Say anything
Mark Vernon is playing the same old hurdy-gurdy.
The Oxford church historian tells of a ‘wise old Dominican friar’ who informed him that God is not the answer. Rather, God is the question…First you’ve got to ask what you mean by the word ‘God’. And there is a quick answer: we don’t know what we mean by the word ‘God’. God is a mystery. ‘The word “God” is a label for something we do not know’…
A mystery is different from a problem; a problem can be solved, science does that, science does it well, but a mystery is different. And God is one of those. Aquinas said God can’t even be said to exist. Talk about mysterious!
That’s how much of a mystery God is. Inherent in any decent conception of divinity is the notion that the divine is not a thing in the world, like everything else, because God is the reason there are things at all. God as the cause of existence, not something that exists.
It’s a mystery, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it; oh nooooooo. We can talk about it a lot! Why would we want to?
Again, the “why” is simply answered: because existence is so extraordinary. You see, if you believe the question of God is worth asking then it’s because you’ve sensed that life might have meaning, that the cosmos is for something, that there might be an explanation beyond chance as to why there is something rather than nothing. To ask of God is to raise these questions.
No doubt, but to raise these questions is not necessarily to talk about (or ‘ask of’) God. It is entirely possible to talk and speculate about life, and meaning, and the cosmos, and purpose, and why there is something rather than nothing, without talking about ‘God.’ You may not want to; you may think those vague suggestions are too generalized and shapeless and in an odd way parochial to be worth talking about; you may suspect that those aren’t real ‘questions’ but rather pretend questions shaped by the need to find reasons for thinking ‘God’ is real; but all the same you can. It’s the weird imperialism of goddy types that makes them think all questions of that kind are inextricable from God-talk. Being hammers, they think everything is a nail. But it isn’t.
So, second, how can God be talked of? It’s called the negative way, or the apophatic – saying what God is not. Whatever God might be, God is not visible: God’s invisible. Whatever God might be, God cannot be defined: God’s ineffable. Nothing positive is said. But nonetheless something is said of God. Similarly, the often forgotten motivation for the formulation of doctrine is the aim of not dissolving the mystery of God. When Christians say God is three in one, they assert what they take as a meaningful contradiction. And that’s the point. If you accept it, you accept a mystery.
God’s ineffable, but we get to go on and on and on effing anyway, and people say God is one and God is three and you just have to lump it and that’s because they don’t want to dissolve the mystery of God so the thing to do is to talk complete bullshit because by gum that preserves the mystery of God, and it lets you go on talking, too. In other words anything and everything, anything goes, it doesn’t matter, it’s a mystery and ineffable so nobody can say ‘Eh that’s nonsense’ and we can just go on blathering forever without ever having to check our data. As Mark Vernon does for another three paragraphs.
There’s something terribly childish about being satisfied with that kind of thing. Why bother? Yes, sure, you can do that, and go ahead, but why go proudly public with it in the Guardian’s blog? Why say it aloud as if we were supposed to be impressed? I’m impressed by people who really find out things, not by people who just spin words about ineffable trinities.
Something that’s worth pointing out is that people who claim God is utterly ineffable often don’t act as if they believe that themselves.
That is to say, they still pray, they still attend religious services, they still read the Bible, and they still do all those other things that only make sense under the understandable, anthropomorphic understanding of God they claim to have left behind. If God is completely ineffable, if his will is incomprehensible and his nature beyond description, then it doesn’t even make sense to talk of what God wants or desires. Yet they still act as if they know that God wants and desires certain specific things from human beings.
Oh, so much material:
You can be sure someone’s wise if they’re uttering incoherent platitudes, especially if they’re an old friar.
It is instructive here to compare those who do science with those who do the opposite. Scientists have a range of terms that are labels for unknown phenomena. Dark Energy is a good one. Its effect (increasing the rate of expansion of the universe) is known, but nothing else about it is. The key differences are:
1) Scientists don’t go running around making bold claims about what Dark Energy is or how it works. Unlike priests, physicists don’t go round telling people dark energy has declared Stephen Hawking His prophet (Dark Energy’s male, naturally) and that he doesn’t want us to eat spaghetti on a Thursday.
2) Scientists try to fill the gaps in their knowledge, not worship the empty spaces, as if it were profound to not know something.
“If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven’t visited yet” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
“saying what God is not. … God’s ineffable. Nothing positive is said”
“God is the reason there are things at all. God as the cause of existence”
Compare and contrast.
There is something so profoundly dishonest about this kind of thing – the kind of thing that Vernon is engaged in, whatever it’s called – that one feels a bit nauseous. But he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying, and he makes it clear like this:
For Zen Buddhists there is a mystery, and they show the mystery through Koans, which are really, if you like, questions, not answers, mysteries, not solutions. But the word ‘god’, like it or not, is a positive signifier, a referring expression. It pretends to be about something. If you then say, but it’s not an answer, it’s a question – it’s not the dressing, it’s the wound – you are being dishonest. You take away with one hand what you give with another. As Wittgenstein said – and he should have stuck to it (but he didn’t) – Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
It makes me angry. I was the fall guy. There are lots more. The reason churches and other religious businesses stay alive is not because they ask questions, but because they pretend to answer them. And then they say that the answers are really only further questions, but deeper into the mystery, and so the quest goes on. In for a penny, in for a pound. It’s a deeply dishonest business, a bit like gambling, but the stake is your life.
Thanks James K. This is great:
I also like ‘not worship the empty spaces’ – quite – I really hate the way Vernon and Armstrong and hoc genus omne sit around drooling over mysteries as such. It’s so self-indulgent. It would take a million lifetimes just to absorb everything we as a species do know – why spend so much time preening about what we don’t know? It pretends to be humble but really it’s terribly self-admiring.
Not just self-admiring but futile. If you study knowledge, you learn new things, which is a good thing in and of itself, but you might also discover something new, by finding a link between two different pieces of knowledge no one had figured out before.
But if you study ignorance you learn nothing and discover nothing. Its like watching TV, but with the TV turned off.
God is not the answer, but rather the question. OK, let’s buy that for a moment. If God is the question, how precisely is that question framed? Is there an answer to it? Is it as a question (?) even answerable?
These sorts of piss-pot profundities must take their proponents round and round in ever-decreasing circles.
As far as I am concerned, God is an old man with a white beard who sits on a throne up in the sky; who can be prayed to for the ending of a drought, but not abused for letting the drought happen in the first place.
That makes far more sense.
These sorts of articles, and often many of the accompanying comments, are so tiresome – I don’t often bother posting under them any more because there’s just no way to respond to each and every one of the empty inanities.
Reading some of the pro-science (and it really is an anti/pro-science debate in the broader philosophical sense of what a scientific mindset is about I think) comments, they read so clearly, they make sense, and most pertinently there is substance that I can get to grips with, rather than clouds of (often very very smug, ‘you haven’t been touched by God’-style) nothingness.
And you’re right OB, it is so self-indulgent. It’s the mindset of those who don’t like the effort of religion but of course are deep and warm-hearted enough to still believe in a great something, as long as it’s so ineffable they don’t have anything they need to defend in arguments.
Some favourite cliché-spotting from the comments:
no. 2 ‘God is Love’
no. 14 ‘Really Dawkins and Co and the fundamentalists are two sides of the same coin. Both seek to reduce existence to their perceptions, to their perspectives.’
I like that last bit – is not the whole point of science to work out the truth about the world in spite of our subjective sense-organs, ie beyond our perceptions?
Does this apparent emphasis on “mystery”, or not knowing, and being proud of it, amongst the proponents of religion have any connection with the late S. J. Gould’s now-falsified theory of NOMA?
Because science, as said by others here, attempts to fimd out, whereas these particular religious advocates claim NOT to know.
I realise this is in direct contradiction of other religious advocates who do claim to know – which raises an interesting dichotomy (maybe)
I still don’t understand the premise behind apophatic theology. We can say what God ISN’T, for example:
God is not red.
But this is equivalent to the positive (disjoint) assertion:
God is EM absorptive to red frequencies
OR
God is EM transparent to red frequencies
OR
Asking whether God is red is a category mistake, such as asking whether my opinion is green.
Whichever of these three is true, we’ve asserted something positive about God: either God absorbs red light, transmits red light, or belongs to a class of objects that do not accept colors as properties.
Is there even such a thing as a negative assertion which is not equivalent to some positive assertion?
If god is the Question the answer is:
A) No
B) Why?
C) What the?
D) All of the above
Surely mysteries must be solved…
Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot were always capable.
I’m thinking the butler did it.