Goddities

This is going to be me going at it like a bull at a gate rather than just sitting down and composing my mind and thoughts about the issues at hand. My basic idea with this is to try to explore the common ground or otherwise between atheism and theism, because I sometimes wonder if we’re talking about the same thing or just using the same words. There are certain things which atheists have been known to do which I feel have just been designed for the specific occasion of their argument rather than having a wider respectability, and there are other things which, well, are just interesting for everyone, or at least might be, and I want to plonk all these things together today and talk about them.

The first one is something I’ve mentioned before, which is the question of active and passive atheism. I insist on a definition of atheism as the existence of a belief that no deities exist rather than the absence of a belief that a deity exists. I’ve been over this, so I’ll be brief. The motivation for defining atheism passively is to set it as the default belief, but in doing so one is forced to accept peculiar implications. We assume all sorts of things, which is in itself interesting and complicated because in fact we seem to have uncountably infinite assumptions but only a finite number of active beliefs. Therefore an assumption is not something which is happening in anyone’s mind. It’s something one has not done. This seems messy and excessive to me, and is actually more or less the exact issue which many philosophers have with the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Freges view of concepts, so it’s something which has been flogged to death in philosophy already and to produce this definition at this stage, I think, reflects a lack of philosophical training. It comes across to me as naive and reflecting a kind of thinking on the spot which hasn’t had its rough edges knocked off it. On the other hand, perhaps it reflects some kind of demographic shift. As I understand it, analytical philosophers have had very little interest in the concept of God since the start of the tradition, which was probably Freges thought itself back in the 1870s CE, but they may also have been enjoying this lack of interest in a more overtly theistic and religious society than nowadays, or perhaps a less confrontational one in this area, so the definition of atheism as the absence of a belief may have become more accepted simply because more atheists, as opposed to apatheists which probably characterises most philosophers, are now in academia. Nonetheless, there is no word for someone who doesn’t believe in Russell’s teapot or that there’s an invisible gorilla in every room, so in such a situation there may as well be no word for atheism, but clearly there should be and it does mean something. But I won’t go on.

Second issue: small g “god”. There are atheists who insist on using a small g for the name God. I think they do this because they want to equate God conceptually with what they think of as other deities. This, I think, is also erroneous and an example of an over-reaction to a situation they have kind of imagined. Look at it this way: atheists claim God is a fictional character. It’s possible to go further than that and claim that God is an incoherent concept, but that isn’t atheism, although it’s an interesting position to take and one I have more than a little sympathy with. Fictional characters are given names. We know who Gandalf is, who Bridget Jones is, and unfortunately we know who Bella Swan is (actually I forgot and had to look that up!), and they all have names beginning with capital letters. Is god supposed to be someone like ee cummings or archie the cockroach? Someone once said to me I was confusing myself by capitalising God, which they didn’t explain but I think it’s along the lines that God is just one deity among many. It is, though, a little bit interesting that we generally just call God “God” and don’t say, for instance, Metod any more, which used to be a word used for God and seems to mean “measurer” (i.e. “mete-er”) and “arranger”, which could be a euphemism or a kind of title but is in any case a name for God.

This is of course related to “I only believe in one fewer deities than you do,” which involves the supposition that theistic Christians believe the likes of Ba`al and Zeus don’t exist. This also I think is seriously misconceived and fairly thoughtless. My view of the other deities is not that they don’t exist but that they’re God under different names. They do of course have other attributes, but then if God exists, God is beyond human understanding, so we have no better idea of what attributes are true of God than of any other deities who are, in any case, God by other names. So yes, I do believe in all those deities because they’re all the same deity. Another rather unsettling consequence of saying I’m atheist about all the other deities is that it’s very like the Islamophobic belief that Allah is not God and that Muslims are not worshipping the same god as Christians. It has disturbingly racist overtones to it, to my mind, which is of course a feature of “New Atheism”, and this is where it gets interesting. Many Christians claim Muslims worship a different, false god and not the God of the New Testament, or presumably the Hebrew scriptures, where they see continuity, and among Christian nationalists I would expect a very strong denial that Muslims worship God. This unifies some theists and atheists. The details of the denial may be different though. For instance, Christian nationalists might want to distinguish between the Christian trinitarian God and the Islamic indivisible divine unity, whereas the New Atheist approach is more likely to be along the lines of imaginary beings being given different attributes, including the trinity or otherwise.

Emphasising the fact that New Atheism is not all anti-theistic atheism is vital. It’s also possibly a movement whose time has passed. Nor would I want to say that anyone within that movement is overtly racist. They are characterised, and perhaps led, by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, notably all White men, meaning that they will all have unconscious bias, some of which I inevitably share by virtue of my whiteness and to some extent other aspects of my social conditioning though not all. This by no means makes anti-theistic atheism unsalvageable, but equally it’s important to note that atheism is not monolithic. I always think of South Asia in this respect, with the separate Jain, Samkhya and Carvaka beliefs that God cannot or does not exist, among others, in one case because the force of karma is a sufficient explanation for the Cosmos, and more recently the Marxist anti-theistic movement there, though this is clearly influenced by the West. Some New Atheists see the development of European culture under Christian influence as a necessary precondition for the emergence of what might be termed a more liberal or progressive approach which includes atheistic approaches to reality, possibly including South Asian Marxist activists.

One major problem, I think, with anti-theist approaches in general is that they seem to make a major assumption which really doesn’t seem warranted and is odd for a group which tends to see itself as rational. That is that the urge to be religious can be removed from human psychology even if it should be. It seems to me that there are several reasons why this is unlikely. We have cognitive biasses involving finding patterns in things, we engage in magical thinking which may be the basis of rationality, and large communities tend to drift away from their constituted foundations after a while. We also have ego defences. The idea that a non-religious mind set could be adopted by the general population may not be realistic. There don’t seem to be any societies which are entirely non-religious, and when it does occur officially, religion creeps back in somewhere, such as superstitious beliefs about luck and fate. There are of course very large numbers of non-religious people whose lives are entirely healthy and well-adjusted, but they’re not an entire society and there’s too much diversity between people’s personalities and influences to conclude that everyone could live their lives that way. This has nothing to do with whether religious claims to truth are correct. This also seems to be an article of faith among, for example, humanists – that society can exist, whether or not it’s a good thing, without religion. I really want to stress that I’m not saying religion is needed, just that we don’t know if it even could be eliminated. In fact, ironically this belief is almost religious in itself, although I would also insist in defining religion in a different way which doesn’t emphasise belief.

I feel like I’ve spent several paragraphs low-key slagging off atheism. This isn’t what I want to do at all. I want it to be the way things are in my own life most of the time, and probably increasingly so in these isles with the possible exception of Ireland, that whether one is theist, atheist or agnostic is a private matter one would prefer not to talk about with people outside one’s possibly religious community and maybe not even that. What I’m trying to do is establish common ground and I’m not looking for a fight. There are more important things to engage in conflict over and it can be divisive even to bring this up, but at the same time it feels messy and naive, so I’m going to carry on.

Something which is not so divisive is the rather more nuanced approach found in both religious and non-religious circles which is not firmly atheist, theist, deist or agnostic, which is present both in some forms of mysticism and Western philosophy. Many religious mystics, and in fact a lot of just ordinary religious people like me, would say God is beyond human understanding, and in particular there’s the via negativa, which is the idea that you can best say what God is not in order to suggest what God is. God is also said to be unlike any created thing, and it’s a very familiar experience to find that one can’t express a religious experience in language. Similarly, there’s ignosticism and theological non-cognitivism, which I’ve talked about before on here. In the mid-twentieth century, there was a movement within analytical philosophy called logical positivism which attempted to establish that meaning, i.e. either truth or falsehood, only inheres in statements which are axiomatic, express necessary truths or can be empirically verified. Along with this claim was the one that religious statements were not in any of these categories and therefore they were meaningless. This is not the same thing as being false and in a way it corresponds quite well to the mystical position. Logical positivism is now considered passé, but other areas of Western philosophy have adopted a somewhat reminiscent position. My ex is of course German and among other things a philosopher in the continental tradition. When we got together, I was worried they might be Christian but it turned out that they saw religious claims very much as not having truth values in a manner I found reminiscent of logical positivism but which have much more in common with the postmodern condition, which sees philosophy as a branch of literature and everything as up for deconstruction. Statements about God make sense in their own communities and theology is a poetic or narrative truth, but these truth claims are no more or less valid than those of maths and science. Postmodern theology has been adopted by people in religious communities. There is, however, no truth outside language according to this.

I mean, I have certain views of course, as this view is both ableist and speciesist, but it is nevertheless interesting that there is a kind of agreement in this area between, of all things, postmodernity, religious mysticism and logical positivism. These are not all there is to philosophy of course, but it strikes me that this shows a way forward for us all. There are of course other non-theistic religions and non-theistic traditions within Christianity and Judaism.

Getting back to gripes though, there’s another cluster of beliefs which tend to be considered as universally associated. This is not a definitive list but I hope I’ve captured most of them:

• Theism
• An afterlife
• Souls and bodies as separate items which coexist in the same sense
• Varying fates according to actions in this life
• Subjectively sequential time extending beyond death
• Theological voluntarism/divine command theory
• Literal and unironic belief

The first three in particular seem to be closely associated with each other. For instance, it’s often said that people want to believe in God because they don’t want to die, so in other words they see the prospect of an afterlife, or possibly reincarnation, to follow from the idea that God exists. There’s also an implicit assumption that God is good and/or loving in theism, which unless you agree with the ontological argument for God’s existence out of the best-known “proofs” of God has no connection with whether God exists or not. In fact I strongly suspect a lot of fundamentalist evangelist Protestants don’t, deep down, believe God is good at all but are afraid to admit it even to themselves because God would be telepathic and know they believe this. Nonetheless their public view is that God is good and just.

In each case you can uncouple the bullet-pointed belief from theism. It’s entirely feasible to believe in an afterlife in isolation, with no God. There are also Christian physicalists, who believe God will re-create us all in superior physical form at the end of time with no separate entity bearing our consciousness. Jehovah’s Witnesses may fall into this category. Alternatively, there are religions which are strongly atheist but believe in souls, such as the Jains. So far as I can tell, even faithful Judaism as opposed to the reconstructionist form is pretty much agnostic on what happens when they die, and as a Christian I think it’s important for ethical reasons to ignore any claims about what happens beyond this life, if anything. My views on the nature of time make it a bit involved for me to go into this just now without it taking over the post. Theological voluntarism and divine command theory are the idea that God alone makes ethics meaningful, a belief which can only sincerely be held by a psychopath. Finally, literal and unironic belief relies on Biblical literalism, which is seriously compromised by Biblical criticism, and there is also a project to imagine history as proceeding as young Earth creationists and otherwise Biblically literalist people suppose but with no God. Incredibly, there really are people who believe that and are atheist.

I very much get the impression that some anti-theistic atheists really would prefer theistic Christians to be conservative evangelicals, and I seem to remember Richard Dawkins saying that liberal and progressive Christianity are dangerous because they represent a kind of gateway drug to extremism. It also seems to me that some anti-theists simply think that’s what Christians are like as a block, and I think this is our fault because of those of us who are particularly strident and emphatic about our bigotry. In fact churches can be excellent factories for anti-theistic atheists and we’re responsible for creating them in many cases. But on both sides there is a tendency, which I’ve probably exhibited here, to caricature the other side, whereas in fact there could be said to be no sides at all, just people dedicated to the truth.

Gnosticism

Trigger warning: Rape.

Here’s some common ground for mainstream theistic Christians and metaphysically naturalistic atheists: something neither of us believe in. Gnosticism is a variety of religion, possibly a form of early Christianity but arguably not, which existed from about the first Christian century until going into decline around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It might have been the other way round, in which case mainstream Christians would’ve been the heretics and they’d be orthodox, but this is how it really turned out.

The word “Gnosticism” is derived from the Greek γνωσις, which both means and is cognate with the English word “knowledge” and the Sanskrit word ज्ञान, jñāna. The general idea is that Jesus provided special esoteric knowledge to a few people, such as his disciples, which can be discovered by analysing what he said. Because history went the way it did, Gnosticism comes across as odd to today’s Christians, and also has a flavour more akin to Eastern religions such as Buddhism than Judaism or the other Abrahamic religions. A possibly over-simplified version of Gnosticism goes as follows: There is an ultimate true God known as the Λογος, Logos, or Word, who rules over all and is ultimately good. This God is hermaphrodite and defined only negatively, for instance as the Unmoved. Several steps down from this God is the Δημιουργός, Demiurge or artisan, carpenter perhaps, who fashioned the physical Cosmos and has trapped souls in matter. This Universe as we know it is therefore effectively the Matrix. This is the origin of the idea that we might be living in a simulation, and the secret knowledge we gain enables us to escape. I often think this makes the film series ‘The Matrix’ and Elon Musk’s and others’ idea that we are in a simulation distinctly unoriginal. Some Gnostic Christians saw Christ as the manifestation of the Logos and contrasted the New Testament God with God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as being the Logos and the Demiurge respectively.

Now for a bit more detail.

This is a diagram of the πληρωμα (pleroma). This is literally “fullness” and is a concept used in both orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. It means the totality of divine power. There is, incidentally, a lot of overlap between the concepts of orthodox and Gnostic Christianity and the word is used many times in the New Testament. It contrasts with κένωμα, kenoma, emptiness, and there may be a third contrast with κοςμος, kosmos (more usually spelt with a C in English). I should point out, incidentally, that when I say “orthodox Christianity” I’m actually referring to the version of Christianity which is directly ancestral to the Roman Catholic, Protestant and of course Orthodox denominations of the Church, and not just the Orthodox churches, although at the time what was to become mainstream Christianity was also to become the Orthodox Church. Terminology just is confusing here. A general trend of sophistication can be traced in the New Testament between the earlier synoptic gospels and the later Fourth Gospel and Johannine writings, and this trend continued with Gnosticism becoming more esoteric. Therefore the Pleroma as shown above works like this. The point at the top is the Monad, which seems to be another word for the Logos but I’m not sure (I’ll come back to that). This emanates into νους & αληθεια (I’m having to shift between Greek and English keyboards here all the time, hence the ampersand in the middle of that – it’s quite tiresome!), which are Mind and Truth. The word for “truth” is negative in Greek, meaning something like “non-forgetfulness” or “the state of not being hidden”, hence the “a-“, as in “atypical”, “asymmetrical” and “atheism”, also found in the related Sanskrit. This reflects the tendency in Gnosticism to pursue the via negativa, i.e. describing things as what they are not because the divine passes all understanding and therefore cannot be described positively – we don’t have appropriate concepts for God. This could lead into something interesting, and it will in a bit. Every point in that diagram within or on the larger circle represents one of the emanations of the divine, and the circle itself is referred to as the Boundary, Cross (Stake as in σταυρος), i.e. the same word used for the instrument of Jesus’s execution. The pleroma is where the ‘αιωνης (I’m not sure of that plural) dwell. These Æones (singular “Æon”) are the enamations of the Monad. Emanations are things which are “thrown off” the Monad without it being diminished. I tend to think of them as separate beings but I’m not sure this is correct. A similar idea is found in Zoroastrianism with the 𐬀𐬨𐬆𐬱𐬀 𐬯𐬞𐬆𐬧𐬙𐬀, Amesha Spenta, seven divine and personified emanations of Ahura Mazda representing various virtuous attributes of God. Since these are personified, I assume they are also in Gnosticism, which has thirty of them.

The kenoma could be linked to kenosis, an important concept in orthodox Christian theology. Kenosis is the idea that in becoming human Jesus emptied himself out and “became nothing for us”, and is a useful concept, for example, in the idea that Jesus was gang-raped before the crucifixion by Roman soldiers. One of the most popular posts on this blog is ‘Was Jesus Raped?‘ which goes into this in more detail, but it should be noted that there are many people who describe themselves as Christian now who object to such things as this statue:

A photo of the Jesus the Homeless Statue by Timothy Schmalz outside
Date
22 April 2014, 14:15:07
Source
Own work
Author
Pjposullivan

This statue is sometimes objected to on the grounds that it attempts to debase Christ, and similarly there are attempts on Yahoo! Answers to insult Christians by bringing up the question of him being gang raped. Kenosis focusses on the idea of Jesus becoming the lowest of the low: a homeless man, born in a stable, who happened to be God. The Gnostic concept of the Kenoma is of the emptiness or void outside of the Boundary of the Monad, and is the world as we perceive it by our senses. Each Æon in the pleroma has a corresponding entity in the kenoma.

The reason all this stuff is speculated about is that it’s supposed to be secret knowledge which carries the key to the Universe, and it’s also an attempt to reconcile Christian philosophy with Neoplatonism. My first impulse is to throw all of this into some kind of conceptual dustbin as completely idle and pointless esotericism, but one thing that stops me is the fact that, and this opens me to potential ridicule, I actually believe Nostradamus made successful, unambiguous and accurate predictions, and he based his technique on Neoplatonism. Also, the esoteric has a draw to me: it can be seen in alchemy, the Qabbalah, choirs of angels and the likes of the chakra system in Yoga.

I am, of course, coming out of the dominant strand of Christianity, some of which was to evolve into evangelical Protestantism, and consequently I’ve inherited the dismissive attitude of the early Church from about the fifth Christian century onwards, which regards Gnosticism as heretical. This history of early Christianity may, however, help to explain a couple of notable features of today’s mainstream Christian faith. Christianity as I understand it has an oddly sparse and austere cosmology. Any other world faith seems to have accumulated complex models of the spiritual universe such as many deities, the various worlds of Buddhism, the emanations of Zoroastrianism, the complexity of the Talmud in Rabbinical Judaism and the names of God in Islam. Some denominations of the Christian faith share that kind of concretion, but not the likes of the Society of Friends or Evangelical Protestantism, the two aspects wherewith I have most to do. I also place ethical considerations right at the centre of my life, something which occurred to me when I first looked at the Qabbalah, because the idea there seemed to be that “doing the Right Thing”, which in that case probably meant following the Talmud perfectly, was simply the first stage of the Tree Of Life, whereas to me that makes the entire thing redundant because it constitutes a distraction from that duty and a waste of time and energy. This plainness and austerity, in the context of what became orthodox Christianity, seems like a continuation of the trend which began with the rejection of Gnosticism.

There is, though, an opposite trend which is equally apparent in Evangelical Protestantism, and the fact that these two seem to coëxist in it really puzzles me. If you look at, for example, Judaism, that has a list of thirteen precepts arrived at by Moses Maimonides which sums up its basis, although of course you then have the sophistication of Torah, Talmud and perhaps even the Zohar. Islam has its Five Pillars and Buddhism its Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. All of these amount to just one principle: do good deeds in the world and you will achieve a higher state of being. Evangelical Protestantism is markèdly unlike this. It has no “elevator pitch”. In order to do the right thing according to that, you have to repent and commit to Christ, the uniquely fully human and fully divine sinless person who died on the Cross for you in order to atone for the inherited sins of the human race due to the first people’s disobedience from God, and it isn’t good deeds which help here but just the one deed of letting Christ in. Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to it, but all that seems a lot more complicated than other religions. And somehow, this austerity and complexity comfortably occur together as features of Evangelical Protestantism. Which is weird. However, I think this complexity is probably inherited from Gnosticism, because a clear trend can be seen towards it in the chronological order of the New Testament texts.

Modern mainstream Christianity, including in fact heterodox sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, emerges from a tradition which defined itself as “Not Gnosticism”, although there are other heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism, while also inheriting Gnostic features. One legacy is the via negativa, that is, describing the Divine by what it’s not. There is a view that metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist atheism is the result of a Christian world view because of its separation between the Divine and the created realms, the latter of which is taken to be amenable to logic and governed by physical laws, and ultimately leading to the redundancy of the concept of God. Some other forms of atheism are remarkably different. For instance, some Indian atheists simply saw karma as a sufficient explanation for everything an therefore rejected the concept of God. But to me the most appealing other option to theism, and probably the one closest to my own theism, is theological non-cognitivism, also known as “ignosticism”, which is the view that religious language, including talk of God, is not about semantic meaning, and therefore that “there is no God” is just as invalid as “God exists”. It’s similar to ethical non-cognitivism – the idea that a sentence like “this is the right thing to do” in fact means “I approve of this, do so as well”. It is also true that the via negativa edges into that, and if I were to reach another set of beliefs from where I currently am, I would probably just decide that atheism and theism are equally crass and ill-conceived. This idea can be traced back to Gnosticism, although it crops up in other belief systems, such as logical positivism. There is no point at which I would ever claim to be atheist, for that reason, unless I change my mind about the idea that there is always a strong emotive element in meaning. My narrative tends to be psychological even though I’m externalist, but ignosticism also works as a way of highlighting the possibility that our notion of God, among other religious ideas, may simply be incoherent.

I don’t consider Gnosticism to be a good thing. To my mind, it removes the distinctiveness of Christianity and makes it more like Buddhism and Hinduism in that it leads one to view matter as evil. This has negative consequences in the real world. For instance, Ayurvedic medicine is influenced by the idea that reincarnation is an undesirable consequence in that it sees in utero development as painful for the fetus and pregnancy as an unhealthy state, so it brings misogyny with it. Women are, for Ayurvedic medicine, undesirable vessels which trap us all in life as opposed to Nirvana. The same kind of thing happens with Gnosticism, since it views matter as evil and something to be escaped. Adopting such an attitude undercuts the urge to make a positive difference to the world, since life is effectively an illusion anyway. The modern Church has also accused transgender people of Gnosticism, which I won’t cover since this is the wrong blog for it: here is a pamphlet from the Christian Institute on the matter, so to speak.

There are opposing views regarding whether the New Testament itself contains Gnostic elements. It had a tendency to use words also used in the New Testament, and the Septuagint, but elaborated way beyond their usual meaning, which accords with its esotericism. The Fourth Gospel (“John”) of course mentions the Logos in a prominent position and there seems to be something odd going on with its prose style which I’ve never been able to put my finger on, possibly chiasmus, which might be used to extract some kind of hidden meaning. Analysing the texts of the gospels themselves, some claim that earlier and later versions can be distinguished in such as way that Jesus was viewed differently as time went by. Specifically, the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical gospel which, however, appears to be Q, an early long-undiscovered apparent source for other canonical gospels, seems to focus on the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and doesn’t refer to the idea of the End Times. This could reflect on a change in attitude when the apparently promised imminent end of the world didn’t happen. To my mind, it seems that paradoxically the idea that the world was about to end is a later idea, although this may not be sustainable considering the apparently apocalyptic focus of much contemporary Judaism. It’s also possible that Paul was influenced by Gnosticism, because his focus was on the Gentiles, who would at the time have been more comfortable with Greek ideas, although the Jews were themselves quite Hellenised at this time. He may even have been Gnostic himself, referring to “knowledge” in such texts as 1 Corinthians 8:10 –

Εαω γαρ τις ιδη σε τον εχοντα γνωσιν εν ειδωλειω κατακειμενον ουχι η συνειδησις αυτου ασθενους οντος οικοδομηθησεται εις το τα ειδωλοθυτα εσθειν;

For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 

I don’t know about you, but to me this looks a bit contrived, since the “knowledge” might simply be the usual Pauline theology of salvation.

To conclude, if Gnosticism had become the dominant form of Christianity I don’t think it would’ve been a good thing. Even as it stands, Christianity may have been instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire because people simply didn’t care about the world any more, and with Gnosticism it would’ve been even more so. It’s popular in certain circles and has influenced Christianity as we know it, pun intended, but it isn’t a good thing. It’s still quite interesting though.