to the deity of a particular religious tradition. Something other than a supernatural deity could be the first cause, or maybe the universe works in ways that do not comply with our intellectual preferences.
Those are the main theistic arguments; there are some other silly ones which I need not mention here. That is a brief summary of The God Argument's first half. In the second half, I explain how you can have a life of meaning, morality, consolation, inspiration, etc, without religion, because a lot of religious people seem to find this concept difficult. The short answer is: easily.
The case against religion shows it to be a hangover from the infancy of modern humanity, persistent and enduring because of the vested interests of religious organisations, proselytisation of children, complicity of states requiring the social and moral policing that religion offers, and human psychology itself. Yet even a cursory overview of history tells us that it is one of the most destructive forces plaguing humanity. This remains true despite the positives of art, inspiration and consolation. Even at a personal level, it is too often a tormentor as well, plunging people into agonies of guilt over sins and fears of damnation. Religions give easy answers to life's difficult questions, and the answers they give are wrong.
I say this in full recognition of the fact that many religious organisations carry out charitable works that do much good. That is not in question. But non-religious people and organisations also engage in charitable work and do so without the strings often attached to religious charity. If I see two men do good, one because he takes himself to be commanded to it by a supernatural agency and the other solely because he cares about his fellow man, I honour the latter infinitely more.
Thankyou.
(GRAYLING sits)
ARMSTRONG: Disappointingly shallow, Professor. Very basic. You should read some more theology.
GRAYLING: I don't need to know the finer points of theology when they are based on a premise I have rejected: the existence of a supernatural deity who monitors humankind.
(ARMSTRONG sighs)
ME: I think we can agree that believing in something despite an absence of evidence or good reasoning is silly, right?
MCDOWELL: Of course, but Christianity is a rational, factual faith. I'm going next!
(MCDOWELL stands)
Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell
ME: Very well, Mr McDowell, give us a quick taster of Evidence That Demands A Verdict. Josh is a evangelical Christian apologist from America.
MCDOWELL: My book is mainly aimed at Christians who want to spread the word of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. I have bested the arguments of many Atheist Professors, and I will beat yours, Grayling! Have you considered, atheist, that to be consistently assured your belief is accurate, you must also claim omniscience! For there always exists the possibility of the existence of God outside your knowledge!
GRAYLING: That was one of the arguments I didn't think I needed to cover. Replace 'God' with literally any other supernatural entity and your argument is equally valid. By your reasoning we should all believe in fairies, unicorns, dragons, the Olympian gods, etc, just because there is a remote probability, vanishingly close to zero, that those things exist.
MCDOWELL: Moving on. Many sincere students of the Bible are led astray because of a bias against supernatural explanations. They look for natural explanations of events, rather than just accepting the truth of the supernatural explanation. Besides, even if there is a natural explanation for a Biblical miracle, that does not detract from the truth of the supernatural explanation, because God controls nature. Students of the Bible are often troubled to find statements in the Bible that appear to contradict other statements in the Bible. They should give the text the benefit of the doubt, and just accept that it is not actually a contradiction. Jesus existed; therefore, the New Testament gospels are accurate historical accounts; therefore, Jesus is either Lord, Liar or Lunatic. If Jesus was a liar or a lunatic, then how come he was so peaceful and his teachings so wise? How did he perform all his miracles? Therefore: Jesus is our Lord and Saviour, God in human form.
ME: I think we'll stop there.
MCDOWELL: But I have so much more to say! My book is 760 pages of fine print! The Mosaic Law was definitely dictated to Moses by God. The fact that there are older law codes of equal or greater complexity to the Mosaic Law is not evidence that it is man-made. Those earlier law codes are the result of previous revelations by God which he just neglected to mention in the Bible.
ME: Stop. Please. I lost some respect for humanity while reading your book, and I'll never get that back. I couldn't handle the leaps of faith, the circular reasoning, the twisting of the truth, the false dichotomies and trichotomies, how much you pad out your arguments with unnecessary verbosity and repetition so they look more impressive. There is a desperate tone running through the text. I was shocked by how deceptive you are, how much you lie, in your book. Is lying not one of the ten commandments?
MCDOWELL: Yes, but it is a forgiveable sin. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is One Unforgivable Sin. God will forgive me for lying, especially if I've lied in order to save souls. There are Christians out there with doubts, and there are non-Christians who haven't yet accepted Jesus into their hearts. They are in danger of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. I am safe; God will forgive my lying. But if those guys blaspheme, that's it: straight to Hell, no chance of forgiveness. If I have to lie to save souls, God will understand and forgive.
ME: That reasoning has been used to justify quite a number of atrocities throughout history...
MCDOWELL: But we have the truth.
(GRAYLING sighs)
ME: So you've converted many Atheist Professors in your time?
MCDOWELL: Yes! Very many! A professor of literature once asked me what I thought of Greek mythology, and I told him that there is an obvious difference between what is recorded in the Bible and the stories in Greek mythology: the Bible tells of historical people, whereas the characters of Greek myths are fictional. That showed him!
ARMSTRONG: This is embarrassing. Can we move on?
GRAYLING: People thought Plato was the son of a god.
ME: There are so many myths about historical figures. Your book's desperate tone was particularly apparent in the Atheist Professor anecdotes. I got the impression that you'd thought of the responses long after the encounters had ended, is this right?
(MCDOWELL doesn't answer)
ME: There are quite a few thorough rebuttals to your work freely available on the internet. You have so far refrained from answering their criticisms, why is that?
MCDOWELL: The internet is greatest threat to Christianity.
ME: If you see the Internet as a threat, rather than a means of spreading the truth, does that mean you acknowledge, on some level, the weakness of your arguments?
MCDOWELL: You need to accept Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour into your heart. Anyone who does not believe in him is going to eternal damnation in Hell after they die.
ME: It's a shame, for you, that the evidence doesn't support that verdict.
MCDOWELL: It's a shame, for you, that you're going to Hell.
(MCDOWELL sits)
On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius
ME: Lucretius, why don't you go next? He's come all the way from Ancient Rome to be with us today. He finished writing On the Nature of the Universe around 55 B.C.E. Luc, what are your views on the idea of an afterlife?
(LUCRETIUS stands)
LUCRETIUS: For what is to follow, my friends, lay aside your cares and lend undistracted ears and attentive mind to true reason. Do not scornfully reject, before you have understood, the gifts I have marshalled for you with zealous devotion.
Often it is religion that is the mother of sinful and impious deeds. At Aulis, the altar of the Virgin Goddess was foully stained with the blood of an innocent girl, slaughtered so that a fleet might sail under happy auspices. Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.
GRAYLING: You have no idea.
LUCRETIUS: Please don't interrupt.
If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets. As it is, they have no power of resistance, because they are haunted by the fear of eternal punishment after death. They know nothing of the nature of the spirit. Many a time before now men have betrayed their country and their beloved parents in an effort to escape the halls of Hell. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by sunbeams, the shining shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature.
Some people who know nothing of matter believe that nature without the guidance of the gods could not bring round the changing seasons in such perfect conformity to human needs, creating the crops and those other blessings that mortals are led to enjoy by the guide of life, pleasure, which coaxes them to reproduce their kind, lest the human race should perish. Obviously, in imagining that the gods established everything for the sake of men, they have stumbled in all respects far from the path of truth. Even if I knew nothing of atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power; it is so full of imperfections.
GRAYLING: Mate, I already covered that. Stick to the afterlife stuff.
LUCRETIUS: Just showing my support. Please don't interrupt.
The mind, which we often call the intellect, is part of a man, no less than hand or foot or eye. There is also a vital spirit in our limbs. The mind and spirit are interconnected. The mind is firmly lodged in the mid-region of the breast. Here is where we feel fear and alarm. Here we feel the touch of joy. Here, then, is the seat of intellect and mind. The rest of the vital spirit, diffused throughout the body, obeys the mind and moves under its direction and impulse.
ME: Nowadays, we know that the brain, in the head, is the seat of intellect. What you call the 'vital spirit', we might call the 'nervous system'.
LUCRETIUS: That's nice. When I'm from this is cutting edge science. Please don't interrupt.
Mind and spirit are both composed of matter. We see them propelling the limbs, rousing the body from sleep, changing the expression of the face and guiding and steering the whole man - activities that all clearly involve touch, and touch in turn involves matter.
How can we deny their material nature? You see the mind sharing in the body's experiences and sympathising with it. The substance of the mind must be material, since it is affected by the impact of material weapons. Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death? Since the mind is thus invaded by the contagion of disease, you must acknowledge that it is destructible, for pain and sickness are the artificers of death.
Conversely, we see that the mind, like a sick body, can be healed and directed by medicine. This too is presage that life is mortal. When you embark on an attempt to alter the mind or to direct any other natural object, it is fair to suppose that you are adding certain parts or transposing them or subtracting some trifle at any rate from their sum. But an immortal object will not let its parts be rearranged or added to, or the least bit drop off. For, if ever anything is so transformed as to overstep its own limits, this means the immediate death of what was before. By this susceptibility both to sickness and to medicine, the mind displays marks of mortality. So false reasoning is plainly confronted by true fact.
Mind and body as a living force derive their vigour and vitality from their conjunction. Without body, the mind alone cannot perform the vital motions. Bereft of spirit, the body cannot persist and exercise its senses. As the eye uprooted and separated from the body cannot see, so we perceive that the spirit and mind by themselves are powerless. It is only because their atoms are held in by the whole body, intermingled through veins and flesh, sinews and bones, that they are kept together so as to perform the motions that generate sentience.
No one on the point of death seems to feel his spirit retiring intact right out of his body. If our mind were indeed immortal, it would not complain of extinction in the hour of death, but would feel rather that it was escaping from confinement and sloughing off its garments like a snake.
From all this it follows that death is nothing to us and no concern of ours, since our tenure of the mind is mortal. When we shall be no more - when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted - to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all. Nothing will have power to stir our senses, not though earth be fused with sea and sea with sky.
If the future holds travail and anguish in store, the self must be in existence, when that time comes, in order to experience it. But from this fate we are redeemed by death, which denies existence to the self that might have suffered these tribulations. Rest assured, therefore, that we have nothing to fear in death. One who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from one who has never been born, when once this mortal life is ended.
In sleep, when mind and body alike are at rest, no one misses himself or sighs for life. If such sleep were prolonged to eternity, no longing for ourselves would trouble us. Death, therefore, must be regarded, so far as we are concerned, as having much less existence than sleep, if anything can have less existence than what we perceive to be nothing.
The old is always thrust aside to make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the wreck of another. There is no murky pit of Hell awaiting anyone. There is need of matter, so that later generations may arise; when they have lived out their span, they will follow you. Bygone generations have taken your road, and those to come will take it no less. So one thing will never cease to spring from another. To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease. Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in the sight - anything depressing - anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep?"
(LUCRETIUS bows. I, GRAYLING, and ARMSTRONG applaud. MCDOWELL looks sullen.)
ME: Beautiful! I find your writing on death more consoling than any infantile afterlife wankery.
GRAYLING: (shouting) YOLO!
MCDOWELL: But what about near-death experiences? People have visions of the afterlife!
ME: The visions are not consistent across religious traditions. Christians see Jesus, Muslims see Muhammad, etc. From the variety of visions, we can conclude that they are hallucinating. As for lights at the end of tunnels, lack of oxygen causes your vision to darken from the edges until it looks like a tunnel.
GRAYLING: Afterlife ideas are very useful for controlling people. Some find the idea psychologically supportive; others find they make death a more terrifying prospect: death becomes a dangerous country, ruled by strange powers, into which we creep nervous and ill-prepared. It sometimes happens that the more devout or credulous a believer is, the more horror the inevitability of death holds: I have personally known people tormented by their sense of sin and their terror at what will greet them when they die. It is an unspeakable cruelty.
ARMSTRONG: The afterlife is a red herring as far as I'm concerned. I prefer to be agnostic on that matter. It's only really Christianity and Islam that are obsessed with it. Endless speculation about the next world deprives you of a great experience in this one.
(LUCRETIUS sits)
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong
ME: Last but not least, Karen Armstrong, writer and campaigner for religious liberty. So: God? What's that all about? What was so 'shallow' about Grayling's analysis?
(ARMSTRONG stands)
ARMSTRONG: In our modern world, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive.
(ARMSTRONG glares at both MCDOWELL and GRAYLING)
During the 16th and 17th centuries, a period that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilisation, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Science achieved such spectacular results that myths were discredited. The meaning of the word 'belief' changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith. 'Belief' originally meant loyalty or trust. Theologians adopted the criteria of science, and the myths of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally and historically verifiable.
MCDOWELL: Myths of Christianity?! Myths! Are you saying Jesus is a myth?!
ARMSTRONG: Jesus was a historical figure, but the gospel stories are myths. The four gospels each tell a different story with a different Jesus.
MCDOWELL: The gospel accounts do not contradict each other. They are complementary. Jesus just changed his mind about certain things every now and again.
ARMSTRONG: This rationalised interpretation of religion resulted in two modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished myth, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion.
Historically, atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred but a rejection of particular concept of the divine. It was a term of abuse. Christians and Muslims were both called 'atheists' by their pagan contemporaries. During the early modern period, the idea of God was reduced to a scientific hypothesis, and God became the ultimate explanation of the universe. When that happened, it was only a matter of time before atheism became a viable proposition, because scientists were soon able to find alternative explanatory hypotheses that rendered 'God' redundant. This would not have been a disaster had not the churches come to rely on scientific proof.
The 'New Atheists', such as Grayling here, are focused almost exclusively on the God of the fundamentalists. I can sympathise with their irritation, but it is a shame they express themselves so intemperately. Some of their criticisms are valid. Religious people have committed atrocities, and fundamentalist theology is indeed...
(ARMSTRONG glances at MCDOWELL, who fidgets in his seat)
GRAYLING: Bullshit?
ARMSTRONG: (after a pause)... 'unskilful', as the Buddhists would say. The New Atheists refuse on principle to dialogue with theologians, and so their analysis is based on such poor theology. They are not radical enough. Many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God is (a) not a supernatural being and (b) non-existent.
GRAYLING: Eh?
MCDOWELL: Atheists! Traitors to their faiths!
ARMSTRONG: In making these assertions their aim was not to deny God but to safeguard God's transcendence.
GRAYLING: That makes no sense.
ARMSTRONG: In our talkative and opinionated society, we seem to have lost sight of this important tradition, which could solve many of our religious problems. People believed that 'God' exceeded our thoughts and concepts. This was not, of course, a universal attitude, but it was a major element in monotheist and non-theist religions. We have lost sight of this important insight; this might be one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so difficult today.
GRAYLING: Um. Objection. Non-theistic religions?
ARMSTRONG: You know, Buddhists, Jainists, Confucians. Those guys.
GRAYLING: Those are in fact not religions but philosophies. This is a very important distinction, and one that is widely overlooked. Buddhism in its original and Theravada forms is a philosophy, not a religion. So is Jainism. So most emphatically is Confucianism. The differentiator is that these philosophies are not centred upon belief in, worship of, and obedience to a deity or deities, from whom or from which come the commands that construct the correct form of life for the devotee. Buddhism and Jainism involve metaphysical views that prompt some to assimilate them to religion, but this is a bad mistake.
ARMSTRONG: That’s a very chauvinistic Western view, if I may say so. You’re saying this is what we regard as religion, and anything that doesn't measure up to that isn't. I think a Buddhist or a Confucian would be very offended to hear that he or she was not practising a religion.
ME: Then what, in your opinion, is religion?
ARMSTRONG: Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.
ME: Belief in an external god can be unreligious?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, people very often talk about God as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker. This is very immature. Often, we heard about God at about the same time as we were told about Santa Claus. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our idea of God remained infantile. Not surprisingly, when we attained intellectual maturity, many of us rejected the God we had inherited.
MCDOWELL: You sound an awful lot like an atheist to me. Do you believe in God?
ARMSTRONG: People who ask that question often have a rather simplistic notion of what God is. No, I do not believe in a Supreme Being, a divine personality, who created the world and everything in it.
GRAYLING: So you're an atheist. You are not religious.
ARMSTRONG: I am religious. It’s helped me immeasurably to overcome despair in my own life. But I have no hard and fast answers.
GRAYLING: Religious people are superstitious. They believe in at least one supernatural agency whose existence impacts their life. You don't believe in any?
ARMSTRONG: No.
GRAYLING: You are not religious, neither are Confucians or Jainists.
ARMSTRONG: Western people think the supernatural is the essence of religion, but that’s rather like the idea of an external god. It’s a minority view worldwide. I really get so distressed on behalf of Buddhists and Confucians and Hindus to have a few Western philosophers loftily dismissing their religion as not religious because it doesn't conform to Western norms. It seems the height of parochialism.
(Awkward silence)
ME: Let's move on and try to remember that you both have different understandings of the word 'religion'. So, you were saying that people in pre-modern times did not take the scripture all that literally?
ARMSTRONG: We must not idealise the past. Every age has its bigots, and there have always been people who were less theologically skilled than others and interpreted the truths of religion in a prosaic, factual manner.
GRAYLING: Such as, for example, the majority of the illiterate uneducated population of the pre-modern world. But do go on.
ARMSTRONG: In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognised ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge. Plato called them Mythos and Logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. It was considered unwise to mix the two. Logos (reason) was the pragmatic mode of thought; it had to correspond accurately to external reality. But Logos had it's limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles. For that, people turned to Mythos or 'myth'.
In popular parlance, a 'myth' is something that is not true. But in the past, both Mythos and Logos helped people to live creatively in a confusing world, though in a different ways. A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.
A myth would not be effective if people simply 'believed' in it. It was a programme of action. It could put you in the correct spiritual or psychological posture but it was up to you to take the next step and make the 'truth' of the myth a reality in your own life. Myths showed us how to live more richly and intensely, how to cope with our mortality, and how to endure the suffering that flesh is heir to.
People re-enacted their myths in stylised ceremonies that worked aesthetically upon participants and, like any work of art, introduced them to a deeper dimension of existence. Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action. Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.
Religion is an art form; theology is poetry. It’s a way of finding meaning in a world that is violent and cruel and often seems meaningless. And art is hard work. You don’t just dash off a painting. It takes years of study. Religion is like any other activity. It’s like cooking or sex or science. You have good art, sex and science, and bad art, sex and science. Like any skill, some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and others will miss the point entirely.
Humans seek out experiences that touch us deeply and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being. A musician can lose herself in her music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world as he speeds down the slope. It is a satisfaction that goes deeper than merely 'feeling good'. It is what the Greeks called Ekstasis, a 'stepping outside' the norm. All art aspires to this; so too, at its best, does theology.
The early Daoists saw religion as a 'knack' to be learned by constant practice; people who acquired this 'knack' discovered a transcendent dimension of that was not simply an external reality 'out there' but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality, which they have called God, Dao, Brahman or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. Today, people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs or sport.
ME: Right, so religion is about art - symbols, myths, and imagery - that leads to this ecstatic transcendent experience? And this transcendence is what we call 'God'?
ARMSTRONG: One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to the extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Time for a history lesson...
In tenth century India, a name was given to the ultimate reality: Brahman was the unseen principle that enabled all things to grow and flourish. It was a power that was higher, deeper and more fundamental than the gods. Because it transcended the limitations of personality, it would be entirely inappropriate to pray to Brahman or expect it to answer your prayers. Brahman was the sacred energy that held all the disparate elements of the world together and prevented it from falling apart. You could never define Brahman, because language refers only to individual beings and Brahman was 'the All'; it was everything that existed, as well the inner meaning of all existence.
The ultimate reality was not a personalised god, but a mystery that could never be plumbed. The Chinese called it 'Dao', the fundamental 'Way' of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Dao had no qualities, no form; it was not a god; it pre-dated heaven and earth, and was beyond divinity. You could not say anything about the Dao, because it transcended ordinary categories: it was more ancient than antiquity but was not old, because it went far beyond any form of 'existence' known to humans.
In the ancient world, people felt a yearning for the absolute, sensed its presence all around them, and went to great lengths to cultivate their sense of the transcendent in creative myths. But they also felt estranged from it. Almost every culture has developed a myth of a lost paradise, from which men and women were ejected at the beginning of time. It expressed an inchoate conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain. There must have been a time when people had enjoyed a greater share in the fullness of being and had not been subject to sorrow, disease, bereavement, loneliness, old age, and death.
This nostalgia informed the cult of 'sacred geography', one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas. Certain places that stood out from the norm seemed to speak of 'something else'. The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred 'centre' that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective.
GRAYLING: Could you get to the point?
ARMSTRONG: The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that are engrained in our thoughts and behaviour but are also the source of so much of our pain. The Greeks called this process Kenosis, 'emptying out'. Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, and draw attention to special qualities, you experienced an immense peace. When you learn to accept that there are some things beyond your control or intellectual grasp, you experience a sense of release. Poets, philosophers, mathematicians and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.
One of the first people to make it crystal clear that holiness was inseparable from altruism was the Chinese sage Confucius; he was the first person - that we know of - to write down the Golden Rule: 'Never do to others what you would not like them to do to.' Living a compassionate, empathic life takes you beyond yourself, giving momentary glimpses of a sacred reality not unlike the God worshipped by monotheists. It was both immanent and transcendent: it welled up from within, but was also experienced as an external presence.
MCDOWELL: Could you talk about God please? I'm sick of this heathen stuff.
ARMSTRONG: The ancient Israelites decided to make a new mythology in which Yahweh, the 'holy one of Israel', was the only symbol of ultimate transcendence.
Today, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical texts. There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role morals and give us precise moral teaching. Neither of these was the intention of the biblical authors. It is a mistake, therefore, to expect the saga to be historically accurate in our sense. It is true that the biblical authors were more interested in human history than most of their contemporaries, but it is impossible to seek a single, consistent message in the Bible, since a directive in one book is likely to be countermanded in another.
MCDOWELL: Nope. Inerrant Word of God. No contradictions.
ARMSTRONG: Any image of the divine is bound to be inadequate, because it cannot possibly express the all-encompassing reality of being itself. If it is not balanced by other symbols, there is a danger that people will think of the sacred too simplistically. Idolatry has always been one of the pitfalls of monotheism. Because its chief symbol of the divine was a personalised deity, people could easily start to imagine 'him' as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they could use to endorse their own ideas, practices, hatreds and loves.
When a finite idea is made supreme, it is compelled to destroy anything that opposes it. A lot of modern theology is idolatrous, because it assumes that a man-made idea of 'God' is an adequate representation of transcendence. Atheists are right to condemn this. An intelligent atheist critique helps rid the mind of facile theology that impedes understanding of the divine.
MCDOWELL: Intelligent atheist critique?! Atheists are intellectually dishonest at best! They invent intellectual doubts just to excuse their immoral lives!
(GRAYLING sighs)
ARMSTRONG: Moving on to Christianity...
Like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament records a wide range of views rather than a single, orthodox teaching. Sceptics point derisively to the obvious discrepancies between the gospels, but these were not supposed to be factual and the final redactors felt no qualms about including such contradictory stories.
MCDOWELL: Nope. Inerrant Word of God. No contradictions.
ARMSTRONG: In 325 CE, Constantine, unfortunately, decided to summon all the Christian bishops to Nicaea to create the first Christian creed. The council issued a statement that Christ the Word had not been created but had been begotten 'in an ineffable, indescribable manner' from the Father. This attempt to impose a uniform belief on the bishops and the faithful was counter-productive.
Decades later, Basil of Caesarea, formulated the doctrine of the Trinity to show Christians that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were not three distinct 'gods'. When we spoke of Father, Son and Spirit being One God, we were not saying 1+1+1=3, but infinity+infinity+infinity=infinity. The purpose of the Trinity was to remind Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call 'God' was inaccessible to rational analysis.
When they meditated on the God that they had known as three and one, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation to any being in their experience. It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people who had seen God as a mere being. In the modern period, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity, even though that was the point.
Some Western Christians read the Genesis creation story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. This peculiarly Western Christian interpretation was introduced controversially by Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century because his doctrine of Original Sin needed the story to be historically accurate.
Eastern Christians found his interpretation too literal, but Augustine was no diehard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously and his 'principle of accommodation' dominated biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period: God had adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had received it; God had accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the Israelites could understand it; whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.
GRAYLING: Clutching at straws.
ARMSTRONG: In the 6th century, someone writing under the pseudonym Denys the Areopagite wrote a theological treatise which had a major influence on nearly every major Western theologian during the medieval period. When his writings were translated into Latin in the 9th century, they achieved near-canonical status in Europe. The fact that very few people have heard of him today is, perhaps, a symptom of our current religious malaise.
Religious people are always talking about God and it is important that they do. But they also need to know when to fall silent. Denys' theological method was a deliberate attempt to bring all the Christians he taught to that point by making them conscious of the limits of language. We can only do that by talking about God and listening carefully to what we say.
In the Bible, God is given 52 names. God is called a rock, and is likened to the sky, the sea and a warrior. All that is fine, as far as it goes. A rock is a very good symbol of God's permanence and stability. But because a rock is not alive, it is obviously worlds apart from the God that is life itself, so we will never be tempted to say that God is a rock.
The more sophisticated attributes of God, however - Ineffability, Unity, Goodness and the like - are more dangerous, because they gave us the false impression that we knew exactly what God is like. 'He' is good, wise, intelligent; 'he' is one; 'he' is Trinity. At first, each one sounds appropriate, but closer examination reveals it to be inherently unsatisfactory.
It is true that God is one - but this term applies only to be beings defined by numerical quantities. God is the Trinity, but that does not mean the three persona add up to any kind of triad that is familiar to us. God is nameless, but he has a multiplicity of names. God is intelligible, yet unknowable. God is certainly not 'good' like a 'good' human or a 'good' meal. Even the most exalted things we say about God are bound to be misleading.
The Bible, of course, cannot be read literally. It is full of incredible and fictitious fairy tales. From the very first chapter of Genesis, the Bible calls God a creator as if he was a mere artisan, and goes on to say even more ludicrous things. When we read the Bible, we have to deny, one after another, the inadequate descriptions of God. It is easy to deny the physical attributes: God is plainly not a rock, a warrior, or a creator. But we also have to deny the more conceptual attributes: God is not great, God is not love, God is not truth, God is not power, God is not life, God is not divine. We cannot even say that God 'exists', because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself. God is not one of the things that are; God is all things in everything and nothing in anything.
GRAYLING: That makes no sense.
ARMSTRONG: This was not simply an arid logical conundrum that left people baffled, it was a spiritual exercise consisting of three phases:
Phase One: Affirm what God is: God is good, God is existent, etc
Phase Two: Deny each attribute: God is not good, God is non-existent, etc
Phase Three: Realise that phase two is just as inaccurate as phase one, then deny the denials: God is not bad, God is not non-existent, etc
In the course of this exercise, we learn that God transcends the capability of human speech, and is beyond every assertion and beyond every denial. What we call God falls neither within the predicate of existence or non-existence. This exercise leads to the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God. As our language fails, we experience ekstasis.
Once we have left the idols of thought behind, we are no longer worshipping a simulacrum, a projection of our own ideas and desires. There are no longer any false ideas obstructing our access to the inexpressible truth and we can remain silent in the presence of the Unknown God.
Fast forward to the 13th century: Thomas Aquinas. Another great theologian. He taught that whenever someone made a statement about God, they must realise that it was inescapably inadequate. When we contemplate God, we are talking of what cannot be contained in words. By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and the audience to silent awe. Thomas' huge output can be seen as a campaign to counter the tendency to domesticate the divine transcendence.
His influence on Catholic thought has been immense, but he has recently become a laughing stock to atheists - and an embarrassment to some theologians - because of the apparent inadequacy of his 'proofs' for the existence of God. Grayling mentioned one earlier: that there must be a First Cause or a Necessary Being which started the universe in motion, and this is 'what people call God'.
But straight after making the claim that 'what people call God' must 'exist', we have no idea what the word 'exists' can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this means, and the same goes for God's attributes. We cannot know the 'existence' of God anymore than we can define God. We cannot ask if there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a 'sort of thing'.
All that the 'proofs' achieve is to show that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what 'God' means. Because of something undefined, there is something instead of nothing, but we do not know what we have proved the existence of. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery. Thomas was not trying to convince a sceptic that supernatural being existed.
Like any good pre-modern theologian, Thomas made it clear that all language about God can only be approximate, because our words refer to limited, finite categories. He knew that our doctrines about God are simply human constructs. He knew it was impossible either to prove that the universe was created out of nothing or had always been: 'there is no proving that men and skies and rocks did not always exist, and it is well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery.'
Long story short: logic, mathematics, and science became popular. University curriculums required students to study logic, maths and science before they began their theological training. Theologians increasingly read scripture literally and sought to prove that the contents of Bible stories were historical events. Even in the 13th century, this led to a conflict between religion and science. There was a backlash against Aristotelian physics, because if God had to conform to Aristotle's natural laws, he could not be all-powerful. People were already thinking of God as just another being, another member of the cosmos, for whom such a contradiction would be impossible.
And it only got worse. Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as 'creation science, which regards the myths of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in schools because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.
It is difficult to speak about God these days, because people immediately ask you if a god exists. This means that the symbol of God is no longer working. Instead of pointing beyond itself to an ineffable reality, the humanly conceived construct that we call 'God' has become the end of the story. The Biblical God is supposed to be starter kit, not the last word, which guides us to transcendent appreciation of the Unknown God.
(Puzzled looks all round)
MCDOWELL: Karen?
ARMSTRONG: Yes?
MCDOWELL: You are at best a pantheist, at worst an atheist.
GRAYLING: So, the greatest theologians all realised that the Bible is fiction and that the God character is just an attempt by humans to put the ineffable unknown into words?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
GRAYLING: I don't understand how this is a defence of religion.
ME: Karen's book took me by surprise. The first half seems to be an attack on religion, but it gets very dodgy in the second half when she starts talking about science, modernity, and the New Atheists. It often felt like I was reading a Wikipedia summary by someone who didn't understand science.
GRAYLING: Oooh burn!
ARMSTRONG: What do you mean?
ME: Well, for example, your comparison between physics and biology, and how you link this to atheism.
ARMSTRONG: You mean "While physicists have felt comfortable with the unknowing that seems to be an essential component of intellectual advance, some biologists, whose discipline has not yet experienced a major reversal, have remained confident of their capacity to discover absolute truth and have started to preach a militant form of atheism."
ME: Bullshit. Utter bullshit. Biology, at least as much as the other sciences, revels in the unknowing. You also cheerfully ignore the physicists who are part of the New Atheist movement, such as Lawrence Krauss and Victor Stenger. And all the other non-biologists.
ARMSTRONG: But science depends on faith, intuition and aesthetic vision as well as on reason!
ME: Yes, in the formulation of hypotheses and theories, but these are dismissed or accepted based on reason. Not faith, intuition or aesthetic vision.
(ARMSTRONG sulks)
ME: Despite all this, your book is my favourite of those we've discussed today.
ARMSTRONG: Thankyou.
ME: Not that I agree with you. My views are similar to those of Anthony and Lucretius. You didn't reach what seemed - to me - to be the obvious conclusion to the information you presented. You weren't radical enough. You say that in pre-modern times, people re-enacted their myths in rituals, including Christians?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, Christians were taught to see the Mass as a symbolic re-enactment of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. The fact that they could not follow the Latin added to its mystique. Much of the Mass was recited by the priest in an undertone, accompanied by solemn silence or liturgical drama, with music and stylised gestures. They listened to scripture, recited piecemeal, often in a foreign language and always in a heightened liturgical context.
ME: And in the modern period, this all stopped?
ARMSTRONG: During the Reformation, the reformers declared that the Mass was no longer a symbolic re-enactment but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were historical facts, and the alacrity with which people seized upon these new teachings suggests that many Christians in Europe were losing the older habits of thought. In tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctly 'modern' notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated and objective emerged in the Western world.
ME: Right, but the old way of thinking survived in new forms. Today, millions of people re-enact and celebrate the stories of new mythologies. Everyone knows that the stories of these new mythologies aren't literally true; they are valued beyond that. These myths provide meaning and inspiration; they often advocate a more acceptable morality than that of the old myths; they explore the tough questions and lead people to a transcendent experience.
I am talking about fandom, about the fans of the various fictional universes that are so popular nowadays. You seemed to suggest that the ancient mythologies are the best, and that modernity has made our culture spiritually sterile. I am not the first to notice this comparison, and was very disappointed that you didn't spot it while researching your book. Later this year, there's even a conference on the comparison which I am considering attending.
Perhaps we could combine non-literalist theology with scientific enquiry and an appreciation of fiction?
(ARMSTRONG sighs)
ME: I think we can agree that believing in something despite an absence of evidence or good reasoning is silly, right?
MCDOWELL: Of course, but Christianity is a rational, factual faith. I'm going next!
(MCDOWELL stands)
Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell
ME: Very well, Mr McDowell, give us a quick taster of Evidence That Demands A Verdict. Josh is a evangelical Christian apologist from America.
MCDOWELL: My book is mainly aimed at Christians who want to spread the word of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. I have bested the arguments of many Atheist Professors, and I will beat yours, Grayling! Have you considered, atheist, that to be consistently assured your belief is accurate, you must also claim omniscience! For there always exists the possibility of the existence of God outside your knowledge!
GRAYLING: That was one of the arguments I didn't think I needed to cover. Replace 'God' with literally any other supernatural entity and your argument is equally valid. By your reasoning we should all believe in fairies, unicorns, dragons, the Olympian gods, etc, just because there is a remote probability, vanishingly close to zero, that those things exist.
MCDOWELL: Moving on. Many sincere students of the Bible are led astray because of a bias against supernatural explanations. They look for natural explanations of events, rather than just accepting the truth of the supernatural explanation. Besides, even if there is a natural explanation for a Biblical miracle, that does not detract from the truth of the supernatural explanation, because God controls nature. Students of the Bible are often troubled to find statements in the Bible that appear to contradict other statements in the Bible. They should give the text the benefit of the doubt, and just accept that it is not actually a contradiction. Jesus existed; therefore, the New Testament gospels are accurate historical accounts; therefore, Jesus is either Lord, Liar or Lunatic. If Jesus was a liar or a lunatic, then how come he was so peaceful and his teachings so wise? How did he perform all his miracles? Therefore: Jesus is our Lord and Saviour, God in human form.
ME: I think we'll stop there.
MCDOWELL: But I have so much more to say! My book is 760 pages of fine print! The Mosaic Law was definitely dictated to Moses by God. The fact that there are older law codes of equal or greater complexity to the Mosaic Law is not evidence that it is man-made. Those earlier law codes are the result of previous revelations by God which he just neglected to mention in the Bible.
ME: Stop. Please. I lost some respect for humanity while reading your book, and I'll never get that back. I couldn't handle the leaps of faith, the circular reasoning, the twisting of the truth, the false dichotomies and trichotomies, how much you pad out your arguments with unnecessary verbosity and repetition so they look more impressive. There is a desperate tone running through the text. I was shocked by how deceptive you are, how much you lie, in your book. Is lying not one of the ten commandments?
MCDOWELL: Yes, but it is a forgiveable sin. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is One Unforgivable Sin. God will forgive me for lying, especially if I've lied in order to save souls. There are Christians out there with doubts, and there are non-Christians who haven't yet accepted Jesus into their hearts. They are in danger of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. I am safe; God will forgive my lying. But if those guys blaspheme, that's it: straight to Hell, no chance of forgiveness. If I have to lie to save souls, God will understand and forgive.
ME: That reasoning has been used to justify quite a number of atrocities throughout history...
MCDOWELL: But we have the truth.
(GRAYLING sighs)
ME: So you've converted many Atheist Professors in your time?
MCDOWELL: Yes! Very many! A professor of literature once asked me what I thought of Greek mythology, and I told him that there is an obvious difference between what is recorded in the Bible and the stories in Greek mythology: the Bible tells of historical people, whereas the characters of Greek myths are fictional. That showed him!
ARMSTRONG: This is embarrassing. Can we move on?
GRAYLING: People thought Plato was the son of a god.
ME: There are so many myths about historical figures. Your book's desperate tone was particularly apparent in the Atheist Professor anecdotes. I got the impression that you'd thought of the responses long after the encounters had ended, is this right?
(MCDOWELL doesn't answer)
ME: There are quite a few thorough rebuttals to your work freely available on the internet. You have so far refrained from answering their criticisms, why is that?
MCDOWELL: The internet is greatest threat to Christianity.
ME: If you see the Internet as a threat, rather than a means of spreading the truth, does that mean you acknowledge, on some level, the weakness of your arguments?
MCDOWELL: You need to accept Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour into your heart. Anyone who does not believe in him is going to eternal damnation in Hell after they die.
ME: It's a shame, for you, that the evidence doesn't support that verdict.
MCDOWELL: It's a shame, for you, that you're going to Hell.
(MCDOWELL sits)
On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius
ME: Lucretius, why don't you go next? He's come all the way from Ancient Rome to be with us today. He finished writing On the Nature of the Universe around 55 B.C.E. Luc, what are your views on the idea of an afterlife?
(LUCRETIUS stands)
LUCRETIUS: For what is to follow, my friends, lay aside your cares and lend undistracted ears and attentive mind to true reason. Do not scornfully reject, before you have understood, the gifts I have marshalled for you with zealous devotion.
Often it is religion that is the mother of sinful and impious deeds. At Aulis, the altar of the Virgin Goddess was foully stained with the blood of an innocent girl, slaughtered so that a fleet might sail under happy auspices. Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.
GRAYLING: You have no idea.
LUCRETIUS: Please don't interrupt.
If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets. As it is, they have no power of resistance, because they are haunted by the fear of eternal punishment after death. They know nothing of the nature of the spirit. Many a time before now men have betrayed their country and their beloved parents in an effort to escape the halls of Hell. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by sunbeams, the shining shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature.
Some people who know nothing of matter believe that nature without the guidance of the gods could not bring round the changing seasons in such perfect conformity to human needs, creating the crops and those other blessings that mortals are led to enjoy by the guide of life, pleasure, which coaxes them to reproduce their kind, lest the human race should perish. Obviously, in imagining that the gods established everything for the sake of men, they have stumbled in all respects far from the path of truth. Even if I knew nothing of atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power; it is so full of imperfections.
GRAYLING: Mate, I already covered that. Stick to the afterlife stuff.
LUCRETIUS: Just showing my support. Please don't interrupt.
The mind, which we often call the intellect, is part of a man, no less than hand or foot or eye. There is also a vital spirit in our limbs. The mind and spirit are interconnected. The mind is firmly lodged in the mid-region of the breast. Here is where we feel fear and alarm. Here we feel the touch of joy. Here, then, is the seat of intellect and mind. The rest of the vital spirit, diffused throughout the body, obeys the mind and moves under its direction and impulse.
ME: Nowadays, we know that the brain, in the head, is the seat of intellect. What you call the 'vital spirit', we might call the 'nervous system'.
LUCRETIUS: That's nice. When I'm from this is cutting edge science. Please don't interrupt.
Mind and spirit are both composed of matter. We see them propelling the limbs, rousing the body from sleep, changing the expression of the face and guiding and steering the whole man - activities that all clearly involve touch, and touch in turn involves matter.
How can we deny their material nature? You see the mind sharing in the body's experiences and sympathising with it. The substance of the mind must be material, since it is affected by the impact of material weapons. Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death? Since the mind is thus invaded by the contagion of disease, you must acknowledge that it is destructible, for pain and sickness are the artificers of death.
Conversely, we see that the mind, like a sick body, can be healed and directed by medicine. This too is presage that life is mortal. When you embark on an attempt to alter the mind or to direct any other natural object, it is fair to suppose that you are adding certain parts or transposing them or subtracting some trifle at any rate from their sum. But an immortal object will not let its parts be rearranged or added to, or the least bit drop off. For, if ever anything is so transformed as to overstep its own limits, this means the immediate death of what was before. By this susceptibility both to sickness and to medicine, the mind displays marks of mortality. So false reasoning is plainly confronted by true fact.
Mind and body as a living force derive their vigour and vitality from their conjunction. Without body, the mind alone cannot perform the vital motions. Bereft of spirit, the body cannot persist and exercise its senses. As the eye uprooted and separated from the body cannot see, so we perceive that the spirit and mind by themselves are powerless. It is only because their atoms are held in by the whole body, intermingled through veins and flesh, sinews and bones, that they are kept together so as to perform the motions that generate sentience.
No one on the point of death seems to feel his spirit retiring intact right out of his body. If our mind were indeed immortal, it would not complain of extinction in the hour of death, but would feel rather that it was escaping from confinement and sloughing off its garments like a snake.
From all this it follows that death is nothing to us and no concern of ours, since our tenure of the mind is mortal. When we shall be no more - when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted - to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all. Nothing will have power to stir our senses, not though earth be fused with sea and sea with sky.
If the future holds travail and anguish in store, the self must be in existence, when that time comes, in order to experience it. But from this fate we are redeemed by death, which denies existence to the self that might have suffered these tribulations. Rest assured, therefore, that we have nothing to fear in death. One who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from one who has never been born, when once this mortal life is ended.
In sleep, when mind and body alike are at rest, no one misses himself or sighs for life. If such sleep were prolonged to eternity, no longing for ourselves would trouble us. Death, therefore, must be regarded, so far as we are concerned, as having much less existence than sleep, if anything can have less existence than what we perceive to be nothing.
The old is always thrust aside to make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the wreck of another. There is no murky pit of Hell awaiting anyone. There is need of matter, so that later generations may arise; when they have lived out their span, they will follow you. Bygone generations have taken your road, and those to come will take it no less. So one thing will never cease to spring from another. To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease. Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in the sight - anything depressing - anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep?"
(LUCRETIUS bows. I, GRAYLING, and ARMSTRONG applaud. MCDOWELL looks sullen.)
ME: Beautiful! I find your writing on death more consoling than any infantile afterlife wankery.
GRAYLING: (shouting) YOLO!
MCDOWELL: But what about near-death experiences? People have visions of the afterlife!
ME: The visions are not consistent across religious traditions. Christians see Jesus, Muslims see Muhammad, etc. From the variety of visions, we can conclude that they are hallucinating. As for lights at the end of tunnels, lack of oxygen causes your vision to darken from the edges until it looks like a tunnel.
GRAYLING: Afterlife ideas are very useful for controlling people. Some find the idea psychologically supportive; others find they make death a more terrifying prospect: death becomes a dangerous country, ruled by strange powers, into which we creep nervous and ill-prepared. It sometimes happens that the more devout or credulous a believer is, the more horror the inevitability of death holds: I have personally known people tormented by their sense of sin and their terror at what will greet them when they die. It is an unspeakable cruelty.
ARMSTRONG: The afterlife is a red herring as far as I'm concerned. I prefer to be agnostic on that matter. It's only really Christianity and Islam that are obsessed with it. Endless speculation about the next world deprives you of a great experience in this one.
(LUCRETIUS sits)
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong
ME: Last but not least, Karen Armstrong, writer and campaigner for religious liberty. So: God? What's that all about? What was so 'shallow' about Grayling's analysis?
(ARMSTRONG stands)
ARMSTRONG: In our modern world, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive.
(ARMSTRONG glares at both MCDOWELL and GRAYLING)
During the 16th and 17th centuries, a period that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilisation, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Science achieved such spectacular results that myths were discredited. The meaning of the word 'belief' changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith. 'Belief' originally meant loyalty or trust. Theologians adopted the criteria of science, and the myths of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally and historically verifiable.
MCDOWELL: Myths of Christianity?! Myths! Are you saying Jesus is a myth?!
ARMSTRONG: Jesus was a historical figure, but the gospel stories are myths. The four gospels each tell a different story with a different Jesus.
MCDOWELL: The gospel accounts do not contradict each other. They are complementary. Jesus just changed his mind about certain things every now and again.
ARMSTRONG: This rationalised interpretation of religion resulted in two modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished myth, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion.
Historically, atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred but a rejection of particular concept of the divine. It was a term of abuse. Christians and Muslims were both called 'atheists' by their pagan contemporaries. During the early modern period, the idea of God was reduced to a scientific hypothesis, and God became the ultimate explanation of the universe. When that happened, it was only a matter of time before atheism became a viable proposition, because scientists were soon able to find alternative explanatory hypotheses that rendered 'God' redundant. This would not have been a disaster had not the churches come to rely on scientific proof.
The 'New Atheists', such as Grayling here, are focused almost exclusively on the God of the fundamentalists. I can sympathise with their irritation, but it is a shame they express themselves so intemperately. Some of their criticisms are valid. Religious people have committed atrocities, and fundamentalist theology is indeed...
(ARMSTRONG glances at MCDOWELL, who fidgets in his seat)
GRAYLING: Bullshit?
ARMSTRONG: (after a pause)... 'unskilful', as the Buddhists would say. The New Atheists refuse on principle to dialogue with theologians, and so their analysis is based on such poor theology. They are not radical enough. Many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God is (a) not a supernatural being and (b) non-existent.
GRAYLING: Eh?
MCDOWELL: Atheists! Traitors to their faiths!
ARMSTRONG: In making these assertions their aim was not to deny God but to safeguard God's transcendence.
GRAYLING: That makes no sense.
ARMSTRONG: In our talkative and opinionated society, we seem to have lost sight of this important tradition, which could solve many of our religious problems. People believed that 'God' exceeded our thoughts and concepts. This was not, of course, a universal attitude, but it was a major element in monotheist and non-theist religions. We have lost sight of this important insight; this might be one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so difficult today.
GRAYLING: Um. Objection. Non-theistic religions?
ARMSTRONG: You know, Buddhists, Jainists, Confucians. Those guys.
GRAYLING: Those are in fact not religions but philosophies. This is a very important distinction, and one that is widely overlooked. Buddhism in its original and Theravada forms is a philosophy, not a religion. So is Jainism. So most emphatically is Confucianism. The differentiator is that these philosophies are not centred upon belief in, worship of, and obedience to a deity or deities, from whom or from which come the commands that construct the correct form of life for the devotee. Buddhism and Jainism involve metaphysical views that prompt some to assimilate them to religion, but this is a bad mistake.
ARMSTRONG: That’s a very chauvinistic Western view, if I may say so. You’re saying this is what we regard as religion, and anything that doesn't measure up to that isn't. I think a Buddhist or a Confucian would be very offended to hear that he or she was not practising a religion.
ME: Then what, in your opinion, is religion?
ARMSTRONG: Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.
ME: Belief in an external god can be unreligious?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, people very often talk about God as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker. This is very immature. Often, we heard about God at about the same time as we were told about Santa Claus. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our idea of God remained infantile. Not surprisingly, when we attained intellectual maturity, many of us rejected the God we had inherited.
MCDOWELL: You sound an awful lot like an atheist to me. Do you believe in God?
ARMSTRONG: People who ask that question often have a rather simplistic notion of what God is. No, I do not believe in a Supreme Being, a divine personality, who created the world and everything in it.
GRAYLING: So you're an atheist. You are not religious.
ARMSTRONG: I am religious. It’s helped me immeasurably to overcome despair in my own life. But I have no hard and fast answers.
GRAYLING: Religious people are superstitious. They believe in at least one supernatural agency whose existence impacts their life. You don't believe in any?
ARMSTRONG: No.
GRAYLING: You are not religious, neither are Confucians or Jainists.
ARMSTRONG: Western people think the supernatural is the essence of religion, but that’s rather like the idea of an external god. It’s a minority view worldwide. I really get so distressed on behalf of Buddhists and Confucians and Hindus to have a few Western philosophers loftily dismissing their religion as not religious because it doesn't conform to Western norms. It seems the height of parochialism.
(Awkward silence)
ME: Let's move on and try to remember that you both have different understandings of the word 'religion'. So, you were saying that people in pre-modern times did not take the scripture all that literally?
ARMSTRONG: We must not idealise the past. Every age has its bigots, and there have always been people who were less theologically skilled than others and interpreted the truths of religion in a prosaic, factual manner.
GRAYLING: Such as, for example, the majority of the illiterate uneducated population of the pre-modern world. But do go on.
ARMSTRONG: In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognised ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge. Plato called them Mythos and Logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. It was considered unwise to mix the two. Logos (reason) was the pragmatic mode of thought; it had to correspond accurately to external reality. But Logos had it's limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles. For that, people turned to Mythos or 'myth'.
In popular parlance, a 'myth' is something that is not true. But in the past, both Mythos and Logos helped people to live creatively in a confusing world, though in a different ways. A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.
A myth would not be effective if people simply 'believed' in it. It was a programme of action. It could put you in the correct spiritual or psychological posture but it was up to you to take the next step and make the 'truth' of the myth a reality in your own life. Myths showed us how to live more richly and intensely, how to cope with our mortality, and how to endure the suffering that flesh is heir to.
People re-enacted their myths in stylised ceremonies that worked aesthetically upon participants and, like any work of art, introduced them to a deeper dimension of existence. Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action. Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.
Religion is an art form; theology is poetry. It’s a way of finding meaning in a world that is violent and cruel and often seems meaningless. And art is hard work. You don’t just dash off a painting. It takes years of study. Religion is like any other activity. It’s like cooking or sex or science. You have good art, sex and science, and bad art, sex and science. Like any skill, some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and others will miss the point entirely.
Humans seek out experiences that touch us deeply and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being. A musician can lose herself in her music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world as he speeds down the slope. It is a satisfaction that goes deeper than merely 'feeling good'. It is what the Greeks called Ekstasis, a 'stepping outside' the norm. All art aspires to this; so too, at its best, does theology.
The early Daoists saw religion as a 'knack' to be learned by constant practice; people who acquired this 'knack' discovered a transcendent dimension of that was not simply an external reality 'out there' but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality, which they have called God, Dao, Brahman or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. Today, people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs or sport.
ME: Right, so religion is about art - symbols, myths, and imagery - that leads to this ecstatic transcendent experience? And this transcendence is what we call 'God'?
ARMSTRONG: One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to the extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Time for a history lesson...
In tenth century India, a name was given to the ultimate reality: Brahman was the unseen principle that enabled all things to grow and flourish. It was a power that was higher, deeper and more fundamental than the gods. Because it transcended the limitations of personality, it would be entirely inappropriate to pray to Brahman or expect it to answer your prayers. Brahman was the sacred energy that held all the disparate elements of the world together and prevented it from falling apart. You could never define Brahman, because language refers only to individual beings and Brahman was 'the All'; it was everything that existed, as well the inner meaning of all existence.
The ultimate reality was not a personalised god, but a mystery that could never be plumbed. The Chinese called it 'Dao', the fundamental 'Way' of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Dao had no qualities, no form; it was not a god; it pre-dated heaven and earth, and was beyond divinity. You could not say anything about the Dao, because it transcended ordinary categories: it was more ancient than antiquity but was not old, because it went far beyond any form of 'existence' known to humans.
In the ancient world, people felt a yearning for the absolute, sensed its presence all around them, and went to great lengths to cultivate their sense of the transcendent in creative myths. But they also felt estranged from it. Almost every culture has developed a myth of a lost paradise, from which men and women were ejected at the beginning of time. It expressed an inchoate conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain. There must have been a time when people had enjoyed a greater share in the fullness of being and had not been subject to sorrow, disease, bereavement, loneliness, old age, and death.
This nostalgia informed the cult of 'sacred geography', one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas. Certain places that stood out from the norm seemed to speak of 'something else'. The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred 'centre' that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective.
GRAYLING: Could you get to the point?
ARMSTRONG: The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that are engrained in our thoughts and behaviour but are also the source of so much of our pain. The Greeks called this process Kenosis, 'emptying out'. Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, and draw attention to special qualities, you experienced an immense peace. When you learn to accept that there are some things beyond your control or intellectual grasp, you experience a sense of release. Poets, philosophers, mathematicians and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.
One of the first people to make it crystal clear that holiness was inseparable from altruism was the Chinese sage Confucius; he was the first person - that we know of - to write down the Golden Rule: 'Never do to others what you would not like them to do to.' Living a compassionate, empathic life takes you beyond yourself, giving momentary glimpses of a sacred reality not unlike the God worshipped by monotheists. It was both immanent and transcendent: it welled up from within, but was also experienced as an external presence.
MCDOWELL: Could you talk about God please? I'm sick of this heathen stuff.
ARMSTRONG: The ancient Israelites decided to make a new mythology in which Yahweh, the 'holy one of Israel', was the only symbol of ultimate transcendence.
Today, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical texts. There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role morals and give us precise moral teaching. Neither of these was the intention of the biblical authors. It is a mistake, therefore, to expect the saga to be historically accurate in our sense. It is true that the biblical authors were more interested in human history than most of their contemporaries, but it is impossible to seek a single, consistent message in the Bible, since a directive in one book is likely to be countermanded in another.
MCDOWELL: Nope. Inerrant Word of God. No contradictions.
ARMSTRONG: Any image of the divine is bound to be inadequate, because it cannot possibly express the all-encompassing reality of being itself. If it is not balanced by other symbols, there is a danger that people will think of the sacred too simplistically. Idolatry has always been one of the pitfalls of monotheism. Because its chief symbol of the divine was a personalised deity, people could easily start to imagine 'him' as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they could use to endorse their own ideas, practices, hatreds and loves.
When a finite idea is made supreme, it is compelled to destroy anything that opposes it. A lot of modern theology is idolatrous, because it assumes that a man-made idea of 'God' is an adequate representation of transcendence. Atheists are right to condemn this. An intelligent atheist critique helps rid the mind of facile theology that impedes understanding of the divine.
MCDOWELL: Intelligent atheist critique?! Atheists are intellectually dishonest at best! They invent intellectual doubts just to excuse their immoral lives!
(GRAYLING sighs)
ARMSTRONG: Moving on to Christianity...
Like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament records a wide range of views rather than a single, orthodox teaching. Sceptics point derisively to the obvious discrepancies between the gospels, but these were not supposed to be factual and the final redactors felt no qualms about including such contradictory stories.
MCDOWELL: Nope. Inerrant Word of God. No contradictions.
ARMSTRONG: In 325 CE, Constantine, unfortunately, decided to summon all the Christian bishops to Nicaea to create the first Christian creed. The council issued a statement that Christ the Word had not been created but had been begotten 'in an ineffable, indescribable manner' from the Father. This attempt to impose a uniform belief on the bishops and the faithful was counter-productive.
Decades later, Basil of Caesarea, formulated the doctrine of the Trinity to show Christians that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were not three distinct 'gods'. When we spoke of Father, Son and Spirit being One God, we were not saying 1+1+1=3, but infinity+infinity+infinity=infinity. The purpose of the Trinity was to remind Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call 'God' was inaccessible to rational analysis.
When they meditated on the God that they had known as three and one, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation to any being in their experience. It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people who had seen God as a mere being. In the modern period, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity, even though that was the point.
Some Western Christians read the Genesis creation story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. This peculiarly Western Christian interpretation was introduced controversially by Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century because his doctrine of Original Sin needed the story to be historically accurate.
Eastern Christians found his interpretation too literal, but Augustine was no diehard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously and his 'principle of accommodation' dominated biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period: God had adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had received it; God had accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the Israelites could understand it; whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.
GRAYLING: Clutching at straws.
ARMSTRONG: In the 6th century, someone writing under the pseudonym Denys the Areopagite wrote a theological treatise which had a major influence on nearly every major Western theologian during the medieval period. When his writings were translated into Latin in the 9th century, they achieved near-canonical status in Europe. The fact that very few people have heard of him today is, perhaps, a symptom of our current religious malaise.
Religious people are always talking about God and it is important that they do. But they also need to know when to fall silent. Denys' theological method was a deliberate attempt to bring all the Christians he taught to that point by making them conscious of the limits of language. We can only do that by talking about God and listening carefully to what we say.
In the Bible, God is given 52 names. God is called a rock, and is likened to the sky, the sea and a warrior. All that is fine, as far as it goes. A rock is a very good symbol of God's permanence and stability. But because a rock is not alive, it is obviously worlds apart from the God that is life itself, so we will never be tempted to say that God is a rock.
The more sophisticated attributes of God, however - Ineffability, Unity, Goodness and the like - are more dangerous, because they gave us the false impression that we knew exactly what God is like. 'He' is good, wise, intelligent; 'he' is one; 'he' is Trinity. At first, each one sounds appropriate, but closer examination reveals it to be inherently unsatisfactory.
It is true that God is one - but this term applies only to be beings defined by numerical quantities. God is the Trinity, but that does not mean the three persona add up to any kind of triad that is familiar to us. God is nameless, but he has a multiplicity of names. God is intelligible, yet unknowable. God is certainly not 'good' like a 'good' human or a 'good' meal. Even the most exalted things we say about God are bound to be misleading.
The Bible, of course, cannot be read literally. It is full of incredible and fictitious fairy tales. From the very first chapter of Genesis, the Bible calls God a creator as if he was a mere artisan, and goes on to say even more ludicrous things. When we read the Bible, we have to deny, one after another, the inadequate descriptions of God. It is easy to deny the physical attributes: God is plainly not a rock, a warrior, or a creator. But we also have to deny the more conceptual attributes: God is not great, God is not love, God is not truth, God is not power, God is not life, God is not divine. We cannot even say that God 'exists', because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself. God is not one of the things that are; God is all things in everything and nothing in anything.
GRAYLING: That makes no sense.
ARMSTRONG: This was not simply an arid logical conundrum that left people baffled, it was a spiritual exercise consisting of three phases:
Phase One: Affirm what God is: God is good, God is existent, etc
Phase Two: Deny each attribute: God is not good, God is non-existent, etc
Phase Three: Realise that phase two is just as inaccurate as phase one, then deny the denials: God is not bad, God is not non-existent, etc
In the course of this exercise, we learn that God transcends the capability of human speech, and is beyond every assertion and beyond every denial. What we call God falls neither within the predicate of existence or non-existence. This exercise leads to the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God. As our language fails, we experience ekstasis.
Once we have left the idols of thought behind, we are no longer worshipping a simulacrum, a projection of our own ideas and desires. There are no longer any false ideas obstructing our access to the inexpressible truth and we can remain silent in the presence of the Unknown God.
Fast forward to the 13th century: Thomas Aquinas. Another great theologian. He taught that whenever someone made a statement about God, they must realise that it was inescapably inadequate. When we contemplate God, we are talking of what cannot be contained in words. By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and the audience to silent awe. Thomas' huge output can be seen as a campaign to counter the tendency to domesticate the divine transcendence.
His influence on Catholic thought has been immense, but he has recently become a laughing stock to atheists - and an embarrassment to some theologians - because of the apparent inadequacy of his 'proofs' for the existence of God. Grayling mentioned one earlier: that there must be a First Cause or a Necessary Being which started the universe in motion, and this is 'what people call God'.
But straight after making the claim that 'what people call God' must 'exist', we have no idea what the word 'exists' can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this means, and the same goes for God's attributes. We cannot know the 'existence' of God anymore than we can define God. We cannot ask if there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a 'sort of thing'.
All that the 'proofs' achieve is to show that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what 'God' means. Because of something undefined, there is something instead of nothing, but we do not know what we have proved the existence of. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery. Thomas was not trying to convince a sceptic that supernatural being existed.
Like any good pre-modern theologian, Thomas made it clear that all language about God can only be approximate, because our words refer to limited, finite categories. He knew that our doctrines about God are simply human constructs. He knew it was impossible either to prove that the universe was created out of nothing or had always been: 'there is no proving that men and skies and rocks did not always exist, and it is well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery.'
Long story short: logic, mathematics, and science became popular. University curriculums required students to study logic, maths and science before they began their theological training. Theologians increasingly read scripture literally and sought to prove that the contents of Bible stories were historical events. Even in the 13th century, this led to a conflict between religion and science. There was a backlash against Aristotelian physics, because if God had to conform to Aristotle's natural laws, he could not be all-powerful. People were already thinking of God as just another being, another member of the cosmos, for whom such a contradiction would be impossible.
And it only got worse. Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as 'creation science, which regards the myths of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in schools because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.
It is difficult to speak about God these days, because people immediately ask you if a god exists. This means that the symbol of God is no longer working. Instead of pointing beyond itself to an ineffable reality, the humanly conceived construct that we call 'God' has become the end of the story. The Biblical God is supposed to be starter kit, not the last word, which guides us to transcendent appreciation of the Unknown God.
(Puzzled looks all round)
MCDOWELL: Karen?
ARMSTRONG: Yes?
MCDOWELL: You are at best a pantheist, at worst an atheist.
GRAYLING: So, the greatest theologians all realised that the Bible is fiction and that the God character is just an attempt by humans to put the ineffable unknown into words?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
GRAYLING: I don't understand how this is a defence of religion.
ME: Karen's book took me by surprise. The first half seems to be an attack on religion, but it gets very dodgy in the second half when she starts talking about science, modernity, and the New Atheists. It often felt like I was reading a Wikipedia summary by someone who didn't understand science.
GRAYLING: Oooh burn!
ARMSTRONG: What do you mean?
ME: Well, for example, your comparison between physics and biology, and how you link this to atheism.
ARMSTRONG: You mean "While physicists have felt comfortable with the unknowing that seems to be an essential component of intellectual advance, some biologists, whose discipline has not yet experienced a major reversal, have remained confident of their capacity to discover absolute truth and have started to preach a militant form of atheism."
ME: Bullshit. Utter bullshit. Biology, at least as much as the other sciences, revels in the unknowing. You also cheerfully ignore the physicists who are part of the New Atheist movement, such as Lawrence Krauss and Victor Stenger. And all the other non-biologists.
ARMSTRONG: But science depends on faith, intuition and aesthetic vision as well as on reason!
ME: Yes, in the formulation of hypotheses and theories, but these are dismissed or accepted based on reason. Not faith, intuition or aesthetic vision.
(ARMSTRONG sulks)
ME: Despite all this, your book is my favourite of those we've discussed today.
ARMSTRONG: Thankyou.
ME: Not that I agree with you. My views are similar to those of Anthony and Lucretius. You didn't reach what seemed - to me - to be the obvious conclusion to the information you presented. You weren't radical enough. You say that in pre-modern times, people re-enacted their myths in rituals, including Christians?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, Christians were taught to see the Mass as a symbolic re-enactment of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. The fact that they could not follow the Latin added to its mystique. Much of the Mass was recited by the priest in an undertone, accompanied by solemn silence or liturgical drama, with music and stylised gestures. They listened to scripture, recited piecemeal, often in a foreign language and always in a heightened liturgical context.
ME: And in the modern period, this all stopped?
ARMSTRONG: During the Reformation, the reformers declared that the Mass was no longer a symbolic re-enactment but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were historical facts, and the alacrity with which people seized upon these new teachings suggests that many Christians in Europe were losing the older habits of thought. In tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctly 'modern' notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated and objective emerged in the Western world.
ME: Right, but the old way of thinking survived in new forms. Today, millions of people re-enact and celebrate the stories of new mythologies. Everyone knows that the stories of these new mythologies aren't literally true; they are valued beyond that. These myths provide meaning and inspiration; they often advocate a more acceptable morality than that of the old myths; they explore the tough questions and lead people to a transcendent experience.
I am talking about fandom, about the fans of the various fictional universes that are so popular nowadays. You seemed to suggest that the ancient mythologies are the best, and that modernity has made our culture spiritually sterile. I am not the first to notice this comparison, and was very disappointed that you didn't spot it while researching your book. Later this year, there's even a conference on the comparison which I am considering attending.
Perhaps we could combine non-literalist theology with scientific enquiry and an appreciation of fiction?
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