Questions Atheists rightfully ask of God, Religion, the Church, and Christianity itself

Questions Atheists ask of God, Religion,

the Church, and Christianity itself

by R.E. Slater

April 22, 2022

Here at Relevancy22 I try to listen and consider all approaches to things metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, ethical, and especially religious... in the Christian sense... as that is what I am familiar with and was raised within from my earliest days of childhood upwards.

It may surprise a few of my fundamental, or evangelical, readers that I still claim God as real; Jesus as my Savior; Love as God's modus operandi (not hell, wrath, and judgment as I was taught); that we have a capacity as humans for both good and evil; and that the future is not closed, but open, hopeful, optimistic (rather than a thing to be dreaded), and moves according to its inherent DNA.

Over the years all of these subjects I have at one time or another addressed... perhaps not as a fundamentalist would, or even as an evangelic any longer.. but perhaps as a post-evangelic, process theologian might... or as near to it as I can understand its ramifications for Christianity (as well as that of other religions). Further, those subjects themselves have also been reframed over the years as I move out of my rigid past and into my speculation of philosophic theology. Good theologians must do this or they can no longer stay relevant with their readers and contemporary times.

Mostly, I've tried to answer the deep questions of life, of religion, of spirituality, in unique ways to how I was educated and trained to answer those same questions from my deeply conservative and Baptistic faith traditions. I ask questions like:

• How did the Church Fathers get to their ideas expressed in the Christian Church's Confessional Creeds and Dogmas?

• How did Greek philosophy usurp the Old Testament Hebraic underpinnings of the even more ancient *Semitic philosophies? (*relating to, or denoting, a family of languages which includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and other ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the main subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family.)

• Or rather, how did Greek philosophy end up guiding all parts of the bible, both in the Old as well as in the New Testament? And importantly, in the Church's Christian expression of its faith?

• How has religious man - whether in really ancient societies, or the cultures in Jesus's day, or the many eras afterwards to this present moment - determine Christianity's "systematized" doctrines of the bible so knowingly as to reject other, better, teachings of the Judaic and Christian testaments?

• Or why did the Church settle on a variety of systematic theologies canonized through its Catholic and Protestant faiths when in actuality, a biblical theology looks at the flows and patterns of the biblical narrative to help direct towards the bare minimums of the Christian faith without locking down its studied beliefs? Which is another way of saying, when studying one's faith, try to avoid unloving expressions of God and creation.

Of course, my list can go on and on and on... as can yours if sit down and think about all the absurdities of proposed Christian beliefs found within certain denominational or sectarian tenet directives of the more popular church testimonies to God, Christ, the Bible, sin, hell, and eschatological doom.

As a result, in redress of all of my inherited tradition's assured Christian beliefs I could no longer hold to them any longer. In fact, the Lord removed me for nearly a year to walk through a wilderness of doubt and uncertainty to prepare my heart, mind, and soul (a Greek reductionistic ideation; Hebraic is expressed more organically as one's soul) to return to the present day and rewrite, recategorize, rethink, and redesign how a Loving, Learning, Healing, Redeeming Christianity might actually look at life if removed from the ancient Church Father's writings, their Creeds and Confessions, or the many bright Church illuminaries who continue on to this day adding such newer ponderous doctrines of Christian apologia to the Church's Creeds such as the inerrancy, infallibility, and authority of the Scriptures for faith and practice. In essence, it is how Evangelicalism has decided to claim for itself the rightness of its beliefs by going to the very same Scriptures I do not find inerrant, infallible, nor authoritative (if by this latter I am not allowed to question the church's declaration of its legalized beliefs).

In sum, I have cauterized and replaced bad Christian teachings with better speculations, ideations, conceptualizations, and perhaps, a more holistic, organic philosophic-theology more akin to the older Semitic cultures of yesteryear without dismissing the present day's discussions in academia, science, and all other disciplines.

I cannot say that I have accomplished this fully, but I did wish to set a precedence of questioning the unquestionable, and by listening and considering the unsanctioned. It seems to my heart that God is truer to what a God should be - and how this God would be communicating to us - than simply closing down discussions based upon ancient, errant narratives of people and cultures who were similarly attempting to tell of their belief in God while chained to their own older, more beautiful-and-awful ideas of God.

At least this is my preferred approach to reading Scripture, reading society, and myself. It's all open and we have good beginnings in many areas but also many more questions too.

I can no longer read the Bible with a capital "B" but with a small "b" bible, reminding myself that the narratival thoughts and expressions of God found throughout it's many era-specific religious beliefs were more like what other individuals and communities have been working through when trying to speak of God to themselves and their neighbors.

In those narratives and voices found both in Scripture as well as in Scriptural writings, as many good, as well as, as many horrible things have been done in the name of God. Which is not unlike today's Trumpian churches mixing White Christian Nationalism, God, Guns, and Jesus into the politicized Republican GOP platforms, no less than they had been in the very earliest expressions of traditionalized church teachings through the centuries.

Moreover, I can no longer simply read of Church doctrines as unpliable and unquestioned definitions of my Christian faith when such teachings and dogmas have been hammered down as inflexible set expressions codified into strict, legal-and-religious, teachings forever removed from nullifiable future commentary.

The commentary spent here at Relevancy22 intends to question, rip apart, destroy, and reform wretched Christian beliefs so that it might better resonate with a God intimately present and in love with creation as versus a God infinitely removed from us, condemning us for being who He made us to be, and consigning all to a hellish fire of damnation unless we submit to some form of religious formulae to save our souls.

Hence, to those atheists, agnostics, and ex-Christians, who have given up on the formalized church... to the nonreligious, the unquestioning, and spiritualists amongst us, I hear you... as do my other fellow Christian writers and theologs who themselves have also undergone the same fiery transformative process I have been going through myself. After editing and writing 2500+ articles I can only say I like where Relational Process Christianity is taking me at the guidance of the Holy Spirit who has spoken to other like-minded individuals saying to His Church, "Enough, let's do this again, and let's do it better, if possible."

My response is "to listen"... they have legitimate questions
to be considered and addressed.

Below are the questions a handful of atheists are asking of Christianity. I do sympathize with their perspectives; do believe their questions can find better answers than are found within evangelical Christianity; and would like to challenge them, as I have myself, how we might together answer the questions of God based upon what we have learned from history, literature, academia, and today's matriculating postmodern, and metamodern, philosophies and theologies.

As a Christian I would like to take into my religious background and education the ability to challenge my faith's precepts and teachings with better questions - not better defenses (apologias).

And with a Richard Rohr-like contentedness, to sit still in the  question of faith in order to speculate through listening without the demand for immediate answers.

And finally, to utilize the sacred cloistered hallways of doubt and uncertainty to lead us into a fuller faith journey than the one we've be taught that through these experiences we may come to know Jesus, our Redeemer and Living Lord.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

April 22, 2022

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Why, as an atheist, I’m worried about

the declining interest in religious studies

Christian Religious Studies

by Alex J. O'Conner

23 May 2019

The opium of the people; a universal and obsessional neurosis; a means of exerting control over those who can’t handle their freedom; even the most strident of iconoclasts appearing on the theology syllabus, from Karl Marx to Ivan Karamazov, are invariably forced to admit that the object of their criticism is an expression of something deeply human, and a profoundly fundamental component of social behaviour. Yet despite religion’s intellectual preeminence, its study is in steep decline, and this emptying of classrooms and lecture halls is something even a non-believer like myself can be troubled by.

When I applied to study philosophy and theology at St John’s College, Oxford, it was out of necessity; this university, unlike most others, including Cambridge, does not offer an undergraduate course in philosophy alone, so those who wish to study it have to pair it with something else. Theology wasn’t the most appealing of options available; I would rather say it was the least unappealing, and I was content to put up with the headaches and frustrations of reading it as an atheist in order to spend my remaining time with Hume and Mill and Singer. Before long, however, I began to realise that a degree in theology is not suitable only for the religious, and, to my surprise, to rather enjoy it.

Part of the reason for this turnaround is that at Oxford we don’t do theology; we do theology and religion. Studying a paper on the figure of Jesus, I remember being surprised by my tutor’s eager willingness to allow me to skip his suggested reading of Edward Schillebeeckx, the Belgian Catholic theologian whose influence is scattered across Vatican II’s theological constitutions, in favour of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, both men not quite as charitable to Holy Mother Church as Mr. Schillebeeckx in their contributions to discussions of Catholicism (and both men whose writings I was far more enthusiastic about spending some time with my nose in). I was struck by a sense of academic freedom that has since characterised my study of religion, and by an emerging sense within me that this ‘lesser’ half of my degree may well contain a wealth of secular - even critical - value.

Through my engagements with both the received wisdom of a variety of theological schools and proposed explanations as to why people subscribe to them, I have repeatedly encountered arguments just as relevant to the most pressing issues of modern society as to the religious context of their original publication.

Does the anthropological observation that religion arose independently in isolated tribes indicate a human tendency to invent figures of unassailable authority? If so, is this the same tendency that leaves us so susceptible to promises of worldly authority at the expense of liberty? The latter issue is of obvious importance in an age of digitised personal information and global military expediency. Does it indicate a human tendency towards tribalism and shared identity based in supernatural beliefs? This is surely a crucial component to any explanation of modern populism. If religion can, as it must, help those who study it to understand the nature and core of humanity’s most cherished and universal convictions, how could this not be of relevance to the modern statesman, philosopher or social scientist?

Walking past the iconic university buildings of Oxford, one of the oldest of which was erected specifically to service the school of divinity, towards the uncharacteristically bland theology faculty building that now serves as the home to this dying subject, is depressing.

I would like to optimistically suggest that the neglect of religious studies at Oxford is due to a simple decline in interest from potential undergraduates in the subject, however I am more inclined to believe that it is in fact due to a decline in understanding of what its study really entails. The queen of the sciences has lost her crown, and it is unclear whether she will ever find it again. If she does, however, it will not be due to an increase in the popularity of religion, but rather an increase in the recognition of the worth of its analysis and study, which is undeniable.

*Alex J O'Connor is a philosophy and theology student at Oxford University. Follow him on Twitter @cosmicskeptic 

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DISGUSTING Things From My Theology Degree

Jul 15, 2019

CosmicSkeptic

--------------------------------------VIDEO NOTES--------------------------------------

Having just finished my first year studying philosophy and theology at Oxford University, I decided to compile some of the ideas of two key thinkers from the syllabus that I find troubling.

--------------------------------------------LINKS---------------------------------------------

Athanasius, On The Incarnation (read online): http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/th...

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (read online): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cur_De...

Article I wrote on studying theology as an atheist: https://www.premierchristianity.com/B...

University reading list: https://cosmicskeptic.com/oxfordreadi...

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OXFORD READING LIST

the cosmic skeptic

I’m currently reading Philosophy and Theology at Oxford University, and have decided to share the reading lists that I’m set as I receive them from my tutors. At the time of writing, I have completed my first term of my first year of study, so this list will expand as I progress through my degree.

In the first term, I studied one paper (Logic and Moral Philosophy) for philosophy, and one paper (Religion and Religions) for theology. Logic is formal logic taught from a single textbook over eight weeks; Moral Philosophy is an in-depth, term-long study of a single text, J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism; Religion and Religions is the study of religion as a human phenomenon through a psychological, anthropological and sociological lens, as well as a study of four major world religions.

Next term, I will study for two papers: General Philosophy (for philosophy) and The Figure Of Jesus Through The Centuries (for theology). I will update this list when I have competed the term.

I will try to break down the reading as clearly as possible.

(Please note that the majority of set reading at university is for particular chapters and passages, which I have tried to denote in this list. Books that have already been mentioned previously in the list (but for different chapters) are denoted with an asterisk (*). Also, not all the books that were set did I read, and not all the books I read were set; I have added a few books to the sociology of religion section.)

Year One Philosophy

Logic

• The Logic Manual, by Volker Halbach

Moral Philosophy (Utilitarianism)

General/Reference

• Utilitarianism, by J.S. Mill
• Mill on Utilitarianism, by R. Crisp
• Cambridge Companion to Mill, by J. Skorupski
  
•  John Stuart Mill, by J. Skorupski

Weeks 1-2: Utility and Desire

• Reasons and Persons, by D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (Appendix I)

• Ethics, by J.L. Mackie (ch.6, especially sections 6 and 7)

• Well-Being, by J. Griffin (chs. 1-3)

Weeks 3-4: The Proof of Utilitarianism

• *Utilitarianism, by J.S. Mill (chs. 1 and 4)

• *Mill on Utilitarianism, by R. Crisp (ch. 4)

• Principia Ethica, by G.E. Moore (ch. 1, sects. 1-14; ch. 3, sects. 39-44 and 59-65)

• “Moral Naturalism”, by J. Lenman, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

• On What Matters, by D. Parfit (vol. 2, ch. 25)

Weeks 5-6: The Forms of Utilitarianism

• *Utilitarianism, by J.S. Mill (especially chs. 2 and 5)

• *Mill on Utilitarianism, by R. Crisp (ch. 5)

• Moral Thinking, by R.M Hare (chs. 2-3)

• Utilitarianism For and Against, by Smart and Williams (esp. sect. 7 of Smart and sect. 6 of Williams)

• Ideal Code, Real World, by B. Hooker (chs. 1, 3, and 4)

• Consequentialism and Its Critics, by S. Scheffler (introduction)

Weeks 7-8: Justice and Equality

• *Utilitarianism, by J.S. Mill (ch .5)

• *Mill on Utilitarianism, by R. Crisp (ch. 7)

• Anarchy, State and Utopia, by R. Nozick (chs. 2 and 7)

• ‘Rights as Trumps’ by R. Dworkin in Theories of Rights, by J. Waldron

• “Are There Any Natural Rights?”, by H.L.A Hart in Philosophical Review 64 (1955)

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Year One Theology

Religion and Religions

General (Introductory)

• Get Set for Religious Studies, by D. Corrywright and P. Morgan
• Religion: The Modern Theories, by S.D. Kunin
• Religion: The Classical Theories, by J. Thrower
• Religions in the Modern World, by L. Woodhead
• Nine Theories of Religion, by D. Pals
• Comparative Religion: A History, by E. Sharpe

Classical Texts

• From Primitives to Zen; A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, by M. Eliade
• The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer
• The Varieties of Religious Experience, by W. James
• The Idea of the Holy, by R. Otto
• Speeches on Religion, by F. Schleiermacher
• The Rites of Passage, by A. van Gennep

Other General Suggestions

• The Anthropology of Religion, by F. Bowie
• The Meaning and End of Religion, by W. Cantwell Smith
• Religion Defined and Explained, by Clarke and Byrne
• The Sacred and the Profane, by M. Eliade
• Theories of Primitive Religion, by E. Evans-Pritchard
• The New Penguin Handbook of Living Religions, by J. Hinnells
• The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, by J. Hinnells
• The World’s Religions, by N. Smart

Week One: What Is Religion?

• *Religion Defined and Explained, by Clarke and Byrne
• *Theories of Primitive Religion, by E. Evans-Pritchard
• *Religion: The Classical Theories, by J. Thrower

Week Two: Is Studying Religion Doing Theology?

• Understanding Religion, by E. Sharpe
• Approaches to the Study of Religion, by P. Connolly (ch. 7 by F. Whaling)
• The Study of Religion, Traditional and New Religions, by Sutherland and Clarke
• Theology: A Very Short Introduction, by D. Ford

Week Three: The Idea Of The Holy

• The Idea of The Holy, by R. Otto
• *Religion: The Modern Theories, by S.D. Kunin (ch. 5)
• *Comparative Religion: A History, by E. Sharpe (particularly ch. 7)

Week Four: The Sociology Of Religion

• *Nine Theories of Religion, by D. Pals (chapters on Durkheim, Marx, and Weber)
• *The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, by J. Hinnells (chapter on sociology)
• The Sociology of Religion, by M. Hamilton
• The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by E. Durkheim
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by M. Weber
• Sociology of Religion, by M. Weber
• Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, K. Marx (introduction)

Week Five: Islam

• Islam: A Very Short Introduction, by M. Ruthven
• Discovering Islam, by A. Ahmed
• Islam: The Straight Path, by J. Esposito
• Muhammed, by M. Rodinson

Week Six: Hinduism

• Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction, by K. Knott
• Hinduism: A Short History, by K. Klostermaier
• Hinduism and Modernity, by D. Smith
• The Hindu View of Life, by S. Radhakrishnan

We did not have tutorial on Judaism or Buddhism, but were still given the reading for Judaism:

Judaism

• Judaism: A Very Short Introduction, by N. Solomon
• The Jewish Heritage, by D. Cohn-Sherbok
• Modern Judaism, by D. Cohn-Sherbok
• The Essence of Judaism, by L. Baeck

Interviews on Religion: Deconstructing God, Part 3 - John D. Caputo

THE STONE

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers

and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Deconstructing God

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/deconstructing-god/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

by Gary Gutting

March 9, 2014

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment isJohn D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.”

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Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?

John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?” To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.

If you cease to ‘believe’ in a particular religious creed,

you have  merely changed your mind. But if you lose

‘faith,’ a way of life, everything is lost.

If you cease to “believe” in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position, for which you will require new propositions. Imagine a debate in which a theist and an atheist actually convince each other. Then they trade positions and their lives go on. But if you lose “faith,” in the sense this word is used in deconstruction, everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on.

G.G.: I’m having some trouble with your use of “deconstruction.” On the one hand, it seems to be a matter of undermining sharp distinctions, like that between atheism and theism. On the other hand, your own analysis seems to introduce a sharp distinction between beliefs and ways of life — even though beliefs are surely part of religious ways of life.

J.C.: After making a distinction in deconstruction, the first thing to do is to deconstruct it, to show that it leaks, that its terms are porous and intersecting, one side bleeding into the other, these leaks being the most interesting thing of all about the distinction. I am distinguishing particular beliefs from an underlying faith and hope in life itself, which takes different forms in different places and traditions, by which the particular traditions are both inhabited and disturbed.

I agree they are both forms of life, but on different levels or strata. The particular beliefs are more local, more stabilized, more codified, while this underlying faith and hope in life is more restless, open-ended, disturbing, inchoate, unpredictable, destabilizing, less confinable.

G.G.: O.K., I guess you might say that all thinking involves making distinctions, but deconstructive thinking always turns on itself, using further distinctions to show how any given distinction is misleading. But using this sort of language leads to paradoxical claims as, for example, when you say, as you just did, that beliefs contain a faith that they can’t contain. Paradox is fine as long as we have some way of understanding that it’s not an outright contradiction. So why isn’t it a contradiction to say that there’s a faith that beliefs both contain and can’t contain?

J.C.: The traditions contain (in the sense of “possess”) these events, but they cannot contain (in the sense of “confine” or “limit”) them, hold them captive by building a wall of doctrine, administrative rule, orthodoxy, propositional rectitude around them.

G.G.: So the distinction that saves you from contradiction is this: Beliefs contain faith in the sense that, in the world, beliefs are where we find faith concretely expressed; but any given faith can be expressed by quite different beliefs in quite different historical contexts. In this sense, the faith is not contained by the beliefs. That makes sense.

Presumably, then, deconstructive theology is the effort to isolate this “common core” of faith that’s found in different historical periods — or maybe even the differing beliefs of different contemporary churches.

J.C.: No! I am not resurrecting the old comparative-religion thesis that there is an underlying transcendental form or essence or universal that we can cull from differing empirical religious beliefs, that can be approached only asymptotically by empirical cases. I am saying that the inherited religious traditions contain something deeper, which is why they are important. I don’t marginalize religious traditions; they are our indispensable inheritance. Without them, human experience would be impoverished, its horizon narrowed. We would be deprived of their resources, not know the name of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the startling notion of the “kingdom of God,” the idea of the messianic and so on.

As a philosopher I am, of course, interested in what happens, but always in terms of what is going on in what happens. The particular religious traditions are what happen, and they are precious, but my interest lies in what is going on in these traditions, in the memory of Jesus, say. But different traditions contain different desires, promises, memories, dreams, futures, a different sense of time and space. Nothing says that underneath they are all the same.

G.G.: That doesn’t seem to me what typically goes on in deconstructive theology. The deconstructive analysis of any religious concept — the Christian Trinity, the Muslim oneness of God, Buddhist nirvana — always turns out to be the same: an endless play of mutually undermining differences.

J.C.: There is no such thing as deconstructive theology, in the singular, or “religion,” in the singular. There are only deconstructive versions of concrete religious traditions, inflections, repetitions, rereadings, reinventions, which open them up to a future for which they are not prepared, to dangerous memories of a past they try not to recall, since their tendency is to consolidate and to stabilize. Accordingly, you would always be able to detect the genealogy, reconstruct the line of descent, figure out the pedigree of a deconstructive theology. It would always bear the mark of the tradition it inflects.

A lot of the “Derrida and theology” work, for example, has been following the wrong scent, looking for links between Derrida’s ideas and Christian negative theology, while missing his irregular and heretical messianic Judaism. I like to joke that Derrida is a slightly atheistic quasi-Jewish Augustinian, but I am also serious.

Derrida said he ‘rightly passes for an atheist,’ but if we stop there we miss

everything interesting and important about his thinking about religion.

G.G.: I can see that there are influences of Judaism, Augustinian Christianity and enlightenment atheism in Derrida. But isn’t this just a matter of his detaching certain religious ideas from their theistic core? He talks of a messiah — but one that never comes; he’s interested in the idea of confessing your sins — but there’s no one to forgive them. After all the deconstructive talk, the law of noncontradiction still holds: Derrida is either an atheist or he isn’t. It seems that the only reasonable answer is that he’s an atheist.

J.C.: In the middle of his book on Augustine, Derrida said he “rightly passes for an atheist,” shying away from a more definitive “I am an atheist.” By the standards of the local rabbi, that’s correct, that’s the position to attribute to him, that’s a correct proposition. But if we stop there we miss everything interesting and important about what he is saying for religion and for understanding deconstruction.

G.G.: So if I insist on expressing religious faith in propositions (assertions that are either true or false), then, yes, Derrida’s an atheist. But according to you, the propositions that express faith aren’t what’s interesting or important about religion.

I agree that there’s much more to religion than what’s stated in creeds. There are rituals, ascetic practices, moral codes, poetry and symbols. But for most people, believing that God exists entails believing such propositions as that there’s someone who guarantees that justice will eventually prevail, that no suffering is without meaning, that there is a life after death where we can find eternal happiness.

J.C.: We have to appreciate the deep distrust that Derrida has for this word “atheism.” This kind of normalizing category has only a preliminary value — it finds a place to put him in a taxonomy of “positions” — but it obscures everything that is valuable here. This word is too powerful for him, too violent. That is why in another place he said calling him an atheist is “absolutely ridiculous.” His “atheism” is not unlike that of Paul Tillich, when Tillich said that to the assertion that God is a Supreme Being the proper theologicalresponse is atheism, but that is the beginning of theology for Tillich, not the end.

Derrida is not launching a secularist attack on religion. Deconstruction has nothing to do with the violence of the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Derrida approaches the mystics, the Scriptures, Augustine with respect — they are always ahead of him, he says — and he always has something to learn from them. He is not trying to knock down one position (“theism”) with the opposing position (“atheism”). He does not participate in these wars.

G.G.: You keep saying what Derrida doesn’t do. Is there any positive content to his view of religion or is it all just “negative theology”? Is he in any sense “making a case” for religion? Can reading Derrida lead to religious belief?

J.C.: In its most condensed formulation, deconstruction is affirmation, a “yes, yes, come” to the future and also to the past, since the authentic past is also ahead of us. It leads to, it is led by, a “yes” to the transforming surprise, to the promise of what is to come in whatever we have inherited — in politics, art, science, law, reason and so on. The bottom line is “yes, come.”

Derrida is reading, rereading, reinventing inherited texts and traditions, releasing the future they “harbor,” which means both to keep safe but also conceal, all in the name of what Augustine calls “doing the truth.” He is interested in all the things found in the Scriptures and revelation, the narratives, the images, the angels — not in order to mine them for their “rational content,” to distill them into proofs and propositions, but to allow them to be heard and reopened by philosophy. Deconstruction is a way to read something meticulously, feeling about for its tensions, releasing what it itself may not want to disclose, remembering something it may not want to recall — it is not a drive-by shooting.

G.G.: But why call this “religion”?

J.C.: Derrida calls this a “religionwithout religion.” Other people speak of the “post-secular,” or of a theology “after the death of God,” which requires first passing through this death. In Derrida’s delicate logic of “without,” a trope also found in the mystics, a thing is crossed out without becoming illegible; we can still see it through the cross marks. So this religion comes without the religion you just described — it is not nearly as safe, reassuring, heartwarming, triumphant over death, sure about justice, so absolutely fabulous at soothing hearts, as Jacques Lacan says, with an explanation for everything. His religion is risky business, no guarantees.

G.G.: If Derrida doubts or denies that there’s someone who guarantees such things, isn’t it only honest to say that he is an agnostic or an atheist? For most people, God is precisely the one who guarantees that the things we most fear won’t happen. You’ve mentioned Derrida’s interest in Augustine. Wouldn’t Augustine — and virtually all the Christian tradition — denounce any suggestion that God’s promises might not be utterly reliable?

J.C.: Maybe it disturbs what “most people” think religion is — assuming they are thinking about it — but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force, forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world.

The comparison with Augustine is telling. Unlike Augustine, he does not think a thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has been asking himself all his life Augustine’s question, “What do I love when I love my God?” But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked him this question once he responded, “If I knew that, I would know everything” — he would be omniscient, God!

This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs.

G.G.: But if deconstruction leads us to give up Augustine’s way of thinking about God and even his belief in revealed truth, shouldn’t we admit that it has seriously watered down the content of Christianity, reduced the distance between it and agnosticism or atheism? Faith that is not confident and hope that is not sure are not what the martyrs died for.

J.C.: In this view, what martyrs die for is an underlying faith, which is why, by an accident of birth or a conversion, they could have been martyrs for the other side. Mother Teresa expressed some doubts about her beliefs, but not about an underlying faith in her work. Deconstruction is a plea to rethink what we mean by religion and to locate a more unnerving religion going on in our more comforting religion.

Deconstruction is faith and hope. In what? In the promises that are harbored in inherited names like “justice” and “democracy” — or “God.” Human history is full of such names and they all have their martyrs. That is why the difference between Derrida and Augustine cannot be squashed into the distinction between “theism” and “atheism” or — deciding to call it a draw — “agnosticism.” It operates on a fundamentally different level. Deconstruction dares to think “religion” in a new way, in what Derrida calls a “new Enlightenment,” daring to rethink what the Enlightenment boxed off as “faith” and “reason.”

But deconstruction is not destruction. After all, the bottom line of deconstruction, “yes, come,” is pretty much the last line of the New Testament: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

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This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series were with Alvin Plantinga and Louise Antony.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.

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John Caputo: Towards a Radical Theology, Not a Radical Atheism:

A Review of Modern Atheism, Atheology and Divine Inexistence

Interviews on Religion: Arguments Against God, Part 2 - Louise Antony

THE STONE

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers

and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Arguments Against God

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/arguments-against-god/

by Gary Gutting

February 25, 2014

This is the second in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the editor of the essay collection “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.”

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Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic?

Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean.

G.G.: That is what I mean.

L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

I say ‘there is no God’ with the same confidence

I say ‘there are no ghosts’ or ‘there is no magic.’

That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope ofhuman knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – butthat fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings. I think many arguments for the existence of a God depend on the insufficiencies of human cognition. I readily grant that we have cognitive limitations. But when we bump up against them, when we find we cannot explain something — like why the fundamental physical parameters happen to have the values that they have — the right conclusion to draw is that we just can’t explain the thing. That’s the proper place for agnosticism and humility.

But getting back to your question: I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists? Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible. Hindus think there are many gods while Unitarians think there is at most one. Don’t all these disagreements demand explanation too? Must a Christian Scientist say that Episcopalians are just not thinking clearly? Are you going to ask a Catholic if she thinks there are no good reasons for believing in the angel Moroni?

G.G.: Yes, I do think it’s relevant to ask believers why they prefer their particular brand of theism to other brands. It seems to me that, at some point of specificity, most people don’t have reasons beyond being comfortable with one community rather than another. I think it’s at least sometimes important for believers to have a sense of what that point is. But people with many different specific beliefs share a belief in God — a supreme being who made and rules the world. You’ve taken a strong stand against that fundamental view, which is why I’m asking you about that.

L.A.: Well I’m challenging the idea that there’s one fundamental view here. Even if I could be convinced that supernatural beings exist, there’d be a whole separate issue about how many such beings there are and what those beings are like. Many theists think they’re home free with something like the argument from design: that there is empirical evidence of a purposeful design in nature. But it’s one thing to argue that the universe must be the product of some kind of intelligent agent; it’s quite something else to argue that this designer was all-knowing and omnipotent. Why is that a better hypothesis than that the designer was pretty smart but made a few mistakes? Maybe (I’m just cribbing from Hume here) there was a committee of intelligent creators, who didn’t quite agree on everything. Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B- on this project.

In any case though, I don’t see that claiming to know that there is no God requires me to say that no one could have good reasons to believe in God. I don’t think there’s some general answer to the question, “Why do theists believe in God?” I expect that the explanation for theists’ beliefs varies from theist to theist. So I’d have to take things on a case-by-case basis.

I have talked about this with some of my theist friends, and I’ve read some personal accounts by theists, and in those cases, I feel that I have some idea why they believe what they believe. But I can allow there are arguments for theism that I haven’t considered, or objections to my own position that I don’t know about. I don’t think that when two people take opposing stands on any issue that one of them has to be irrational or ignorant.

G.G.: No, they may both be rational. But suppose you and your theist friend are equally adept at reasoning, equally informed about relevant evidence, equally honest and fair-minded — suppose, that is, you are what philosophers call epistemic peers: equally reliable as knowers. Then shouldn’t each of you recognize that you’re no more likely to be right than your peer is, and so both retreat to an agnostic position?

Why is an all-knowing and omnipotent God more likely than

a God who was pretty smart but made a few mistakes?

L.A.: Yes, this is an interesting puzzle in the abstract: How could two epistemic peers — two equally rational, equally well-informed thinkers — fail to converge on the same opinions? But it is not a problem in the real world. In the real world, there are no epistemic peers — no matter how similar our experiences and our psychological capacities, no two of us are exactly alike, and any difference in either of these respects can be rationally relevant to what we believe.

G.G.: So is your point that we always have reason to think that people who disagree are not epistemic peers?

L.A.: It’s worse than that. The whole notion of epistemic peers belongs only to the abstract study of knowledge, and has no role to play in real life. Take the notion of “equal cognitive powers”: speaking in terms of real human minds, we have no idea how to seriously compare the cognitive powers of two people.

G.G.: O.K., on your view we don’t have any way to judge the relative reliability of people’s judgments about whether God exists. But the question still remains, why are you so certain that God doesn’t exist?

L.A.: Knowledge in the real world does not entail either certainty or infallibility. When I claim to know that there is no God, I mean that the question is settled to my satisfaction. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t say that I’m agnostic, because I disagree with those who say it’s not possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible to know. And I think the balance of evidence and argument has a definite tilt.

G.G.: What sort of evidence do you have in mind?

L.A.: I find the “argument from evil” overwhelming — that is, I think the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being is a zillion times lower than that it is the product of mindless natural laws acting on mindless matter. (There are minds in the universe, but they’re all finite and material.)

G.G.: Why do you think other philosophers don’t see it that way?

L.A.: To cite just one example, Peter van Inwagen, my friend and former teacher, assesses the situation very differently. He believes that we do not and cannot know the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being (which I estimate as close to zero), and that therefore the existence of suffering in our world gives us no reason to doubt the existence of God. He and I will be arguing about this in a seminar this coming summer, and I look forward to it. Don’t bet on either one of us changing our mind, though.

G.G.: What about positive cases for God’s existence? When Iinterviewed Alvin Plantinga, he cited religious experiences as making a strong case for theism. Mightn’t it be that he has evidence on this issue that you don’t?

L.A.: Many theists I’ve talked to — including Plantinga — say that they have or have had experiences in which they have become aware of the presence of God. I’ve never had such experiences.

G.G.: That doesn’t mean that Plantinga and others haven’t had such experiences.

L.A.: O.K., if you hold my feet to the fire (which is what you’re doing), I’ll admit that I believe I know what sort of experiences the theists are talking about, that I’ve had such experiences, but that I don’t think they have the content the theists assign to them. I’ve certainly had experiences I would call “profound.” Many were aesthetic in nature — music moves me tremendously, and so does nature. I’ve been tremendously moved by demonstrations of personal courage (not mine!), generosity, sympathy. I’ve had profound experiences of solidarity, when I feel I’m really together with other people working for some common goal. These are very exhilarating and inspiring experiences, but they are very clearly about human beings — human beings at their best.

G.G.: Would you say, then, that believers who think they have good reasons for theism are deceiving themselves, that they are actually moved by, say, hopes and fears — emotions — rather than reasons?

L.A.: I realize that some atheists do say things like “theists are just engaged in wishful thinking — they can’t accept that death is the end.” Theists are insulted by such conjectures (which is all they are) and I don’t blame them. It’s presumptuous to tell someone else why she believes what she believes — if you want to know, start by asking her.

It is disrespectful, moreover, to insist that someone else’s belief has some hidden psychological cause, rather than a justifying reason, behind it. As a “lapsed Catholic,” I’ve gotten a fair amount of this sort of thing myself: I’ve been told — sometimes by people who’ve just met me or who have never met me at all but found out my email address — that I “only” gave up my faith because (a) the nuns were too strict, (b) I wanted to have sex or (c) I was too lazy to get up on Sundays to go to church.

I believe I have reasons for my position, and I expect that theists believe they have reasons for theirs. Let’s agree to pay each other the courtesy of attending to the particulars.

G.G.: But when you talk about reasons in this way, you seem to mean something like “personal reasons” — reasons that convince you but that you don’t, and shouldn’t, expect to convince other people. And you agree that theists can and do have reasons in the same sense that you do. Many atheists hold a much stronger view: that they have good reasons and theists don’t. Do you agree with this?

L.A.: No, I don’t think reasons are “personal” in the sense you mean. Justificatory relations are objective. But they are complex. So whether any given belief justifies another is something that depends partly on what other beliefs the believer has. Also, there may be — objectively — many different but equally reasonable ways of drawing conclusions on the basis of the same body of evidence.

It’s likely that the conscious consideration of reasons plays a relatively small role in our acquiring the beliefs we do. An awful lot of what we believe is the result of automatic unconsciousness processing, involving lots of unarticulated judgments. That’s perfectly O.K. a lot of the time — if the process is reliable, we don’t have to be able to articulate reasons. I think the proper place for reasons — for demanding and giving reasons — is in interpersonal interaction.

G.G.: What do you mean by that?

L.A.: Reasons are the answer I give to someone who asks me why I believe something, or — more urgently — to someone who asks whyshe ought to believe something that I’ve asserted. In the public sphere, I think reasons are extremely important. If I’m advocating a social policy that stems from some belief of mine, I need to be able to provide compelling reasons for it — reasons that I can expect a rational person to be moved by. If I refuse to give my employees insurance coverage for contraception because I think contraception is wrong, then I ought — and this is a moral ought — to be able to articulate reasons for this position. I can’t just say, “that’s my belief, and that’s that.” A sense of responsibility about one’s beliefs, a willingness to defend them if challenged, and a willingness to listen to the reasons given by others is one of the guiding ideals of civil society.

G.G.: But doesn’t a belief in God often lead people to advocate social policies? For some people, their beliefs about God lead them to oppose gay marriage or abortion. Others’ beliefs lead them to oppose conservative economic policies. On your view, then, aren’t they required to provide a rational defense of their religious belief in the public sphere? If so, doesn’t it follow that their religious belief shouldn’t be viewed as just a personal opinion that’s nobody else’s business?

No one needs to defend their religious beliefs to me — not unless they think

that those beliefs are essential to the defense of the policy they are advocating.

L.A.: No one needs to defend their religious beliefs to me — not unless they think that those beliefs areessential to the defense of the policy they are advocating. If the only argument for a policy is that Catholic doctrine says it’s bad, why should a policy that applies to everyone reflect that particular doctrine? “Religious freedom” means that no one’s religion gets to be the boss.

But usually, religious people who become politically active think that there are good moral reasons independent of religious doctrine, reasons that ought to persuade any person of conscience. I think — and many religious people agree with me — that the United States policy of drone attacks is morally wrong, because it’s wrong to kill innocent people for political ends. It’s the moral principle, not the existence of God, that they are appealing to.

G.G.: That makes it sounds like you don’t think it much matters whether we believe in God or not.

L.A.: Well, I do wonder about that. Why do theists care so much about belief in God? Disagreement over that question is really no more than a difference in philosophical opinion. Specifically, it’s just a disagreement about ontology — about what kinds of things exist. Why should a disagreement like that bear any moral significance? Why shouldn’t theists just look for allies among us atheists in the battles that matter — the ones concerned with justice, civil rights, peace, etc. — and forget about our differences with respect to such arcane matters as the origins of the universe?

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This interview was conducted by email and edited. The previous interview in this series was with Alvin Plantinga.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.