Richard Dawkins and Divine Simplicity: A Short Essay (Part Two)
God
and world mutually implicate each other, so we must pay close attention when
concepts of one or the other are adjusted.
As the historian of science John Hedley Brooke puts it:
Their [That is, those historians
that have Andrew Dixon White and John William Draper’s] preconception that, as
science has advanced, phenomena once considered supernatural have yielded to
naturalistic explanation, is not without support. But it assumes a dichotomy between nature and
supernature that oversimplifies the theologies of the past. If a supernatural power was envisaged as
working through , as distinct from interfering with, nature, the antithesis
[between science and theology] would partially collapse. … The significance
given to explanations in terms of natural causes depends on higher-level
assumptions embedded in a broader cultural framework. In the history of Western culture, it has not
simply been a case of nature swallowing supernature. Something had to happen to change the
higher-level assumptions if the conflict between science and religion was to
achieve the self-evident status proclaimed by Draper, White, and their
successors.[1]
Here
then the evolving historical concept of a “pure nature,”[2]
that has no intrinsic need for reference to God, begins to involve what Kathryn
Tanner phrases as “contrastive transcendence,”[3]
that must necessarily begin to picture and speak of God as “a being,” over
against the world, and one who interacts with the world only by displacing or
superseding purely “inner-worldly” causality, or mechanically accounting for
things for which a naturalist system cannot mechanically
account: “Divinity characterized in terms of a direct contrast [or direct
correlation] with certain sorts of being, or with the world of non-divine being
as a whole is brought down to the level of the world and the beings within it
in virtue of that very opposition [or continuity]: God becomes one being among others
within a single order…A cosmology influenced by such suggestions will
characterize a divine agency in terms appropriate for a finite one.”[4]
Thus Charles Taylor[5]
and Brad S. Gregory[6]
are quite perceptive when they note so-called “scientific” criticisms of those
like Dawkins here are not really based on any actually “scientific” evidence,
but their “logic” rests upon subtle cumulative shifts in our “theological
imaginaries” [7] regarding the autonomy and
self-enclosure of the cosmos, its characteristics, our epistemology, and the
consequent imagining of God’s relation to the world (or not) viz-a-viz that
“self-enclosure” of our world-concept, controlled by an increasingly univocal
predication theory. So Charles Taylor,
who comments on clusters of these assumptions within our modern “social
imaginaries” he calls “Closed-World Structures,”[8]
that orient us away from transcendence as traditionally conceived to its
re-envisioning along essentially secular lines:
The mechanical outlook which splits nature from supernature
voids all...mystery. This split generates the modern concept of miracle;
a kind of punctual hole blown in the regular order of things from outside, that
is, from the transcendent. Whatever is higher must thus come about
through the holes pierced in the regular, natural order, within whose normal
operations there is no mystery. This is
curiously enough a view of things shared between materialists and Christian
fundamentalists. [For fundamentalists]
provide proof of miracles because certain things are unexplained by the normal
course of natural causation. For the
materialist, it is proof that anything transcendent is excluded by science.[9]
He continues: “It isn’t just that one day people looked without
blinkers and discovered epistemology; rather this is the way things could be
made to look from within a new historical formation of human identity, that of
the disengaged objectifying subject. The
process involves reinvention, a recreation of human identity…there is no simple
stepping out of an earlier such identity into the light of pure nature.”[10] And further: “[Thus] we have undergone a
change in our condition involving both an alteration of the structures we live
within, and our way of imagining these structures.”[11] Another scholar looking
over a similar period of history largely agrees:
The medieval sense of God's symbolic presence in his creation
and the sense of a universe replete with transcendent meaning and limits had to
recede, if not to give way totally to the postulates of univocation and homogeneity in the seventeenth century. God's
relation to the world had to be given a concrete physical meaning...It is clear
why a God describable in such unequivocal terms, or even given physical
features and functions, eventually became all the easier to discard...Once God
regained transparency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and
kill.[12]
God indeed has a body that we identified and killed—but it is
Christ crucified; modern atheism by contrast often feeds upon a holocaust of
demiurges that theology inflicts upon itself, rather than rejection of the true
God.[13] Thus if we might allow Dawkins’ tasty
illusion to linger for a moment: to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster
(or: belief in fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, Zeus, etc…) is not the same as belief in God authentically conceived:
Beliefs regarding fairies are beliefs about a certain kind of
object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much
the same intentional shape and rational content as beliefs regarding one’s
neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and
ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular
thing and the totality of all things, the ground of all possibility of anything
at all … God…is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for either
photons or (possible) fairies to exist, and so can be ‘investigated’ only, on
the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and induction and conjecture or, on
the other, by contemplation or sacramental or spiritual experiences…Evidence
for or against the reality of God, if it is there, saturates every moment of
the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of
consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.[14]
So Henri de Lubac writes:
God
is not merely the principle and the term, at the beginning and at the end: the
Good of every good, the Life of all living things, the Being of all beings, he
is also at the heart of all things. In illo vivimus, et movemur, et sumus. In him we live and move and have our
being. But for that presence of the
Absolute at the heart of the relative, of the Eternal at the heart of movement,
everything would return to dust. [15]
And:
For
man, God is not only a norm [a la Kant] that is imposed upon him and, by
guiding him, lifts him up again: God is the Absolute upon which he rests, the
Magnet that draws him, the Beyond that calls him, the Eternal that provides him
with the only atmosphere in which he can breath and, in some sort, that third
dimension in which man finds his depth.[16]
God
is as such not like his saucy counterpart in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, nor
is God like any object at all, not even a maximally perfect one. Precisely because all of these objects are
composed of essence and existence, and are riven by the fact that their
contingency means what they are cannot explain the fact that they exist. They just as well might not be. The epistemological criteria to believe in
such things, or not, is as such susceptible to the usual standards we use
within the order of objects to believe this or that claim. But belief in God is of a different order.
As
such Dawkins commits the increasingly frequent error that is the “habit of
conceiving God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe,
or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from
all other beings only in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically,
and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an
artifact.”[17] Given all this, since the natural
sciences these days appear to do a relatively comprehensive job of explaining
material phenomenon, God appears to be lost somewhere in the unemployment line.[18]
“One does not,” however, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger once quipped,
“lose God as one loses a pocketknife.”[19] He means by this, says Mark Wrathall, that
“to lose God” would be “an apocalyptic event,” a loss that “cannot be treated
with the same equanimity that we might treat the loss of some mundane object.”[20]
[1] John Hedley Brooke, Religion and Science: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 47-48.
[2] On this concept c.f. De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural.
[3] Tanner, God and
Creation, 45.
[5] Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age (Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2007). C.f. esp. 539-779.
[6] Brad S. Gregory, The
Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
(Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 2012), 25-74.
[7] We here use “ theological imaginary,” in the technical
sense that Charles Taylor has defined “social imaginaries.” C.f. Charles Taylor, Modern
Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23-30; and in
more detail, Charles Taylor, A Secular
Age, 171-176.: 1.) How ordinary people "imagine" social surroundings, carried in contemporary images, stories, legends, etc... 2.) It is different than a
"theory," in that theory is mainly possessed at a theoretical or
reflective level, and by only a few elites or a small minority. 3.) The
Imaginary is shared by large groups at an often pre-theoretical level (i.e.
"gut feeling" etc...). These
social imaginaries provide a common "understanding," (if the purely
intellectual connotations are put aside, and "understanding,"
includes emotional, physical, and psychological disposition) which provides and
"atmosphere" or "context" for common practice. Obviously our usage is specific to the
factors which relate to theological formulation, though given the universal
nature of its object, God, the “theological imaginary” no doubt ultimately does
not have a different domain expanse than Taylor’s notion.
[8] Taylor, A
Secular Age, 550ff: “My understanding of the immanent frame is that,
properly understood, it allows both readings [openness and closedness to
transcendence] without compelling us to either… What pushes us one way or
another is what we might describe as our over-all take on human life, and its
cosmic and (if any) spiritual surroundings….My concept of ‘spin’ here…implies
that one’s thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful [world]picture which
prevents one seeing important aspects of reality. I want to argue that those who think the
closed reading of immanence is ‘natural’ and obvious are suffering from this
[spin]…the force of this secularist spin can be understood in terms of what I
will call ‘Closed World Structures’ (CWS), that is, ways of restricting our
grasp of things which are not recognized as such…I will not be arguing for the
open- or closed-reading as such, just trying to dissipate the false aura of the
obvious that surrounds one of these [that is, the closed world structure].”
[9] Taylor, A
Secular Age, 547.
[12] Amos Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 116.
[13] Not that
they would thereby accept Christian theism when presented with it, but such
misconceptions on what exactly they are accepting or rejecting should be
stressed. As David Bentley Hart writes “I am enough of a romantic to believe
that, if something is worth being rude about, it is worth understanding as well.”
(Hart, The Experience of God, 2.)
[14] Hart, Experience
of God, 33-34. These experiences
cannot, however, be discerned at our leisure, but only as they are revealed and
“read” through the revelation and encounter with Jesus Christ in the power of
the Spirit. C.f. Sarah Coakley, God
Sexuality and the Self, 44: “For God, by definition, cannot be an extra
item in the universe (a very big one) to be known, and so controlled, by human
intellect, will, or imagination. God is,
rather, that without which there would be nothing at all; God is the source and sustainer of all being,
and, as such, the dizzying mystery encountered in the act of contemplation as
precisely the ‘blanking’ of human ambition to knowledge, control, and mastery. To know God is unlike any other knowledge;
indeed, it is more truly to be known,
and so transformed.”
[15] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996), 64-65.
[16] Henri de Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 67.
[18] Michael Hanby,
“Triunity, Creation, and Aesthetic Rationality,” American Theological Inquiry, 41:
“It is extremely difficult to make the doctrine of creation
intelligible within the confines of these cosmological assumptions [of the
mechanistic universe], for they require as their precondition that the
Trinitarian God of orthodox Christian understanding had to be un-thought and
forgotten, and the metaphysical grammar appropriate to Divine transcendence dismantled.”
[19] Cited in Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University, 2011), 196.
[20] Ibid. C.f.
Sarah Coakley, God Sexuality and the
Self, 44: “For God, by definition, cannot be an extra item in the universe
(a very big one) to be known, and so controlled, by human intellect, will, or
imagination. God is, rather, that
without which there would be nothing at all;
God is the source and sustainer of all being, and, as such, the dizzying
mystery encountered in the act of contemplation as precisely the ‘blanking’ of
human ambition to knowledge, control, and mastery. To know God is unlike any other knowledge;
indeed, it is more truly to be known,
and so transformed.”; Conor Cunningham, “Suspending the Natural Attitude: From
Thomas Aquinas to Michel Henry,” in Peter M. Candler and Conor Cunningham, ed.,
Transcendence and Phenomenology
(London: SCM Press, 2007), 263-264: “When we ask, do you believe in God? –
the form that this takes, presumes that in the absence of an intelligent, and
free Creator, existence is an unproblematic concept. In strict terms, consequently, the question
of whether God exists is misdirected, to say the least…It is, because talk of
God in this way tends to provide a realm for the formation of nature, or of the
natural subject, over and against the supernatural, and so on. In this way, the god that we must be rid of
is the autonomous subject, who, rather comfortably, rests upon the implied
significance of solidity – the firm ground beneath their feet that neither
needs, nor is affected by, their belief or non-belief in God.”
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