Herbert McCabe (1926-2001) was a Dominican theologian and philosopher who taught at Blackfriars in Oxford. Reading him is always challenging and refreshing: he had what in older Oxbridge parlance would probably have been called a good mind – a very good mind. Anyway, here are some quotes from his God Matters collection, which say more clearly some of what I have been trying to say in response to Dawkins.
[I]t seems to me that what we often call atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or has been told is a religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that religious people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible, that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.
But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question. (7)
When we have concluded that God created the world, there still remains the scientific question to ask about what kind of world it is and was and how, if ever, it began…. Coming to know that the universe is dependent on God does not in fact tell us anything about the character of the universe. How could it? Since everything we know about God (that he exists and what he is not) is derived from what we know of the universe, how could we come back from God with some additional information about the world? If we think we can it is only because we have smuggled something extra into our concept of God – for example, when we make God in our own image and ask ourselves quite illegitimate questions like, ‘What would I have done if I were God?’ (8)
> … the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing …
Would it be wrong to describe answers to that mystery as explanatory hypotheses?
McCabe seems to skip from “not denying the existence of some answer” to “does not see that there is any problem or mystery here” – skipping over ‘seeing that there is a mystery and denying the existence of some answer’.
I suspect McCabe would say that there is something odd about the position you say he skips. Note, first, that he’s here only distinguishing forms of denial (not agnosticism or anything like that); second, that he’s not talking about any specific answer, but the existence of ‘some’ answer (whether or not we have yet, or will ever, be able to identify that answer properly). So I think he would say there is something odd about someone saying, ‘Yes, there is a real question here’ and ‘No, there is not and will not be any answer to that question – it is a strictly unanswerable question.’ Is a strictly unanswerable question – a question where we deny the possibility of any answer – really a question? How does that differ from simply accepting an odd state of affairs as brute fact?
The second quote shows why McCabe, at least, would probably not be happy to describe an answer to this question as an explanatory hypothesis: it does no explanatory work.
I tied myself up with McCabe’s words.
If we accept the premise that there could be nothing then it’s a real question, otherwise not.
I suspect “the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing” is somewhere on Buddha’s list of questions not rightly put, questions that do not edify, questions for which the reply is a four-fold denial.
> it does no explanatory work
Doesn’t it carry the explanatory burden here – “When we have concluded that God created the world… Coming to know that the universe is dependent on God…” – an explanation of existence rather than of characteristics.
McCabe would, I think, not call this an explanation. He does not think we know what God is, and he does not think we know how God created the world. If this is ‘explanation’, then it is nothing like the kind of explanation offered by a scientific theory. It does not, for instance, present the existence of this emergence as one instance of a more general class of occurrences; it does not describe any clear process – and so on. (Maybe I’m being too restrictive in my use of the word ‘explanation’?)
If it is not an explanation in this sense, what kind of claim is McCabe making? As I understand it, his claim does two things – one positive, one negative.
Positively – and I agree that this does look a little like ‘explanation’ in a looser sense – it shows that there is a mysterious limit at the edge of rational accounts of the world, and then claims that Christian discourse about God involves a way of talking about how the world relates to that limit. It says to the atheist, ‘There is something real here, something on your map of the world, that theology talks about and that you don’t really talk about.’
It is not that the question posed by the existence of this limit can’t be met with a Buddha-like unasking, as you propose – an acceptance of the necessary incompleteness of rational accounts of the world. McCabe’s argument is that such unasking is a necessary part of real atheism, not that such real atheism is impossible. (Though another part of his argument is, of course, that some people, when they opt for the “unasking” of the question, do so because they think that the only real alternative is to claim ‘that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, just like Basil Spence only bigger and less visible’ – and he wants them to know that ‘a whole Christian tradition’ thinks such an answer just as implausible and as question-begging as they do.)
And it is not that if one does accept the Christian account, one properly understands what lies beyond this limit on the map. McCabe’s argument simply says, as it were, ‘See this limit? Theology has something to say about that, and it talks about it in a way that isn’t quite like the “Buddhist” way. When theology uses the word “God”, it is pointing in this direction’.
Negatively, however, McCabe’s claim that ‘God’ is the answer to the question (of why there is something rather than nothing) – or, in different words, his claim that ‘God’ has something to do with the limit that can be identified at the edge of even atheist maps – imposes constraints upon how Christian claims about God will work; I talked about that in my recent discussion of Aquinas’ Five Ways, and their relation to mystery. If ‘God’ provides some kind of end to the chains of causal questions, then ‘God’ must be mysterious in some quite specific ways. That’s why McCabe talks about knowing ‘what God is not’, rather than about ‘what God is’.
I do appreciate the effort you make in finding ways to express these ideas clearly.
> He does not think we know what God is, and he does not think we know how God created the world.
Does he not think we know that God is, and does he not think we know that God creates the world?
> he wants them to know that ‘a whole Christian tradition’ thinks such an answer just as implausible and as question-begging as they do
Why should we not think any answer is implausible and question begging?
“How do you Mystics, who maintain the absolute Incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from Skeptics or Atheists, who assert, that the first Cause of All is unknown and unintelligible?”
> ‘There is something real here, something on your map of the world, that theology talks about and that you don’t really talk about.’
That filling in of blanks brought to mind ‘hic sunt dracones’.
🙂
It’s not so much about filling in the blank on someone else’s map, though. It’s about persuading someone who holds one ‘worldview’ to consider another ‘worldview’ by pointing to the different ways in which those worldviews handle a particular area. The theologian says, ‘In your worldview, there’s a blank here – and you might be happy with that. But in my worldview that blank is more directly addressed and discussed – albeit in rather strange way. My worldview gives me something to say about something about which your worldview leaves you quiet.’ That’s not any kind of knock-down argument that the theologian’s worldview is correct, but it might give a prima facie reason for considering it. (The ‘worldview’ terminology is barely adequate here, I know: I don’t want to suggest that we live in a world of neatly identifiable, monolithic, mutually incommensurable paradigms – but I think the basic point I’m making here can survive the muddying of the waters necessary to make this language more precise.)
“For St Thomas, metaphor is the heart of religious language but it cannot be sufficient of itself. It needs to be underpinned by such non-metaphorical but analogical assertions as that God exists, that God is good, that God is the creative cause and sustainer of our world, that he is loving. It is these literal assertions that are subject to the caveat of analogy. Although we do not understand what they refer to in God, they are our way of asserting that the riches of relgious imagery are more than the art-form of a particular culture (although, of course, they are that) but are part of our access to a mystery beyond our understanding which we do not create, but which rather creates us and our understanding and our whole world.” p28 God Still Matters
I’m getting stuck on “analogical assertions”.
Don’t we have to show some commonalities to make a valid analogy? How could we ever show commonalities to “a mystery beyond our understanding”?
Here is how Brian Davies explains analogy (using Aquinas as his main guide) in Thinking about God (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985) – which I’ve chosen simply because I have it to hand, and because it is moderately clear.
“Are terms applied to God and to creatures univocally or equivocally? When we say that God is wise and that Solomon is wise, do we mean exactly the same thing? Or do we mean something completely different in the case of God and Solomon?
Aquinas … answer[s] that terms cannot be applied to God and to creatures univocally … pointing to the vast different between God and creatures. Suppose we say that Solomon is wise. To say this is to say that Solomon is a wise man … whose wisdom is shown in his behaviour as a material thing of a particular kind. … [But for Aquinas] God is not a material thing….” [And so on – Davies goes on to give several other respects in which Solomon ‘s and God’s wisdom must differ.]
[He then turns to the idea that the two claims might be completely equivocal:] “But, as Aquinas sees it, this conclusion will not do either. For … there [will be] little point in talking about God at all since we will then have absolutely no criteria for applying particular terms to God…. [After all] we learn to use words like ‘wise’ with reference to things like Solomon… [so] we cannot mean anything by ‘God is wise’ unless wisdom in God has some connection with wisdom in Solomon….”
[Aquinas’ solution is to defend the possibility of analogical speech about God.] “[I]n the case of God and creatures it is possible to apply the same term to both in such a way that it does not have to mean entirely the same in both cases, nor something so different that the result is just a metaphor…. [W]e may say that a man is healthy and that his diet is healthy. In neither case are we speaking metaphorically…. But health in human beings and health in diets are different. In the same way, so Aquinas holds, we can apply certain terms both to God and to creatures so as really to mean what we say without saying precisely the same thing in both cases yet without meaning something entirely different.”
[Davies then defends Aquinas’ point about the impossibility of univocal predication, and uses Wittgenstein to help him clarify some of the features of ordinary analogical predication, before moving on to a version of what I take to be your question.] “But if God is not definable as creatures are, will it not be true that wisdom in him will differ so greatly from wisdom in them that ‘God is wise’ (or any other positive statement about God) will be incomprehensible to us?… Suppose I say that I know of two faithful things. If I say nothing but this, you cannot know what I am talking about, for ‘thing’ is a kind of dummy word and it does not serve to identify anything. But you can still have some idea about what is meant by calling the things I speak of (whatever they are) faithful…. So one can understand something of what is meant when something is said to be thus and so without understanding what it is like for the thing itself to be thus and so…. [So,] we can sensibly say that, though we might not be able to understand what it is like for God to be as he may be said to be, it is still, in principle, possible for us to understand what is meant when he is said to be as he is. In other words, it is, in principle, possible to agree that certain words can signify something that is really in God, that we can understand something of what is signified by these words, and yet that the way in which God is as he is said to be is not something we can understand…. [Aquinas] distinguishes between the property signified by a property word (its res significata) and the way in which the property is present in the object which has it (its modus significandi)….
“[So] if the doctrine of divine simplicity is correct, there is a sense in which we cannot understand the truth of statements like ‘God is wise’…. [W]e cannot understand what it is like for God to be as we say that he is when we talk about him by means of positive statements…. [H]owever, this is not to say that we cannot rationally believe ourselves to be speaking truly when we make positive statements about God.” (pp.137-144).
Davies also makes clear that this discussion is not about how one might come to make (and to justify) the claims that one makes about God but simply about whether one can intelligibly claim to be saying anything meaningful once one does make such a claim.
Take “God exists”. If God is, in Christian theology, thought to be the source of the existence of everything that is, then we’re going to want to say something like ‘God exists’. But we clearly can’t mean by ‘exists’ something like ‘is instantiated somewhere in the space-time continuum’ (or whatever) – in fact, if we follow Davies or Aquinas, we’ll end up saying that we don’t (and can’t) know what it means for God to exist – we can’t know what existence looks like in God’s case, as it were. The arguments above suggest that we can still meaningfully say ‘God exists’, even if the modus significandi of that claim is utterly beyond us.
(NB – just in case you’re very interested: In one of the chapters of my doctrine book, I do a rather more detailed work through of how all this might work in the case of the claim ‘God is love’.)
> [W]e may say that a man is healthy and that his diet is healthy. … But health in human beings and health in diets are different.
There’s a presumed causal relationship – “his diet is healthy” is a presumption that to some extent because of his diet “a man is healthy”. This isn’t analogy, it’s cause and effect.
> Suppose I say that I know of two faithful things. … But you can still have some idea about what is meant by calling the things I speak of (whatever they are) faithful…
Only because we trust that “faithful” is being applied to things that we commonly agree can be “faithful”, and trust we’re not being tricked into applying “faithful” to a grain of sand or an incomprehensible mystery!
> The arguments above suggest that we can still meaningfully say ‘God exists’, even if the modus significandi of that claim is utterly beyond us.
Elsewhere you alluded to “mealy-mouthed special pleading” and I didn’t understand what that was in reference to – unhappily I think I’m starting to understand.
When “the modus significandi of that claim is utterly beyond us” I fail to see how something “utterly beyond us” can be meaningful.
(Seems like “analogical assertions” means asserting the kind of similarity we might find when we make an analogy – without actually making a valid analogy – in fact asserting that kind of similarity in a situation where we never could make a valid analogy.)
But there’s a presumed causal relationship in the God case as well. We say ‘God exists’ because we’re saying that God is the source of the existence of all things. And, yes, we accept that we don’t know what we’re doing when we say that God exists: we’ve pushed the already stretchy word ‘exist’ beyond any point it has been stretched to before.
And saying God is faithful similarly starts with claims about God that do come under the heading ‘things that we commonly agree to be “faithful”‘ – stories about constancy, about fulfilment of promises and so on. We say God is faithful because we believe God to be the source of those examples of faithfulness. The language starts off on its home ground, as it were. But if we start thinking about what it is for God to be faithful – what faithfulness looks like in God, as it were – we quickly come up against the same sort of limits on understanding: we can’t easily talk about God having some ‘settled disposition’, say, or about God having habits. So the modus significandi breaks, without breaking the claimed connection between God and the examples of faithfulness that we encounter and attribute to God.
So, on the one hand, you’re quite right: I end up saying something I don’t understand – there’s a sense in which it isn’t meaningful. Yet, on the other hand, I am using the word ‘faithful’ in a way that retains a connection to the ordinary usages of the word: I’m still claiming that God is the source of this recognisable faithfulness that I encounter, even if I don’t and can’t know how God is that source.
To get into this properly, one can’t help getting deeper into the patterns of Christian discourse about God. I’d claim, for instance, that the place where the nature of Christian talk about God is clearest is not the claim that God exists, of the God is faithful, but with claims about God’s love. Understand how ‘love’ language works in Christian claims about God, and you can begin to see how other kinds of claim about God might work. So, in the first place, ‘love’ is a word that we learn in ordinary ways, by being loved by parents or carers, by reading love stories, by falling in love, by loving our children, and so on. Of course, there is no one definition of ‘love’ that captures all this; the uses are, rather, ‘analogous’ in the ordinary, unobjectionable sense. Christians, however, believe that they have (in ways that stretch but do not break that word) encountered God loving them in Jesus of Nazareth, and have started to be draw by God into Christlike love. That is something that ordinary language about love is more-or-less fit for: we’re not stretching the word to the point of ineffable mysteriousness. I say ‘God is love’ because I trust God as the source of the love that encounters me in Christ, and begins catching me up into itself. There is some stretching of the word going on, however. I believe I am being taught what true love is by being loved truly. The love shown to me in Christ is not, for me, simply one more example of love to set alongside all the others. It is the example of love – and learning to recognise myself and the world around me as loved by this love begins to change my understanding of (and so practice of) love. This is a love that one learns by learning to become loving. So Christian theologians therefore affirm that there is a sense in which ‘love’ is a word used most properly of God (even though they cannot know how love works in God’s case). God is the source of perfect love, and God’s love is the criterion for all human love. All a person’s finite and imperfect loves are therefore given a standard outside themselves: they are called to account before God’s love in Christ. To say ‘God is love’ is therefore inseparably bound up with the critique of all one’s other ways of using the word ‘love’ – both the ways in which one has personally learnt (and sometimes mis-learnt) how to love, and the ways in which one’s culture enshrines various ideas and confusions about love. Nevertheless, to ask what it means for God to be loving (in the sense of asking what love look like in God, as it were) does involve stretching it far beyond its ordinary limits – unless one starts imagining that God is simply a big version of a human being, with emotions and understanding and commitments that work in much the same way that ours do. Christians are certainly called by what they believe are God’s ways of relating to them to imagine God as the one who loves the world passionately and consumingly, who is so given over to love that there is nothing in God that is not love. And yet they are also called to imagine one who loves purely – that is, one who loves without selfishness, without particular interests, without an ego that is fed or advanced by this love. So although Christians say that ‘God is love’, and inevitably regard themselves as saying something about God’s immanent life when they do so, they also claim that they do not (and cannot) know quite what they are saying when they do so; they cannot imagine quite how love works in the case of God.
> And saying God is faithful similarly starts with claims about God that do come under the heading ‘things that we commonly agree to be “faithful”‘ – stories about constancy, about fulfilment of promises and so on. We say God is faithful because we believe God to be the source of those examples of faithfulness.
(Ill-considered initial comment)
Seems like a circular argument – the stories already presume it’s appropriate to apply “faithful” to God, and we say it’s appropriate to apply “faithful” to God because of the stories?
(I’ll look at it again later)
> But there’s a presumed causal relationship in the God case as well. … the examples of faithfulness that we encounter and attribute to God.
Are the faithful actions of people being attributed to God, or is this God as the direct agent of “faithful” actions?
Back to Brian Davies – “But, as Aquinas sees it, this conclusion will not do either. For … there [will be] little point in talking about God at all since we will then have absolutely no criteria for applying particular terms to God…” – where’s the argument that shows this conclusion is wrong rather than just inconvenient?
Now that I’ve read the essays “God”, “The Logic of Mysticism”, “The God of Truth”, “Aquinas on the Trinity”, and “The Trinity and Prayer” (collected in “God Still Matters”, Continuum 2005) I think I have a better idea of what you have been talking about.
“So for St Thomas, when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about. We are simply taking language from the familiar context in which we understand it and using it to point beyond what we understand into the mystery that surrounds and sustains the world we do partially understand.” p27
What does it actually mean ‘to point beyond what we understand’ apart from ‘we do not know what we are talking about’?
Seems to me that St Thomas simply wants to have his cake and eat it too – both Incomprehensible Mystery and “traditional biblical God-talk”.
“We can use language to say what God is so long as we always realize that we do not know what our words mean. We can say that God is love, so long as we recognize that this love is incomprehensible. … But we mean these statements quite literally.” p57
It isn’t just that we forget God is not god, it isn’t just that the term “love” is applied equivocally but that by using familiar emotive words we equivocate.
“???? is love” or better “???? is ??” seem to be what is meant – although there’s much less chance of confusing “????” with god or confusing “??” with the love we know.
“If, as the Jews did, you take literally ‘God made the heavens and the earth’, you have to recognise that you do not know what ‘makes’ means. The meaning is no doubt analogous with other uses of the verb ‘to make’, but it is not a meaning you understand.” p58
When “you do not know what ‘makes’ means” and “it is not a meaning you understand” I am very much inclined to doubt that it’s analogous with other uses of the verb ‘to make’!
#2 March 25th
> … the existence of ’some’ answer (whether or not we have yet, or will ever, be able to identify that answer properly)
Obviously I’m no philosopher – If we never will “be able to identify that answer properly” then would it be a strictly unanswerable question?
(Maybe “God” has the answer – is that enough to make the question answerable or are we only concerned with whether the question is answerable by finite creatures bound to this universe?)
“I say that God /would/ provide the answer to that question (Why is there anything instead of nothing?) because, since we do not know what God is, we do not have an answer to our question.” p19
“The Logic of Mysticism” in “God Still Matters”.
> Nevertheless, to ask what it means for God to be loving … does involve stretching it far beyond its ordinary limits – unless one starts imagining that God is simply a big version of a human being … they also claim that they do not (and cannot) know quite what they are saying when they do so; they cannot imagine quite how love works in the case of God.
Having our cake and eating it too – saying relationship to God is like relationship to another person and then unsaying that likeness, as though we could un-hear.
In this ‘love’ language it’s anthropomorphism that’s doing the work.
I’ll answer more fully in a separate post, when I get some more time – but just a few rushed pointers.
Re comment #13: Circular? Well, we’re asking about the coherence of two sets of claims that Christian theologians make – specifically, asking whether the positive claims about God’s attributes that Christians make are coherent with the claim that God is incomprehensible. So, yes, the argument starts with the claim that God is, say, faithful – and then sees whether and in what sense that claim can be retained.
Re. #14: We’re asking whether the claim that God is faithful can be retained. Davies explains that if one takes an ‘equivocal’ view of God-talk, no such claim will have any meaning – so we need to look to see whether there are other ways in which the claim can be retained.
Re. #15 (and #17). Yes, asking whether Christians can claim both incomprehensibility and yet make claims about God’s nature is asking whether they can ‘have their cake and eat it’. But Christian theology claims that this is possible because God relates to the world, and it is possible to describe the worldly end of the relationship.
McCabe and Davies take creation as their central example. Our language can get hold of the difference between their being a world and their not being a world. I can distinguish between the claim that it is God who is the reason why there is a world rather than there not being a world, and the claim to know how God did that (the claim to know what ‘making’ means, in God’s case). I am stuck with the fact that every way of saying that God did this will tend to imply a picture of how God did it (by using words like ‘make’ or ’cause’ or ‘create’, which describe worldly processes), but that doesn’t, I think, destroy the distinction between that and how.
So it seems that having and eating this particular cake might be possible. I think one does, however, need to go further and show that the bare ‘that‘ claim does real work: that, even with the denial that we know the how, the claim plays a real part in supporting a larger way of seeing the world / way of living in the world.
Now, I should admit that in expounding McCabe and Davies, I am to a certain extent working on unfamiliar ground. I tend not to take creation as the central example, for various reasons. In part, that’s because I don’t think creation on its own gets you beyond the kind of agnosticism you point to in comment #16.
As I say, I prefer working with ‘love’ as the central example. And you’re quite right: it involves anthropomorphism. Christian talk about God as love grows from talk about the human being Jesus of Nazareth: it is the claim that the love that Christians believe was shown (in inevitably anthropomorphic ways!) by Jesus of Nazareth is best understood as God’s activity towards the world. And God is described as loving because this is claimed to be thanks to God’s.
When I get a bit more time, I’ll try and write a post that expands on this last point a bit more.
> When I get a bit more time …
I hope there’s some benefit for you in these exchanges. I imagine you’ve been down these pathways many times.
> I tend not to take creation as the central example
“Why is there anything instead of nothing?” seems like it could stand outside scripture – I doubt Christian ‘love’ language can.
And once we are back to scriptural interpretation:
“(You swear) that you will love Ashurbanipal, the crown prince, son of Essarhaddon, king of Assyria, your lord as (you do) yourselves.” p222
“Love functions as a means of expressing status differences in which a superior party selects an object of love, who can only give gratitude, affection and service in return.” p223
(“Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence” Hector Avalos, Prometheus Books 2005)
> I hope there’s some benefit for you in these exchanges. I imagine you’ve been down these pathways many times.
I’ve been enjoying it – partly because this isn’t, actually, very familiar territory for me. The kinds of things we’ve been discussing tend to lie just over the border from things I’m used to talking about – so I’m fairly used to discussing the doctrine of creation, say, but not very used to talking in detail about creationism, say, nor that much about Thomist metaphysical arguments about creation. I’ve been using this blog to explore somewhat new territory (for me), and to think through some things that I’ve been meaning to get more familiar with.
>“Why is there anything instead of nothing?” seems like it could stand outside scripture – I doubt Christian ‘love’ language can.
I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way. Rather, once we’re talking about love, we’re more clearly dealing with forms of language about God that are bound up with the life of a particular religious tradition – including the uses within that tradition of particular scriptures. But, yes, I’m much more interested in exploring – and testing – the notion of God that emerges within such a tradition, than with seeing what can be proved about God in the abstract. (One of the reasons for doing the stuff on Aquinas on the Five Ways a short while ago was to see what I really thought of a famous stretch of argument that in the past I have been rather suspicious of, because I have tended to think that if you want to understand the Christian doctrine of God, and ask whether that doctrine is true or not, it’s no use starting where Aquinas starts. I wouldn’t put it so strongly now, but I’ve not completely abandoned that suspicion.)
And, yes, I agree entirely that many of the strands of the tradition I am exploring and testing are deeply mixed up with violence of various kinds – and that what these traditions say about love is by no means immune.
> than with seeing what can be proved about God in the abstract
That was where we came in – “the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing” – and now with “since we do not know what God is, we do not have an answer to our question” it seems that we have vainly responded to one mystery by creating a second mystery.
> deeply mixed up with violence of various kinds – and that what these traditions say about love is by no means immune
Mostly I was just raising this again – ‘any interpretation that sees the New Testament or Jesus as essentially advocates of love, peace, and forgiveness must rely on an ultimately unverifiable rationale for the selection of what counts as representative texts. Such a selection is no more verifiable than the selection of violent views, and the ultimate theological grounds for pacifist actions by Christians are no more verifiable than the grounds for violent ones.’ p216
In brief, cherry-picking.
(Although I did find Hector Avalos’ framework interesting –
“Scarce resources are the main factors in most conflicts.
…
Four of the scarce resources created by religion can be identified as consistent factors in violence. … the divine will, manifested concretely in inscripturation. Sacred space … access to that space is not granted equally to all. … privileges are not available to all. Salvation, as a set of valued benefits…” p110 )
Some responses:
Re comment #14:
I was thinking more of what Christian theology calls the ‘economy of salvation’: the pattern of worldly events which Christians see as God working lovingly to save the world – supremely in the incarnation.
But, yes, classic Christian theology also sees ordinary human acts of faithfulness as a participation in the faithfulness of God, made possible by God, and through which God acts.
Saying this, though, points in the direction of a broader point. The only way I know of trying to explain Christian claims to know the unknowable God work is by looking at how they fit into a broader pattern of Christian thought and practice.
Re. comment #15
Suppose I find in my room a mysterious black box, and discover that whenever I put it on my desk, my computer screen turns pink and my cup of coffee starts to boil – without my being able to work out how those things happen. I could properly say that this box had some pink-making and coffee-boiling power, and be talking literally and truly about the box, even though I continue to prove incapable of understanding what it is about the box that gives it those powers – how they work, what the inner workings of the box look like that give it those powers. And that will remain true even if I am able positively to rule out all the explanations for pink-making and coffee-boiling that have hitherto been available to me.
Now, McCabe is suggesting something similar. He thinks we can have good reason (whether those good reasons come by way of metaphysical arguments – as with his exposition of what Aquinas says about God’s intelligence – or whether they come by way of an examination of what it is that God is held to create or effect in the world) for making literal claims about God (which are genuinely information-providing, knowledge-conveying claims), even though we do not know what it is in God that those claims pick out, and even though we have other arguments available that demonstrate that we are actually incapable of understanding what it is in God that those claims pick out.
Why? To say that ‘God is the reason why things exist’ starts with something pretty clear and graspable about the things that exist (the fact that they do not explain their own existence, that they must therefore exist in dependency upon something else). And the statement also (for whatever reasons) claims that what these things rest upon or emerge from or are generated by is this mysterious reality called God. Because the former point is quite properly graspable, it does not matter that with the latter point we say that we do not know how, and, indeed, that all the kinds of ‘how’ that we might be able to grasp are positively ruled out.
Actually, I think it is probably important to add another point here. If this creation claim were the only way in which God is picked out in Christian theology, the informative content of the claim ‘God makes the world’ would be limited. But it isn’t: Christians make all sorts of other claims about this God – and even if each such claim is no less analogical, they do make the claim that they all refer to the same reality.
Re. comment #17.
You suiggest that I am
When Christians say, for instance, that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, etc, there is at one level no mystery at all involved. The statement assumes a real, not-very-mysterious predicament (sin, death, violence, etc), and a process which Christians believe offers real rescue, overcoming sin, death, violence, etc – a process that, they believe, brings about real peace, love, joy etc. (Yes, yes, I know this simple picture begs a thousand questions, but let it stand for a moment for the sake of argument.) When they say that God loves them, it is first and foremost this picture that they are referring to. (In fact, in Christian theology, I would argue that the primary definition of the word ‘God’ is ‘the one responsible for this saving work’.) To go on to say that, as with the black box, we do not and cannot understand the processes in God which produce these effects – we cannot understand the how – does not kill the appropriateness of describing it using the word ‘love’.
Re. comment #21
I think that misses the fact that Christian claims about the mysteriousness of God’s creative work are part of an interconnected pattern of belief and practice.
The ‘here be dragons’ argument – i.e., the argument that there is a blank on the atheist’s map – is followed in McCabe (and Aquinas) by two further steps.
The next step is an argument about what characteristics any inhabitant of that space must have – a largely negative enterprise, it turns out, which consists in identifying some conceptual constraints.
But the third step is to offer what I have called a different worldview: an interconnected pattern of belief and practice (and one that is not simply deduced or inferred from steps 1 and 2), in which claims about that space and what inhabits it play a central role – even if the proferred worldview does not involve an ability to overcome the mystery and describe univocally the essence of what stands in that space, nor an ability to provide any explanation of how the world depends upon or emerges from the reality that stands in that space.
Actually, I need to add some caveats. (i) I think that within this ‘worldview’ this talk of a ‘space’, and its ‘inhabitant’, and so on, itself gets transformed – and, in fact, that probably already happens at step 2. (ii) Personally, I don’t really accept the 1,2,3 ordering: I prefer for various reasons to start with 3, and then do something analogous to 1 and 2 as one subordinate strategy within the exposition of the Christian ‘worldview’. (iii) Whilst it is convenient, talking about ‘a Christian worldview’ is problematic. Back when I introduced the ‘worldview’ language many posts ago I stated some caveats; the more recent post on tradition should serve to add a few more – as does my very next comment:
Re. comment # 22:
Cherry-picking? I do not claim that Christian theology can simply be deduced from the Bible, in an unproblematic way that excludes alternative interpretations. I agree that there are, in fact, multiple coherent and relatively habitable Christian ‘settlements’, each of which reads the Bible in a different way – and that there is no knock-down way of choosing between settlements. I think each settlement can and should be subjected to all sorts of testing and examination – but the results of such testing and examination is unlikely to be absolutely conclusive.
> pink-making and coffee-boiling power
We could properly talk about correlation.
There’s a car commercial where everytime a mystified couple approach a car in the showroom the lights flash and the horn sounds; upstairs someone’s watching them and playing with the car remote.
Maybe we are in danger of mistakenly attributing pink-making and coffee-boiling power to a mysterious illusory black box.
> Why? To say that ‘God is the reason why things exist’ starts with …
Because I read “no doubt” as a signal that what follows is something we take for granted – and we are often mistaken in the things we take for granted.
Because the talk of analogy has been without any talk of bad analogy, broken analogy, misleading analogy.
Because to not doubt that analogy, and push it outside time and space and existence, /feels/ to me somewhere between lack of humility and silly.
> Christians make all sorts of other claims about this God …
I’m missing the point – it sounds like making a heap of claims?
Someone claims to own a mansion in Beverly Hills, and then additionally claims to own a private jet and a fleet of Ferraris – does that strengthen the original claim or does it just take us from one empty claim to three empty claims?
> To go on to say that, as with the black box, we do not and cannot understand the processes in God which produce these effects – we cannot understand the how – does not kill the appropriateness of describing it using the word ‘love’.
If we do so I think we move from ‘God’ to ‘god’ in the image of man.
> … an interconnected pattern of belief and practice … in which claims about that space and what inhabits it play a central role … nor an ability to provide any explanation of how the world depends upon or emerges from the reality that stands in that space.
I think that inability keeps those claims in what Dawkins called “an epistemological Safe Zone”.
I’ve not been arguing here about whether the particular analogical claims that Christians make are justified or unjustified – and what the criteria or processes are by which one could make that judgment. Rather, I thought we were trying to answer a simpler question: can a Christian who believe he or she has good reason to do so (whatever the reason might be, and whether it is right or wrong) coherently claim to speak truly about a God who is unknowable. Yes, maybe we are in danger of mistakenly attributing pink-making and coffee-boiling power to a mysterious illusory black box – but the question at this point is whether we could ever coherently ascribe such power to the black box in the absence of any understanding of what the inner workings of that black box could be.
Again, my point about Christians making ‘all sorts of other claims about this God’ was not that this somehow makes it more likely that any one of them is correct. I wasn’t meaning to address, at that point, the question of the truth or falsehood of those claims – simply to try and clarify the kind of claim. That us, I was trying to explain why the kind of claim that Christians make about God is not simply a ‘placeholder’ claim: ‘there is some X that is the origin of all that is’. If that were all that Christians said, one might well wonder whether this actually said anything at all other than that ‘the world doesn’t explain its own origin’. But Christians say more than that (e.g., that this source became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth). So, even with all the caveats about incomprehensibility and the analogical nature of God-talk, they do seem to be making a claim or set of claims that have real content. (Whether they’re right or wrong, justified or unjustified.)
>I think we move from ‘God’ to ‘god’ in the image of man.
Yes. But given that the fundamental Christian claim about God is that God was at work in / revealed in / present in / incarnate in (pick your language) the man Jesus of Nazareth, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
>epistemological Safe Zone
But all the claims that Christians make about God get argued about, criticised, defended, tested … so it doesn’t seem like a very safe zone.
> coherently claim
Are we talking about more than grammar? Are we talking about more than the sort of coherence we might find in claims about the colour of jealousy?
Yes, we are talking about more than grammar. The coherence we’ve been discussing (I thought) is that between two Christian claims which, if stated without qualification, appear to contradict: ‘God is unknowable’ and ‘We know some things about God’ (i.e., we can make true claims about God). Bracketing temporarily the obvious (and important) question about the justification for any of the particular truth-claims referred to in the second statement, we’re asking whether these two statements do flatly contradict one another. And that means looking more closely at the sense in which Christians are claiming that God is unknowable, and the sense in which Christians claim to be able to talk about God. Our discussion above has focused more on the second (we’ve discussed the claim that Christian claims about God work analogically), though we’ve touched on the former too (Christians claim to be able to know God on the basis of what God has done, even if they claim that one can’t know how God has done these things). If we were to conclude that there is no coherence here (and if we were convinced that nevertheless Christian theology couldn’t avoid holding on to both sides), we would indeed conclude that the language of Christian theology didn’t actually say anything: the claim ‘God is faithful’, for instance, would be neither true nor untrue – it would simply be nonsense. If, on the other hand, we conclude that the two sides are coherent, then individual claims like ‘God is faithful’ are actually saying something, and might be true or false.
> the claim that Christian claims about God work analogically
And this is still where I get stuck – the possibility of analogical speech about God, while maintaining that ‘God is unknowable’.
On the one hand, as I understand it, analogy is based on correspondence or partial similarity, when ‘God is unknowable’ we cannot show any correspondence and we cannot show any partial similarity – when ‘God is unknowable’ I don’t see what basis we have for analogy at all.
On the other hand, if we claim to know enough about God to show correspondence or to show partial similarity how can we maintain our claim that ‘God is unknowable’?
As I’ve said: the claim is that God is known on the basis of what God has done. That’s the point of the black box illustration: I can say that there must be something about the black box that gives it its coffee-boiling power, without at all being able to say what form that something takes. I might be mistaken in making this claim, of course, or I might lack sufficient reason to say it – but I am making a real claim about the black box when I say this.
To say that God is loving – that there is love in God – is to say that there is something in God that is the origin of the (graspable, knowable) love that I believe has grasped hold of me. Of course here too I might be wrong, or I might lack sufficient reasons to back up this claim – but it is nevertheless an intelligible claim.
And I’m not adding any new ingredient to this picture if I say that, when I call this ‘something’ in God ‘love’, I am speaking analogically: I am trading on the familiar usage where we call ‘love’ that in human beings which produces loving action, and I am using the word ‘love’ to name or point to that unknown ‘something’ in God that produces similar loving action.
If I understand correctly – a claim that can never be justified, a claim for which there can never be sufficient reasons, is a real claim and has real content.
No, no, no. I did not say it can never be justified. I did not say that there can never be sufficient reasons. I simply said that the question of this statement’s justification is different from the question about whether this statement has content.
So when I said ‘I might be mistaken, or I might lack sufficient reason to say it’, it’s not (of course) that I think I am mistaken, or that I think I do lack sufficient reason – just that those aspects of the question are not what I’ve assumed we’ve been arguing about in this thread.
> I did not say it can never be justified.
I did not mean to suggest you did say that.
> epistemological Safe Zone
> But all the claims that Christians make about God get argued about, criticised, defended, tested … so it doesn’t seem like a very safe zone.
When “there is no knock-down way of choosing between settlements” and “the results of such testing and examination is unlikely to be absolutely conclusive” I would say there is a very safe zone.
> individual claims like ‘God is faithful’ are actually saying something, and might be true or false
When ‘God is unknowable’ and ‘faithful’ is an indeterminate analogy I would say the claim ‘God is faithful’ is made within a very safe zone.
Could we ever demonstrate that ‘God is not faithful’?
> epistemological Safe Zone
There are two interrelated questions here. There’s a question about what demonstration looks like within a particular settlement, and there’s a question about the justification of that settlement. A given settlement – a tradition, if you like – is in part a rough consensus about how to argue. Within a given settlement, the mounting of fairly knock-down arguments is often possible. So, within a particular settlement, it is entirely possible to set out pretty precisely the grounds on which God is believed to be faithful – to point to the relevant evidence, to set out the arguments. And to do so in such a way that it is clear that, if the evidence were different, the conclusion would be different too – i.e., to do so in such a way as to make clear what it would take to demonstrate that God is not faithful.
The justification of the settlement itself is necessarily a more complex matter – but even here we don’t end up in anything that I would call an epistemological safe zone. Imagine two critics faced with the same book, arguing about its proper interpretation. Each builds up a claim about what the book means that aims to be coherent, that aims to do justice to as much of the book as possible, and so on. Now, imagine that these two critics have each come up with an interpretation that satisfies these criteria pretty well, but that their interpretations are significantly different. There might well be no knock-down argument between the two – no single passage, say, that clearly demonstrates that one interpretation is right, the other wrong. But the two critics can continue arguing, seriously and rationally – tinkering with their own interpretations to improve their coherence, their coverage, their attention to detail; examining more closely the coherence, the coverage, and the attention to detail of the other… The debate may remain inconclusive, or it may end up with one side eventually crumbling (its interpretation simply coming under too much strain to remain sustainable). That’s roughly the kind of argument I have in mind as happening between settlements.
So there is rational argument of one kind, within a settlement, that justifies the claim ‘God is faithful’ on the basis of fairly clear evidence and argument. And there is rational argument of another kind between settlements, that doesn’t so much justify the claim ‘God is faithful’ as the whole system within which the former kind of argument makes sense.
Actually, I need to muddy the waters just a little. In any settlement, there are bound to be claims that are pretty much basic – that are taken as more-or-less axiomatic, and become the basis on which other claims are argued for within that settlement. The settlement as a whole – including these axioms – is still up for rational discussion and potential rejection in the way that I have described, but there will be less of a sense that those claims are genuinely up for grabs within the settlement.
> within a particular settlement, it is entirely possible to set out pretty precisely the grounds on which God is believed to be faithful
I don’t understand ‘pretty precisely’ when ‘faithful’ is an indeterminate analogy.
Couldn’t we reject demonstrations that ‘God is not faithful’ simply as misunderstanding what ‘faithful’ might mean with reference to ‘God’?
(How long’s a piece of string?)
When we claim everything comes from an unknowable God, we’ve made a very safe zone – we can claim any alternative explanation simply as a specific example of God’s work, we can meet any troublesome situation with some variation on the old chestnut ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ – an unknowable God is beyond challenge.
“It must be admitted that, from a logical point of view, the question: ‘How come that there is something, rather than nothing?’ is very curious. (How does the comparative ‘rather than’ work, except by smuggling in a notion of ‘nothing’ as a kind of thing?)” [p87 “Holiness, Speech, and Silence” Nicholas Lash]
Herbert McCabe claimed it wasn’t a silly question and Bertrand Russell apparently claimed it was unintelligible – is there an account of why logically it isn’t a silly question that I might be able to follow?
Re. comment #35
Within most Christian settlements, one of the central axioms is that Jesus of Nazareth is where the nature of God is seen most clearly. So, within those settlements, the route to a claim like ‘God is faithful’ or ‘God is loving’ starts with some kind of reading of the stories of Jesus- so those claims are justifiable to the extent that they encapsulate a plausible reading of those stories. They only then become a framework through which Christians interpret their lives (rather than primarily being a conclusion drawn from those lives). Now, both processes are fairly complex – and the ways in which they are understood differ from Christian settlement to Christian settlement. But the former (the move from the stories about Jesus to claims about God) is what I had in mind when I said ‘pretty precisely’: were the stories different, different claims would be made. The latter (the move from those claims to the interpretation of one’s own life) is rather different, and the process is understood rather differently in different Christian settlements – but it is still a process capable of failure: plenty of people do in fact end up concluding that some version of this kind of interpretive framework no longer makes sense of their lives.
Re. comment #36
I’m not sure what reading to suggest: it’s not a topic I’ve gone into in great depth. I know that a fairly good argument for the claim that it is a silly question is provided by Bede Rundle, Why there is something rather than nothing (OUP, 2006) – but although I’ve seen a synopsis of the argument, I’ve not read the book itself. There are some decent reviews of the book around online.
> Bede Rundle, Why there is something rather than nothing
‘… the book is best read as a consistent Wittgensteinian treatment of a number of interrelated problems involving, in Rundle’s own words, “practically all concepts of interest to metaphysics” (ix): God, causality, space, time, essence, existence, necessity, infinity, explanation, and mind.’
Thank you, that promises the chewy pleasures and discomforts of white nougat.
From Nicholas Lash’s quotation of Rowan Williams I did wonder if there might be some kind of account in “On Christian Theology”?
> I’ve not read the book itself
Half of it was over my head but the rest was withering.
“It is perhaps not too much of an over-simplification to conclude that theological language, in so far as it merits the title ‘meaningless’, does so essentially through taking words whose meaning we should explain by reference to familiar items of our experience – notably human beings – using them in a way that does not respect the conditions in terms of which we understand them, and failing to explain how their extended use is to be justified.” p23
Also “the unknown god” Anthony Kenny 2004.
While we’re at it – two more:
Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: CUP, 2004); a defence of the demonstrability of God’s existence from someone who takes a pretty strong line on God’s incomprehensibility
and
James K.A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (London: Routledge, 2002); a defence of the possibility of meaningful talk about God on the basis of the incarnation.
> Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God
Happily I started at chapter 11 “Why anything?” and then re-read from the beginning – otherwise I might have choked on the piling up of words in chapters 5 and 6.
Rather than “a defence of the demonstrability of God’s existence” it seems a defence of /the possibility in principle/ of a rational demonstration of God’s existence – after widening the goal by redefining rational/reason and then seemingly moving the goal posts by appeal to the scare-quote ‘logic’ of Chalcedonian Christology.
“But if we could imagine that rather than there being anything at all there might have been nothing at all, …” p250
Not being a philosopher, I’m left to wonder why this “nothing at all” we seem unable to imagine even rises to the level of possibility?
Reading philosophy I’m left to wonder not about actual possibility but the inability to establish impossibility.
And yet “Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like ‘Where do we come from?’, ‘Why do we exist?’, we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies ‘From nothing. For nothing’ really /are/ answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions – and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.” p110
“After Finitude” Quentin Meillassoux
(For me, these writings of a French philosopher in English translation were mostly impenetrable.)