on God and Philosophy

How do I start to write about this topic? Looking at the title, you might be wondering just now whether what I plan is some sort of sermon or some sort of rationally-based rejection of God. To automatically assume my business is one or the other of those things would be, possibly, to allow you to stop reading right here with an, “oh well I know what he’s gonna say.” Real life, C.S. Lewis points out, is often not so simple, and nor is this. I'm neither a preacher nor a philosopher, though it is true that I have studied philosophy extensively and I've given a few sermons in my lifetime. Still, I'm not a preacher and I'm not a philosopher.

I am, however, going to take a look at the uneasy relationship that rationalist thinking has with the matter of God's existence. And then we’re going to talk about what postmodern attitudes have to do with tolerance or lack thereof. Let me say at the outset I'm not concerned with supporting one particular thinker or with refuting some other, but there are some common threads I see running through all the talk on the discussion of God. Whether we're talking about logical proofs of his existence like Anselm of Canterbury's or Kurt Gödel’s, or whether we're talking about other attempts to reason ones way towards God such as Descartes meditations, the writings of Gottfried Leibniz or Pascal's wager, everyone I've read who wants to prove God's existence has started from a point of belief. That is to say, Anselm may have attempted a logical proof of God's existence, but he sets up an argument to support something he believes apriori (apriori being Latin for 'from the former' and referring to arguments that don't need to be proved with empirical evidence). Not that the argument itself reasons apriori, but we know Anselm believed in God. Thus, his proof, and many arguments like it, assume, at least implicitly, belief in God either on the writer's part or on the reader's. Put another way, I've never seen a professed atheist convinced by an ontological argument or other theistically oriented set of arguments.

Now that brings me to atheism. Atheism as a way of thinking has several interesting characteristics that bare thinking about. First, atheistic thinking requires as much belief in what it supposes about the universe as does theistic thinking. Put another way, a Christian believes in God largely by faith, and an atheist must believe, largely on faith, in God's non-existence. If we could observe God through a telescope or spy on him with our high tech surveillance equipment, all this talk about proving or disproving his existence that we've been engaged in over the centuries would be so much nonsense. But we can't observe God in the same way that we can observe atomic fission or the growth and development of a life form. And so, thinkers on one side of the great chasm argue mightily for God's existence through reason and thinkers on the other side argue with equal vehemence against it.

Now as it happens, I've read some of the best arguments both for and against God’s existence. All of them reasoned pieces of discourse and very well written. On the pro-God side, I’d recommend William Lane Craig, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis and Ravi Zacharias. On the other side of the great chasm, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennet and, arguably, Sam Harris are only a few in a long string of writers who have attempted to disprove the existence of God; I only reluctantly include Harris. I don’t include him because he’s a good thinker. Truth be told his reasoning is shoddy and his knowledge of his subject matter demonstrably in error (and that’s according to other atheists, folks), but his books have proven to be bestsellers and so I have to deal with him.

            First, there is no argument out there which, by virtue of its internal structure or its plausibility or its conclusions, will unassailably argue God’s existence or his lack of existence. I realize that statement opens me up to attack from both sides. A comedian once gave this piece of advice, “only antagonize one section of your audience at a time.” I seem to have disregarded that tidbit, sorry about that. But it is true. Christians,  you cannot arrive at the knowledge of God or the tenets of Christianity via pure reason in such a way that you do not leave yourselves open to attack. Even Lewis, one of the most well-respected Christian apologists of the last century, has been attacked by theologians and atheistic thinkers alike, despite presenting what many consider very sound reasoning. Now Lewis never claimed to be a theologian in his own right, and if I cared to, I could undoubtedly find and exploit holes in Lewis’s or Zacharias’s thought. But that’s just my point. You cannot argue the case for Christ in an invincible and unassailable display of human reasoning, even if your reasoning is sound and valid by most definitions. But don’t worry, the atheists don’t get off free.

            Atheists, particularly the self-styled New Atheists who have emerged in the last decade, are as guilty of assuming the infallibility of their reasoning. Dawkins believes his argument from improbability, also known as the “ultimate bowing 747,” can and does prove once and for all that there is no God. Sam Harris argues that religion has proven to be humanity’s most divisive invention and that we are, on the whole, better off without religion and religious thinkers altogether. Harris’s books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, as well as Richard Dawkins The God Delusion have proven so persuasive in America today that Christian apologists have felt the need to respond with books of their own. I don’t know how many times Harris’s or Dawkins’ work has been quoted or referenced among students around here. That, I suppose, is a tribute to their selling power. But their reasoning, especially Dawkins who at least attempts to reason and who writes cogently and logically, is no more unassailable than Lewis’s, Zacharias’s or Anselm’s. All of these thinkers, each and every one, starts their writing from the point-of-view of having believed, or not believed, in a God who made the universe. Fare enough.

            Is that to say that reason plays no role in belief? By no means. But to employ reason as the sole way and the chief means of belief is rather like praising flower as the be all and end all of cake baking. Do we need flower to bake a cake? Most certainly. Can we bake a cake without flower? Well I’m not an expert baker, but probably not. But is flower all we need, to the exclusion or minimalization of all the other ingredients? Now what kind of cake would that be, I ask you. I wouldn’t be eating it. So, continuing the analogy, your theist, (we’ll say your Christian apologist) bakes one kind of cake, and your atheist, another. So then, you ask, what’s to choose between them? Does it make a difference which one I ask for?

            Well let’s keep our cake metaphor as we turn to postmodern thought. That is, we’ll hang on to it until such time as we can’t use it anymore. Now, I’ve spent most of my life in school. I’ve spent my entire adult life walking the halls of our universities. I’ve gone to three of them, from which I’ll have three degrees when it’s all said and done. All that to say, if anyone has been well and truly exposed to the thinking that prevails in our colleges and in our society, I have. And so I’ll discuss it. Don’t worry, we’ll get back to faith and reason in a minute.

            Today, especially in the humanities and social sciences:  history, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology, etc, there are certain words that have become the bywords of study and, more generally, of thought. “Multiculturalism,” “pluralism,” “interdisciplinary,” “cross-cultural,” “inclusion,” and “tolerance” are only a sampling of the nouns and adjectives that have entered into our classrooms, our research, our teaching and our thinking. Am I going to attack these concepts and say they’re horrible, you ask? No. But I do want, in a moment, to look at their consequences where religious thought is concerned.

            Let’s deal with something other than religious thought first. One of the consequences of these terms in our discourse has been that you can’t make any sort of value-driven statements or express any opinions or reasoned judgments about anyone or anything whatsoever without being branded as closed-minded, exclusive, or, most damning at my level of study, “non-scholarly.” For example, in the course of a term paper, conference presentation or dissertation I cannot say anything that resembles the following:  “Hitler was a genocidal egomaniac,” “female genital mutilation is damaging,” and “the Spanish Inquisition’s methods of extracting confessions were counterproductive.” No, I would have to say something like:  “Hitler was misguided in his racial and ethnocentric beliefs,” “female genital mutilation is an accepted cultural practice in certain places,” and “the Spanish Inquisition believed certain interrogation methods to be most conducive to its aims.” Only the first statement retains any notion of judgment or value, because I’m not sure that Hitler has been so sanitized that we couldn’t get away with calling him what he was. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the university mindset and the American mindset as accurately presented as I can make it. Now where am I going with that?

            Let’s go back to our cake metaphor. The postmodern climate in which we live has made it such that you could only express an opinion about the cake so long as you didn’t attempt to say that your opinion was true. For instance, if you are presented with a chocolate cake, you expect certain things to be present, namely chocolate. But our universities would teach you that it is wrong of you to dispute someone else who says that their carrot cake or their fruit cake is also chocolate. You might hear this: “Brad, now that’s pretty insensitive and exclusivist of you. my fruitcake is just as much a chocolate cake to me as yours is to you. You need to be more considerate of my culinary position. Who are you to say that this isn’t a chocolate cake!” Are you laughing yet? I am, and I’m writing the thing! Now that little example doesn’t touch on preference. If you prefer fruitcake to chocolate cake, fine. There’s little I can do to persuade you that chocolate is better, but the error would be in calling your fruit cake a chocolate one. It’s not, and no amount of wishful thinking can make it so.

            Now, at last, we come back to religious thought. What is the current religious climate in the United States? Let’s have a look. We exist, as Ravi Zacharias states it, in a climate of thought in which you can hold any religious opinions you like so long as you don’t tell someone that yours are the true ones. He goes a step further. It’s interesting how eastern religious practices and mentalities, Jainism, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, are given a pass, but western religious thought is subjected to the most critical attacks. I’ve seen this in action. If you claim you’re a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Jainist or a Shintoist, you’ll be left alone. If you claim you’re a Muslim, you’ll be left alone at least where your notion of God is concerned (the current political climate in America notwithstanding). But if you say that you’re a Christian, people will happily line up and demand, “how can you possibly say that your Jesus is the only way to God?” Again, I’m just sketching some of the characteristics of the climate of opinion in which we live today. Anyone want to tell me it’s not so?

            Leaving aside the novelty effect of some eastern religions, the most popular opinion going in America today has got to be, “there’s lots of ways to get to God, and my way’s just as good as yours.” Or you get angry statements like this, “I know X was a kind and caring person who did a lot of good for other people. So how can you say that he’s not in Heaven just because he didn’t believe in your Jesus?” This latter, I’ve heard often. The so-called new-age religions like Wiccan are on the increase, and so is anything that espouses the, “all paths lead to God,” mentality.

            So that’s where we are in the year 2011. It’s not new. This mentality, we’ll call it moral relativism, has been on the rise for the better part of a century. A century ago, we had a moral consensus in this country. Not everyone followed it, but most people could recognize it. And while it wasn’t what most thinkers I know of would call strictly a Christian moral consensus, it was quite close to it in many respects. To borrow a metaphor from a favorite novel, it used to be that a ruler unequivocally measured one foot. That is, everyone knew that 12 inches equals one foot of measurement, and even if they didn’t like the ruler, they operated by its measure. Now what we have done in our postmodern climate of moral relativism is to break the ruler into pieces and say that a foot is three inches to you and four inches to me and six inches to someone else, and by the way, how dare you claim that your six inches of ruler measures the true foot when my three inches is just as good as yours. Now going along with our ruler metaphor, what would happen if we actually tried to conduct measurement in such a situation? Chaos, naturally. No two sets of measurements would agree with any regularity, we wouldn’t build anything with any degree of consistency, and we would be in perpetual doubt as to the reliability of anything in our world that was based on measurement. Well, I’ve just described where we are in terms of religion, have I not? Would anyone like to claim we’re on any more sure footing here in America when it comes to the question of God’s existence and nature than what I’ve just described? I don’t think you could make such a claim.

            Now is it true that one foot equals four inches, or six inches, or eleven inches, or that one foot equals all of these? Of course not, and attempting to operate as though it did is unthinkable. So why do we think we can reason this way when it comes to God? But we try. We surely try. The statement, “all paths lead to God,” is logically and demonstrably untrue. Take Christianity and Islam as two examples. Each has very definite notions of the nature of God and the requirements to get to Heaven. Fare enough. So then, is it true that both a Christian and Muslim will get there?
I am probably going to say a bit more about Islam, because it’s the Abrahamic religion Christians both know the least about and assume the most about without any research of their own. Sloppy work there, Christian folks. But I’ve seen it too often not to have to level the charge. Islam portrays God as one being, undivided in nature or aspect. One sura (or book) in the Koran even says, “In the name of  Allah, … The One without  partner or equal.
The One who does not beget, nor was begotten.
The One who does not resemble nor relies on His creation.” There you have it, a God with no son and no holy spirit. That equals no trinity. Let’s go on. Islam recognizes the life of Jesus, or Isa in Arabic, and in the Islamic tradition, Isa is a prophet in a long line of them stretching back to Ibrahim i.e.  Abraham. Yes, the same prophets as found in the Old Testament. There’s an Adam and Eve story in the Koran, a story of Isaac and Ishmael, and there’s a sura in the Koran devoted to Mary (Mirium in Arabic) and that recounts the life and words of Jesus, not the same stories as found in the canonical gospels, but the important point is that he appears. Jesus also occupies a special place in Heaven for Muslims. Now then, the central statement of Islam here is the key. Does it revolve around Jesus? It reads in Arabic, “أشهد أن لا إله إلا الله و أشهد أن محمد رسول الله” In English, “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.” Keep in mind that Allah is not only the name of the God of Islam, but is the Arabic word for God generally. Therefore, an Arabic-speaking Christian prays to Allah in the name of Isa his son. Just so we avoid any linguistic confusion.

Uttering  the statement quoted above, known as the shahada, in sincerity, is the only act necessary to convert to Islam and it contains within itself the most differentiating element that separates the two religions in this example. Mohammed is considered God’s final prophet, his final deliverer of his, God’s message. That is not to say that Mohammed is considered divine, though Muslims are commanded to follow his, Mohammed’s, teachings and exhortations and even daily living habits, Sunah, as being what I, for lack of a better descriptor, will call best practices of human living. Therefore, the person who gets to Heaven is the one who most faithfully keeps the commandments of God as delivered by Mohammed and who is most virtuous in act and deed and in penitence. The Muslim is told in Sura 99 that on the day of judgment or al-qiyamah, Allah will open each person’s Book of Deeds and will consider their deeds and weigh their life in the balance:  “Then shall anyone who has done an atom’s weight of good, see it! And anyone who has done an atom’s weight of evil shall see it.” And the person is judged based on what they believed and what they did. Yes I know, there are as many interpretations of al-qiyamah out there as there are of the Christian day of judgment. Heck, there’s even some doubt as to the fate of Christians and Jews in Islamic eschatology, but let’s keep it plain and clear. Clearly, true Muslims who lived in submission to the will of Allah and lived in accordance with the teachings of Allah’s final messenger, Mohammed, stand to enter Jana, or Heaven. Good enough. Now let’s turn to the Christian side of the discussion. How is God presented? Let’s see:  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believed in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (john 3:16). Probably the most well-known New Testament verse. Or consider the very end of the book of Matthew:  “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” (Matthew 28:18-19). Ok, so from the outset we have a father, one who has a son, and a holy spirit. Now you could write books on the trinity, and people have. There are entire courses taught on it. I’m going to let it suffice here to say that Christian doctrine supports a God who has a son and a holy spirit as aspects of himself. Very different from Islam, no? Now some biblical scholars will try to bog you down by quibbling over whether or not Jesus actually claimed in so many words to be that same son of God. We’re not going to go there either, not because I lack for an answer, but because it would sidetrack us from the discussion. Let’s look, rather, at what Jesus says about himself:  “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6). That’s quite a statement. To put it in today’s terms, that’s quite an exclusivist statement, isn’t it? Yes that’s what’s been said about it many times. Now in the Christian view of judgment, Jesus will welcome in those who believed and worshiped in his name. Think of the sheep and the goats analogy that’s found in several places throughout scripture.

So there we have it, Christianity and Islam. And we return to the question we started with a couple pages back. Are both our Christian and our Muslim going to Heaven? The society in which we live would answer, “but surely they would if they were both kind and compassionate and caring people who didn’t do any harm to anyone.” But does that make sense? If what the Bible portrays of God’s nature, particularly in the New Testament, is at all true, than is the Muslim view of God true? Can God both have a son and holy spirit, while simultaneously being a deity who does not beget and has no other aspects outside of himself? Let me ask this question, can Jesus be the way the truth and the life, and Mohammed be the final messenger of God? Can Jesus be the son of God, and just another prophet? Can Mohammed be God’s final messenger, and no messenger at all? The answer to any and all of these is, logically, no. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian or a Muslim or whether you’re an atheist looking at the structure of both of those belief systems and answering my questions, the answer remains, “no.” One of them cannot possibly be true without the other necessarily being false. This isn’t theology people, it’s logic, pure and logic. You cannot have them both.

We must, therefore,  make an end to this nonsense about all roads leading to Heaven and all ways that lead to God being equally valid. This postmodern philosophy of ours is a comfort to some, no doubt, but it’s nonsensical and doesn’t hold any water. Truth, by its nature, is exclusivist. If you have a mathematical equation, it has one solution. The simple equation, 2x-8 = 10, when solved, will always yield the solution, x = 9. There’s nothing I can do about that. It doesn’t matter whether I like the math teacher, the math book, the base 10 numbering system or whatever unit of numbering, or the letter X. The equation admits of no other solution, and therefore, all other solutions, X = 8, x = 10, X = whatever, no matter how close they are to our solution, X = 9, are not themselves, X = 9, and are as false as the solution is true. And would we want it to be otherwise? Consider the value of teaching mathematics if that equation could just as easily be answered with some other number besides 9. If 11, 13, and -2.7 were all equally valid and right answers, what would be the point in teaching me how to solve that particular kind of equation? The answer? None at all.

Yet when we attempt to say this of religion, we are criticized and told that we are bigoted, intolerant and closed-minded. Yet it’s true that if Christianity is true, Islam can’t be, Hinduism can’t be, Buddhism can’t be, etc. And if Islam is true, then Christianity can’t be, Hinduism can’t be, etc. Now I haven’t written this to persuade you of my own beliefs. Rather, in this society, we have to start by persuading our hearers to give up this nonsense about all ways to God being right and true. Choose one, would you? Once a choice has been made, then we can talk about whether it’s the right one or not. That’s its own discussion. But getting people to take a stand other than the postmodern bull that we’re flooded with these days, well, that would be a place to start. Don’t you think?