Is God Improving? Are We?
by: Dave Belden on November 26th, 2009 | 8 Comments »
There’s a column worth reading by Kristof today, on liberal views about God, notably by Robert Wright and Karen Armstrong. E.g. this:
Mr. Wright detects an evolution toward an image of God as a more beneficient and universal deity, one whose moral compass favors compassion for humans of whatever race or tribe, one who is now firmly in the antigenocide camp. Mr. Wright’s focus is not on whether God exists, but he does suggest that changing perceptions of God reflect a moral direction to history — and that this in turn perhaps reflects some kind of spiritual force.
Be Scofield, my friend and fellow blogger on this site has a low opinion of Robert Wright, especially his idea that there is moral progress, an arrow to history. I like the idea, and think it has historical value. Be says it’s nonsense and Wright is so sanguine about neoliberal globalization that it puts him in collusion with some of the most immoral forces in our world today. Maybe I’ll get the energy up to debate Be, who you can see from his first post here is an energetic debater. Or maybe he’ll convince me. It’s not over yet.
I haven’t discussed Karen Armstrong with Be but I hope he likes her or we’ll have a real argument. I have to say her memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness is one of my favorite books. (I wrote briefly about her here, and Peter Marmorek has blogged about taking part in her Charter of Compassion project). Kristof on her new book:
Another best-seller this year, Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” likewise doesn’t posit a Grandpa-in-the-Sky; rather, she sees God in terms of an ineffable presence that can be neither proven nor disproven in any rational sense. To Ms. Armstrong, faith belongs to the realm of life’s mysteries, beyond the world of reason, and people on both sides of the “God gap” make the mistake of interpreting religious traditions too literally.
“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage,” Ms. Armstrong writes.
Kristoff’s reference (nr the end) to Nicholas Wade’s position–that there is a “God gene”–in a recent book (and in the Week in Review section) undercuts his whole essay. Wade has always been a genetic determinist in his writings for the Times (ie, a belief that “genes are destiny”, etc). His lastest idea is an absurdity.
Just because something contributes to continued life and evolutionary adaptability does NOT mean it is genetic. EG, the knowledge not to eat poisonous plants is not found in our genes but in the wisdom of our elders. Etc. So, even if one agrees that religiosity is hel;pful for group preservation (a doubtful proposition at best), it does not follow that it is in the DNA.
Yes, it’s very hard to understand exactly how it would be in the DNA anyway. Something so complex can hardly be carried by a single gene, and gene expression is turning out to be hugely influenced by environment anyway. The whole issue of how behavioral traits are carried in DNA is still way in its infancy as far as I (a complete scientific ignoramus) am able to discern. While there is fascinating stuff and a basic plausibility in much evolutionary psychology when written by sensible, non-sensnationalist people (e.g., Frans de Waal), it’s also clearly true that a major evolutionary heritage of the human being is adaptability. If reproduction and survival are the greatest drives in nature, one wonders how so many living celibates and dead soldiers (not to mention suicides) came to be. Clearly we can choose not to go along with some of our most basic behavioral traits.
This is a very interesting post, to someone who has chosen to live rather isolated in an indigenous small village in Central Yucatan for the past 7 years, mostly in order to find a “reality” that works for me–otherwise,”Why would I be reading Tikkun, and have found this website?”The content of this post are the questions most concerning me over the past few years.
What bothers me most about religious people is there tendency to stop “stretching their reasoning powers, and their language to the end of it´s tether.” That aside, I believe reasoning and language are just manifestations of human progress, and not at it`s heart; if one believes that moral progress has been made, –and I do–it`s more likely to have been the result of what`s essential in religions, historically and now, rather than the more western-oriented intellectual idea. I`d like to read the link to your friend, Be´s post, but it didn`t work for me. His ideas about neo-liberalism resonate with me.
I´ve studied sufism for many years, mostly by myself, and I have a degree in ecology, which I gave up years ago for the sake of art, and to put more congruence in life. Thanks for this post.
Although I am a theist, I have always appreciated the wit of Voltaire:
If God created man in his image, we have more than reciprocated.
–Voltaire
“Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.”
- Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.
IMO, Vatican II got it right when it stated that “believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism.” Rather than get sucked into a futile debate on the existence or non-existence of God, a better response to militant atheists may be to agree with them that the *God* they don’t believe in doesn’t exist.” I doubt that many subscribers to Tikkun, whatever their religious tradition, believe in the “Cosmic Bully” of their fundamentalist co-religionists.
The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. The invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator. …. Without doubt those who willfully try to drive God from their heart and to avoid all questions about religion, not following the biddings of their conscience, are not free from blame. But believers themselves often share some responsibility for this situation. For atheism, taken as a whole, is not present in the mind of man from the start (Atheismus, integre consideratus, non est quid originarium). It springs from various causes, among which must be included a critical reaction against religions and, in some places, against the Christian religion in particular. Believers can thus have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of God and of religion.
–Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes, 19
As long as we equate “God” with the inner structures of our acquired traditional images, our accumulated knowledge and/or the personal concepts derived from our internal experiences; we would expect to find some type of evolutionary process reflecting changes in our conciousness. The question is, does that equate to a commensurate alteration in a timeless, non-finite “Ground of Being?”
Consider whether a widening view of the starry heavens, as the clouds thin and part, would infer an alteration in the Cosmos or rather, one in our perceptive ability. Those “clouds” hiding the “Beatific Vision” are our own jealously guarded traditions, our self-valued knowledge and the tyranny of our own inner experiences. Those images may evolve, that knowledge may increase, those experiences seemingly deepen, yet they never will exist in the same plane as the “Living Truth.” The truth of their limiting influence must needs fade them from view.
To equate “God” with our mental images, our patterns of knowledge and/or our emotional experiences is to confuse
re-action for action, symbol for reality. As Krishnamurti never tired of pointing out, “the description is not the described.” The description of a tree is not a tree. The word “tree” is not a tree. Our image of a tree, no matter how much data, knowledge and experience we amass will never be a tree. In fact, the more I amass the more I see “me” whenever I look at that tree.
“Vocatus atque non Vocatus Deus aderit” Bidden or not bidden, God is present. (attributed by Erasmus to the Spartans) Our thirst for knowledge, our search for an experience of the “Source of all that Is,” is in the end a meaningless internal game of hocus-pocus, where we fragment our own consciousness into that part we call “I” and send it in search of that part we call “Thou.”
“By love may He be perceived, by thought never.”
Cloud of Unknowing 14th century
Don, This is a wise commentary indeed. I am entirely on the fence myself about what God may be like or if she exists at all in anything other than the sense of being a word for “everything that is.” But however the cosmos and God really are, I agree that our chances of describing them accurately and fully are zero: now we perceive darkly, and I have no idea if later we will see clearly.
In writing this post I was probably also influenced by a lovely book I read that we reviewed in Tikkun, Joseph’s Bones, by Jerome Segal, which treats the first books of the Hebrew Bible as telling the story of God’s development, especially the ways he is pulled into better moral shape by the complaints and arguments of his prophets. Looking it up and reading the comments on it on Amazon I was surprised to discover that I had left one myself, which reads:
“This book is a great and enjoyable read. I was raised Christian and an enthusiastic one at that, then went secular, then eclectically spiritual. The Bible remains a huge influence in my life but not one I have looked into much in recent years. This book turned my understanding of what it may mean upside down in a most exciting way: the idea that the first six books of the Bible is the story of a relationship with a powerful God who needed to be taught morality by the people he was protecting. I am no Biblical scholar but Tikkun magazine (where I work) recently included a very positive review of the book by highly respected scholar Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. The review can be found at http://www.tikkun.org and put “Joseph’s Bones” in the search function.”
Don and Carol’s comments are terrific.
On my strange, exciting path from skeptical, nominal Christian, to outspoken, strident atheist, to Jew-in-training (intended convert, I mean), I’ve wrestled with various conceptions of G-d.
Curiously, I still consider myself an atheist (in the literal, a-theist sense). The G-d I worship is not a theistic one, but that’s not to say that I don’t believe in G-d. I do. On the face of it, that may seem like a contradictory statement; in fact, it isn’t, especially if you approach G-d from a Spinozan or Karen Armstrong-like vantage point. Armstrong represents the universalistic conception of G-d that Wright describes “evolving.” That’s a good thing. The more people that appreciate the value of perceiving G-d “darkly,” as Dave puts it, the better. Mystery and reverence are paramount, and Armstrong trumpets that approach.
My only fault with Armstrong is that she likes to paint a rosy portrait of religious history, claiming that literal interpretations of the Abrahamic scriptures (represented by today’s religious fundamentalists) are the product of Cartesian influence, a reaction against the Enlightenment’s championing of reason uber alles. That is patently false. The literalistic sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam long preceded the Enlightenment.
As for Wright, I appreciate his assertions (and generally agree with them), but as far as teleological theology goes, I prefer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin‘s ruminations.
The “God” we believe in or the “God” we don’t believe in are essentially the same thing, namely constructs contained completely within our own conceptual and experiential limits. To cling to either is merely to cling to oneself. Both clutter our minds with endless “thought-chatter.” That “thought-chatter” is our own noise. That noise voids both space and silence, it negates the emptiness necessary for observation.
However, when there is that space there is emptiness and silence. Not imagined space, not induced silence nor practiced emptiness; those are all more “thought-chatter” noises, therefore absolutely worthless.
In that silence there is a movement which is timeless. That movement is not measured by thought and experience, in fact, thought and experience have no place in it whatsoever. In that silence IS the timeless Unnameable.