Many years ago in a discussion with Jacques Maritain he remarked that anyone who was as keenly interested in arguments for the existence of God as I seemed to be was not beyond hope of redemption. One can with equal justification observe that strong concern with the validity of the arguments for God’s existence threatens the integrity of belief in him. Some believers have become agnostic when they discovered that the chain of argument which was the anchor of their faith had defective links.
I owe it to the reader to indicate that the point of view from which I shall develop my position is that of a still unredeemed, “skeptical God-seeker.” I call myself a “God-seeker” because I am willing to go a long way, to the very ends of reason itself, to track down every last semblance of evidence or argument which promises fulfillment of the quest. I call myself a “skeptical God-seeker” because I have so far returned from previous expeditions empty-handed. Since I am prepared to undertake the quest anew, I have not embraced any of the final negations of traditional disbelief which would forever close off further objective inquiry by metaphysical fiat.
This freedom from question-begging commitment is all the more appropriate because I am primarily concerned with “the concept of God” and only secondarily concerned with the question whether that of which we form or have the concept exists. It is of the utmost importance that we abide by this distinction. Who would dispute for long about whether “snow men” exist or whether a “hippogriff” exists without first defining or indicating in a rough way what the meaning of these terms is? Such definitions or concepts do not have to be very precise, but they cannot be so vague that we are unable to distinguish them from definitions and concepts of quite different terms altogether. The least we must know is what we are to count as “snow man” or “hippogriff” before looking for it.
Although this initial demand for clarity is regarded as legitimate in the analysis of most concepts, there is an extraordinary resistance to following the same procedure in connection with the term “God.” Many people will heatedly discuss the question whether God exists—without displaying any concern over the fact that they are encompassing the most heterogeneous notions in the use they make of the word “God.” After such discussions, one is tempted to say, “God only knows what ‘God’ means.”
Now this expression “God only knows what ‘God’ means” is perfectly good theology, for it can be taken as a way of saying that “Only God has complete or perfect knowledge of God.” Unfortunately, however, not only “complete or perfect knowledge” of the meaning of God is denied us by some theologians, but even adequate knowledge. According to these theologians, the concept of God refers to something “unique,” and therefore it is impossible to describe him in terms which are applicable to other things. Otherwise God would merely be another item in the catalogue of common things. But he is sui generis. Father Copleston, the able Jesuit philosopher, puts the point explicitly: “God by hypothesis is unique; and it is quite impossible to describe Him adequately by using concepts which normally apply to ordinary objects of experience. If it were possible, He would not be God . . . this must be so, owing to the finitude of the human intellect. . . .”
Now I believe it can be shown that this conclusion is false. The finitude of the human intellect is no bar to adequate knowledge of other things, even of things which are not finite; for example, we can give an adequate account of an infinite series of integers. Nor can our inability to describe God adequately flow from the presumed uniqueness of God because there are unique things in the world which we can describe adequately in terms that apply to other things. If there was a first man in the world, then by definition he is or was certainly unique. There couldn’t be two first men. Nevertheless, we have a rather adequate understanding of what it would mean for anything to be the first man.
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What must be intended by Father Copleston and those who share his views is that God is uniquely unique. In order to understand why God is considered uniquely unique, we must recognize the second of the difficulties that are said to be involved in getting an adequate knowledge of God. This is that the concept of God refers to something or someone that necessarily exists. What does it mean to say that something necessarily exists? It means that our knowledge of its existence cannot be the conclusion of an empirical or inductive argument, for such can only lead to a probability judgment. Nor can our knowledge be the conclusion of a formal deductive argument—unless the premises are taken as absolutely or necessarily true, which is never the case even with propositions in geometry. The only test which is at all plausible of the necessary truth of an assertion concerning the existence of anything is that the denial of this assertion is self-contradictory. There are enormous difficulties here, the upshot of which is that at most and at best the only assertions which fulfill this requirement are the laws of logic. Everything else which is given or discovered in the world can be otherwise. Now if the laws of logic are taken as formal conditions of discourse they cannot establish the existence of anything (including God) as necessary. If they are taken as statements about things then they produce an embarrassing richness of necessary existences. Those who accepted them would be under the intellectual compulsion of finding a way to distinguish between God and other necessary existences. This makes it impossible for believers to use the laws of logic alone, for since they generally assume that the existence of other things depends upon God, they cannot accept any method of argument which leads to the conclusion that there are other necessary existences as well. Such a conclusion would entail that God’s power is limited. If, for example, we assert that the world necessarily exists, it would be self-contradictory to bring in God as its necessary creator or sustainer.
It should now be clear why those who talk about the concept of God, especially in traditional terms, have such difficulties, and why their arguments keep breaking down. In intellectual fairness we must recognize that they have embarked upon a project of belief which forces them to use the language of paradox and analogy. What exacerbates their difficulty is that the language of paradox and analogy cannot be the same as the ordinary models of paradoxical or analogical discourse. To do justice to the theologians, imagination must give wings to our understanding and broaden the perspective of our vision. But we must also remain within the horizon of intelligibility or of what makes sense.
If the term “God” has meaning, we must be able to say what it is. If we say what God is, we must be able to describe him in certain distinct combinations of words and sentences, and therefore we must find some principle which controls our statements. No one who regards the term God as meaningful will admit the propriety of any statement about God, but at the very least he must recognize degrees of appropriateness with respect to language. And the problem with which we are wrestling breaks out all over again when we ask: what principle determines the appropriateness of the language? For example, the reflective believer in God knows that the epithet “person” or “father” cannot be literally applied to God, that God isn’t a person like other persons or a father like other fathers. Nonetheless he finds no difficulty in praying to “Our Father in Heaven.” He would, however, deem it singularly inappropriate for anyone to refer to God in prayer as “Our Nephew in Heaven.” Why?
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The most plausible answer, based upon a study of the names of God and the attributes predicated of him, suggests that the principle which controls the appropriateness of our utterances is derived from the language of human ideals, in their anthropological and ethical dimensions. The conclusion is incontestable that in some sense every intellectual construction of man will reflect his nature. Nor does this fact necessarily entail subjectivity. For even science (which next to mathematics is most frequently taken as a paradigm of objectivity) can be considered a human enterprise whose propositions are constructions of, or inferences from, the data of ordinary experience, and describable in language either continuous with ordinary language or constructed from terms which are ultimately so derived, no matter how technical. But the great difference between God as an object of religious belief, and the objects of scientific belief, is that assertions about the latter are controlled by familiar rules of discourse, understood by all other investigators, that they are related by logical steps to certain experimental consequences, and that these consequences can be described in such a way that we know roughly what counts as evidence for or against the truth of the assertions in question. Now this is not the case with respect to those statements which affirm the existence of God. Certain observable phenomena will sometimes be cited as evidence for the truth of the assertion, but it will not be shown how this evidence follows from God’s existence; nor will there ever be any indication of what would constitute evidence against its truth.
This is what militates against the so-called experimental arguments for the existence of God, as distinguished from the traditional or rationalistic arguments. It must be acknowledged that there is wisdom in the refusal of the traditional position (except for certain aspects of the argument from design) to risk the belief in God’s existence on any experimental findings. For if it is the case that God’s existence is to be inferred from, or confirmed by, the presence of certain experimental findings, then the absence of these findings must be taken insofar forth as evidence against the hypothesis. But in fact those who talk about experimental evidence for the existence of God are obviously prepared to believe in him no matter what the evidence discloses. It is considered blasphemous in many quarters to put God to any kind of test. Truth or falsity as we use the terms in ordinary discourse about matters of fact or as synonyms for warranted or unwarranted assertions in science are not really intended to apply in the same way to religious assertions.
This brings us back to a consideration of the principle which controls the appropriateness of our utterances about God. The most fruitful hypothesis about this principle seems to me to have been formulated by Ludwig Feuerbach, that greatly neglected figure of the 19th century, who declared after a study of the predicates attributed to God that they were projections of human needs—not the needs of the understanding but the needs of the heart, not of the human mind but of human feeling: emotions, hopes, and longings. What Feuerbach is saying, as I interpret him, is that the principle which controls the appropriateness of our utterances about God is man’s idealized conception of himself, and that the predicates of God, particularly those which make him an object of reverence, worship, and aspiration are objectifications of man’s highest ethical ideals.
What I propose to do briefly is to show that certain modern conceptions of knowledge tend to confirm the Feuerbachian hypothesis both negatively and positively. Negatively, I wish to indicate some reasons why the idea of a transcendent God and the idea of an immanent God are intellectually unacceptable, i.e., they cannot give an intelligible account of the concept of God, and a fortiori, of his existence. Positively, I shall try to suggest the way in which the concept of God has functioned as a moral ideal without supernaturalism.
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II
The idea of God as a transcendent power, independent of the world of nature and man, is perhaps the oldest of the concepts of a divine and supreme Being. Certainly it is the most traditional in the West. It views God as a Creator but in such a way as to make an inexplicable mystery of creation. In this connection, it should be pointed out that the argument from the first cause, even if it were valid, which it obviously is not, would by itself be insufficient to establish the existence of God as a Creator. Aristotle’s God is a first cause, too, and is introduced as a support, so to speak, for Aristotle’s physics—an Unmoved Mover toward which everything aspires. But Aristotle’s God does not create the world which exists with him from eternity. It was none other than Aquinas who taught that on grounds of reason alone we could not tell whether the world had existed from eternity or had been created by God: only revelation or faith could be the source of our knowledge that God created the world. Aquinas, however, also assumed that although the truths of revelation are not the same as the truths of reason, the two must nevertheless be logically compatible. Yet the concept of a creative God has always been a stone of stumbling to the human mind—and with good cause.
“Creation” ordinarily presupposes three things: (a) a plan or purpose; (b) a method and instrument of execution; and (c) an antecedently existing subject matter or material which is reshaped or reworked by the instrument in the light of the design or plan. When we speak of God as “creating” the world, there is no difficulty with the notion of plan or purpose. But there is a grave difficulty with the notions of the instrument and subject matter. For God is supposed to have created the world out of nothing—ex nihilo. Now in our experience nothing is or can be created out of nothing. There is always some subject matter, some instrument. How, then, is creation ex nihilo to be understood? The common reply is that God creates “analogically” not literally. But analogical creation is like analogical fatherhood. It doesn’t explain why one kind of analogical expression is used rather than another. Why can’t we say that God coexists with the world—“coexists analogically,” of course? The reason, Feuerbach would say, is not to be found in God but in man. He worships in idealized form the fulfillment of conscious or unconscious need, especially his needs as a person threatened in a world of impersonal things. He expresses this in the analogical transfiguration of the concept Creator and in its analogical predication of God.
Does modern knowledge in any way help to explain the notion of a “creative God” or creatio ex nihilo. Some have thought that this concept of a creative God can be clarified by suggestions from modern cosmology and modern depth psychology. I should like to say a word about each.
According to the so-called cosmology of “continuous creation” developed by Fred Hoyle, Herman Bondi, and others, new matter is continuously being generated out of nothing and in this way the universe (which is continuously expanding) remains “in a steady-state and at an over-all constant density.” As Hoyle puts it, “Matter simply appears—it is created. At one time the various atoms composing the material do not exist and at a later time they do.”1 What is true now is presumably true for original matter—for the very first speck of matter that ever appeared. But it should be pointed out that this theory says nothing about the process by which matter comes into existence. The expression “appearing suddenly” is certainly not synonymous with “creating.” One can speak of “life” spontaneously “appearing” or “emerging” in the past or present without implying that it was “created” or that it is necessarily beyond scientific explanation. Matter is “found” to appear at certain times and under certain conditions. That it is “created” is something to be established only after the expression “creation” is given some determinate meaning. But without reference to plan or purpose, act or instrument, the term “creation” is a misnomer. At any rate, whatever the chaotic state of affairs which is described by the new cosmology as having existed in the universe about five billion years ago when matter was born, it came into being at time t, and therefore in principle is open to a scientific explanation in terms of the state of affairs at time, t-1. If it is objected that there was no time before matter came into existence and that therefore t-1 is ruled out, then the objection equally applies to any creative act as well. Hoyle, too, speaks of time before and after matter appears. Creation becomes just as mysterious in the new cosmology as in the old theology.
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It is a far cry from scientific cosmology to depth psychology. I must content myself with only a passing reference to a recent effort by Professor William Poteat (in Mind, July 1959) to elucidate the expression “creation out of nothing.” He admits that any aspect or piece of behavior of the human body—physical, biological, psychological—can be explained in terms of events which precede it of the same logical order, and that these events constitute a theoretically infinite series without any first term. But, he says, when we speak of the human body or being as a “person,” when we add to the language of impersonal behavior the personal pronouns “I” and “my,” some-tiling radically discontinuous with the rest of the nonpersonal world comes into the picture. The world which is “mine” is altogether different from a world in which “mine” refers to nothing. Now the act of suicide is an act of radical destruction which destroys at one stroke the possibility of any kind of personal experience. “I am not destroying something or other in the world (by my act of suicide), I am destroying the world as a whole.” This is the exact opposite of the process of radical creation. God creates the world out of nothing in an analogously opposite way to our making nothing out of the existing or created world. Granted, then, that “creation out of nothing” is a queer sort of thing, inexplicable in terms of ordinary language. So is suicide. A similar analysis of the notion “I was born”—a phrase I may use when I become aware of the world as related to myself, a person at whose center is the personal pronoun “I”—reveals that this notion is no less queer than suicide. In one case “I make nothing out of something”; in the other “I make something out of nothing.” Both escape explanation by ordinary and scientific modes of speech: both provide the analogy for God as “maker of heaven and earth.”
All this seems to me more ingenious than persuasive. The psychological phenomena of suicide and “becoming aware” can be given quite different explanations which make them less mysterious than “creation out of nothing.” About the causes, motives, conditions, and consequences of suicide we know quite a little. Suicide phenomenologically blots out the world—but so does sleep and unconsciousness. A man may commit suicide not because he wants to destroy the world but because others have destroyed it for him. And since a man who firmly believes in immortality can commit suicide, Professor Poteat’s analysis must be revised. “Becoming aware” or “being born” to myself as a first person singular does not so much create a world as light up an antecedently existing one. I undergo the experience of being-in-the-world, of being treated as object or person, long before I become aware of the world as distinct from myself or of myself as counterposed to the world. The discovery of myself is not primary to everything else in the way in which creation out of nothing must be.
These makeshift attempts to demystify the mystery of creatio ex nihilo either call our attention to something which is unusual in speech or action but which is otherwise intelligible, or generate mysteries as dark as the one they would illumine. The concept of a transcendent God who creates the world ex nihilo, in time or out of time, can no more be clearly thought than the concept of the last number in a series in which every number has a successor. There is a sort of brutal honesty in Karl Barth’s contention that God is “altogether Other” from man and the world, and that philosophic reason is unable to grasp what is “ineffable,” “unfathomable,” and “inconceivable.”
What Barth does not understand, however, is that in applying the axe to human reason, he destroys the possibility of any solid ground for Faith or Revelation. If the concept of God defies adequate grasp by human reason, then what can it mean to say that belief in him rests on Faith or Revelation? Men thirst to know what they have faith in “as the hart pants for water.” Man’s reason will not be denied, despite the pronouncements of Luther and Barth. It makes sense to say, “My belief that X is my friend is based on faith, not evidence or reason,” but only because I know what the phrases “X is a friend” and “X is my friend” mean. Similarly the statement “Belief in God’s existence is based on faith, not rational evidence or argument” takes on meaning only if I am able to describe what it is I have faith in. But how can anyone who eschews intelligence or reason know or describe what he has faith in? How can he distinguish between the assertion, “I have faith in God” and the assertion “I have faith in Mumbo Jumbo”? Whether we approach divinity by reason or by faith, we cannot escape wrestling with the concept of God, even if we are unsure thereby to win Jacob’s blessing.
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If the foregoing analysis is sound, then the idea of a transcendent God has certain root logical and linguistic difficulties which are not likely to be affected by the progress of modern knowledge—unless the latter leads to a shift in the basic categories of our understanding. If the concept of a transcendent God is incomprehensible, it is difficult to see what difference it makes whether we declare that he created the earth in six days or six million years, whether he created man in one operation out of dust or through a long series of evolutionary changes. At the Darwin Centennial celebration at the University of Chicago last year, Sir Julian Huxley denied that the earth and its inhabitants were created, and he presented anew the evidence for believing that both evolved out of earlier forms. To which Father J. Franklin Ewing, professor of anthropology at Fordham University, replied in somewhat the same way as other distinguished theologians replied to Huxley’s grandfather: “God is the creator of man—body and soul. Whether he used the method of evolution for the preparation of the human body or created it from unorganized matter is not of primary importance. In either case he is the Creator. . . . God created not only all beings but also all potentialities for evolution.”
In short, no matter what the findings of science are, they cannot affect the truths of religion. And it is significant that in his address to the Vatican Academy of Sciences on November 22, 1951, Pope Pius XII without any embarrassment accepted the findings of modern astronomy about the age and evolution of the universe. This withdrawal in advance from any possible conflict with the claims of science to true knowledge of the physical universe makes it difficult to understand the intense warfare waged by religion and theology against science in the past. If it really is the case that the domains of scientific inquiry and religious belief do not touch at any point, and therefore cannot conflict, then it becomes hard to explain why the advance of science should in fact have weakened religious belief and produced periodic crises of faith. Whatever the present situation may be, science was not in the past given such autonomy either by religion or theology.
Feuerbach’s interpretation of these periodic crises of belief is that they are nodal points in human consciousness when men become dimly aware that their statements about God are not the same kind of thing as their statements about ordinary matters, but are expressions of need and hope for an absolutely secure source, a power or an Ideal, beyond Nature, yet not foreign to human nature, on which to rely for protection against all the evils that beset them in their precarious careers on earth. “The Creation, like the idea of a personal God in general, is not a scientific, but a personal matter,” he writes, “not an object of the free intelligence but of the feelings. . . .” If God is awesome and tremendous and mysterious it is because he has unlimited power over nature—and therefore unlimited Will which is related to human will. God defies rational analysis because his “existence” is postulated not by any imperative of thought but by the anguished feelings of finite, suffering man, who wishes to preserve his “personality or subjectivity” against the forces which reduce him to the level of matter. For him “the belief in God is nothing but the belief in human dignity . . . and the true principle of creation the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature.” Religion must find a form in which the dignity of men cannot be destroyed by discoveries about Nature whose creatures men are.
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III
So far I have been discussing the concept of a transcendent God and the insuperable intellectual difficulties attached to it—difficulties experienced by reflective religious individuals (among whom even Wittgenstein is to be numbered, according to Professor Malcolm’s memoir on him). The concept of an immanent God is much easier to understand, particularly since it contains no reference to personality. In the history of Western religious thought there has always been among the orthodox a deep suspicion of concepts of an immanent God, which are often regarded as sophisticated expressions of religious unbelief masquerading in the language of piety. We may take the God of Spinoza and Hegel as examples. Novalis once referred to Spinoza as a God-intoxicated man, but in his own time Spinoza was denounced as an atheist, for his God was neither the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, nor the God of Maimonides or Aquinas. Spinoza’s God is Substance or Structure conceived as a self-sufficient network of timeless logical relations. This God is one to whom man cannot pray, and who cannot be loved as one loves a father or friend. So too with Hegel’s God. Hegel gladdened the hearts of the pietists when he declared that “the world cannot exist without God,” but he brought down an excommunicatory wrath on his head when he added: “God cannot exist without the world.” Hegel’s God is the God of Spinoza, except that Substance has been replaced by a timeless process, a dynamic system of evolving logical relations which constitute a great Self. In its strict form the concept of an immanent God (which must not be confused with the idea of an Incarnate God) leads to pantheism, but almost all believers in an immanent God have shrunk from this consequence. They have been reluctant to see Divinity in everything because the feeling of cosmic piety, or what Einstein calls “cosmic religious feeling,” cannot be sustained for very long against a close-up view of each and every item in the world: there is too much that is ugly, disordered, and painful. Consequently some selection must be made. God may be in the world, but even to a believer in immanence not everything in the world is equally divine, or even divine at all.
Two features of experience have been most commonly identified with God. The first is Reason or Order or the pattern of rationality in things without which, it has been said (by Einstein, among others), the success of human thought in charting the ways of things would be a matter of luck or miracle. Not surprisingly, the scientists who hold to this conviction invariably turn out to be the most religious of men. The God of the scientist is not the God of the prophet, priest, or moralist. “His religious feeling takes the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection” (The World As I See It) . Helmholtz, however, was amazed that the eye should be so defective an organ of vision, while Heisenberg and Bohr are not prepared to give the universe high marks for the order of rationality found in nuclear behavior.
Some thinkers, however, find their God not in the rationality of the natural order but in its thrust of creativity. A merely rational world to them seems dead—not the ever fresh and blooming world of our experience with its surprises and novelties. Bergson’s identification of God with the principle of élan vital, Whitehead’s identification of God with “the principle of concretion” are strong cases in point. In Whitehead’s philosophy, God is introduced to account for the fact that not all eternal objects are found in actuality or experience. Out of the realm of infinite possibilities of what might logically be, we must find some principle of limitation to account for the fact that this possibility comes into being and not that, that this “process of actual occasions” is realized here and now and not then and there. Whitehead admits that no logical reason can be adduced for the givenness, the facticity, the just-so-ness of things. His God is the polar opposite of Einstein’s. “God is the ultimate limitation, and his existence is the ultimate irrationality. For no reason can be given for just that limitation which stands in His nature to impose” (Science and the Modern World). And lest there is any doubt that he is speaking of an immanent God, he adds in his Process and Reality: “In this aspect, He (God) is not before all creation but with all creation.”
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An immanent God cannot be plausibly conceived as a personal God, and it is not surprising that so many immanentists wage a fierce polemic against the conception of God as a transcendent person. The boundaries between the natural and supernatural tend to be blurred by this immanentism, and a certain irresolution and ambiguity is introduced into traditional religious faith. For a genuine religious function to be served, it is not sufficient to identify God with logical structure or process or any other generic feature of existence. What must be shown is that the world or cosmos, in virtue of the principle of Incarnate Divinity, has an objective purpose or plan which in some way explains or justifies human suffering. Max Weber, the renowned German sociologist of religion, somewhere says that the various religions of the world can be considered different hypotheses which seek to make sense of the facts of human suffering. Evil, natural and human, must in the religious perspective appear meaningful and, in some fashion, acceptable. That is why in order to warrant the appellation of “God” or “Divinity,” in order to be distinguished from a merely natural force or a purely logical pattern, the immanent Principle must be thought of as working itself out m nature, society, and history in such a way that evil loses its sting. As a rule, the evil of the part is represented as necessary to the good of the whole; God, as it were, uses the Devil for His own purposes.
With respect to the problem of evil, the immanence of God is manifestly superior as a conception to the transcendent God. A transcendent God, no matter how analogically conceived, must be endowed with will or intent. Since his power is such that he can intervene in the order of nature (a small feat to one who is the author of nature), anyone who feels himself an innocent suffering victim of the order of nature is psychologically hopeful that by prayer or petition or sacrifice, he can influence the Divine Will or Intent. But if the all-powerful Divine Will refuses to prevent unjust suffering, he becomes to some extent responsible for that suffering—all the more so since he is also omniscient and cannot like the Epicurean God plead business elsewhere. The agony of the problem of evil consists in not understanding how an all-powerful all-loving Father can permit his innocent children to be tortured in a world he has created. And although every honest theologian must in the end declare that the existence of evil is a Divine Mystery, the agony is not therewith dispelled. It may be attenuated by a temporary mood, but it keeps breaking through in every human being who has sensed in his own life and on his own skin something like the afflictions of Job.
One cannot in the same way question, blame, or complain to an immanent God. If “evil” is represented as a necessary element in the cosmic order, one may have difficulty in comprehending its necessity, but the premise itself commits one to the belief that it could not be otherwise, and that if we persisted and were keen enough, we would finally understand why it couldn’t be otherwise. Consequently the alleged mystery of evil finally dissolves in the blinding vision of its necessity. The psychological ground for this is obvious: for example, we can resign ourselves without defiance or resentment to the weather because we assume that no one controls it. When the weather becomes controllable, the weatherman will have hard questions to answer.
Although the concept of an immanent God does not carry in its train such a cluster of theoretical difficulties as the idea of a transcendent God, its practical availability for the most religious purposes, especially in the Western tradition, is highly limited. Its own theoretical difficulties are grave enough, and its moral consequences are confusing. To interpret the natural cosmos as a moral cosmos is in effect to identify physics with ethics, and the laws of nature with the laws and judgments of morality. This tends to paralyze the nerve of morality, sometimes by identifying the actual with the ideal, the “what is” with the “what should be,” and sometimes by suggesting that human judgments of better or worse are altogether irrelevant to the course of affairs—both the course of nature and of history. The pattern of Divinity is to be understood without laughter and without tears, unmoved and immovable by the petty concerns of our petty lives.
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IV
There is another, modern, view of God which is intermediate between the transcendent and immanent conceptions, and perhaps ultimately unclassifiable in terms of the customary distinction—the idea that God is identical with mystical experience itself. The element of transcendence in this view is that it sees God as beyond ordinary temporal experience—he can only be reached by a break in the natural jointures and continuities of things. The element of immanence is that once the breakthrough has been achieved, the experience itself is defined as a manifestation of Divinity. Thus Professor Walter Stace, who is the most gifted expositor of this conception, writes: “Just as Nirvana simply is the supreme experience of the Buddhist saint, so God simply is the supreme experience of the Christian mystic.” And “the mystic experience of the Christian, as well as of the Hindus, is itself identical with God.” This experience can be described only in paradoxical terms. It is the experience of “an undifferentiated unity,” of the merging of self and non-self, object and subject, an eloquent stillness, a rapturous peace, an awesome joy. No language can be adequate to it, not even the language of oxymoron.
But three important questions must be asked. First, is this a genuine experience in the sense that if one has not been seized or blessed by it oneself, one can still find good reasons for believing that others have? Second, if this experience is genuine, is it only a psychological event in a particular individual’s biography or does it testify to a cosmological or ontological fact? Third, do any ethical consequences for human life follow from the fact of the experience and/or its variant interpretations?
Because of exigencies of space I must content myself with apparently dogmatic answers, but I believe they can be rationally grounded. On the first question: there is little reason to doubt that this experience occurs and that the descriptions of it are authentic. Personally I think that the experience is quite widespread and that anyone suffering an intense emotion in extreme situations may undergo it. It is felt in moments of great danger, great love, great beauty, great joy—and, I am prepared to believe, even at the height of raging hate and the depths of total despair. The nearest I myself have come to it is when getting an anaesthetic, just before going under, and once when I almost drowned. The answer to the second question is that no experience can itself be conclusive evidence for the truth of an assertion about matters independent of that experience. An overwhelming conviction that an oasis which we see on top of a sand dune will be there when we reach it may be the result of a mirage. Even if several people report seeing the oasis, we are still not justified in assuming its existence, for they may all be common victims of the heat and thirst. The testimony of one man who had followed certain canons and methods of scientific inquiry would count far more, even if we grant that it would not be conclusive. Not everyone has experienced seasickness. Yet it is an authentic experience. But not all the unanimous testimony of the seasick can prove that the terrible vision of a nauseated reality experienced at the time gives an objective glimpse of those dread abysses of being by which, according to the existentialists, all of us, seasick or not, are surrounded. As for the third question, whatever consequences for human life follow from the mystic vision must be justified, if they are valid, by their observable effects on ordinary human experience. Whether an actual angel speaks to me in my beatific vision or whether I only dreamed he spoke, the truth of what he says can only be tested in the same way as I test what my neighbor says to me. For even my neighbor may claim to be a messenger of the Lord.
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V
This brings me to the third main conception of God, according to which God is neither a supernatural power nor a principle of immanent structure, but a symbolic term for our most inclusive moral ideals. The “divine” refers to that dimension in human life which is not reducible merely to the physical, the social, and the psychological, although it emerges from and affects them. It is a dimension which is experienced whenever ideal ends, justice, compassion for all suffering creatures, dedication to truth, integrity, move men to change the world and themselves. This is the humanist conception of God. It is what Feuerbach’s God becomes when men grow aware of the mechanisms of transference and projection by which their needs create the objects of ideal allegiance.
The humanist conception of God, which is suggested by John Dewey’s phrase, “the effective union of the ideal and actual,” is fundamentally opposed to any notion of a supernatural power as the source of human morality or even as the justification of morality, although it admits that belief in such a power can serve as a support of human morality. This entire problem of the relation between religion and morality, between God and the Good, is extremely complex. The history of the traditional religions of transcendence reveals a profound ambiguity in the way God is conceived to be related to the Good—an ambiguity on which I have dwelt elsewhere, and here briefly mention.
On the one hand, God appears in the traditional religions as the source and inspirer of the moral ideals which separate men from beasts of prey. He is the lawgiver from whom Moses received the tablets at Sinai; the fountain of righteousness from which the Prophets drank; the infinite sea of mercy and love which Jesus invoked to dissolve human sinfulness. Religion so conceived is the shield of morality—so much so that any doubt or disbelief powerful enough to pierce it strikes down at the same time any possibility of a good life or a good society.
On the other hand, since God is by definition altogether different from man, he cannot be bound by man’s understanding nor his ways judged by human ideas of justice. It is an act of impiety to apply to God and his works the same standards which men apply to each other, even if these standards are derived from him. It would be monstrous on the part of a man to punish an innocent child for a misdeed committed by its grandfather. But when the Lord proclaims, I shall visit the sins of the fathers upon the heads of the children unto the third and fourth generation, the pious man must murmur with a full and loving heart, “Thy will be done.”
Social Christianity (like prophetic Judaism before it) is a conspicuous illustration of the first strain of thought—the idea of God as the source of ethical ideals. It leads to a withering away of strictly theological issues, tends to define the religious man not in terms of belief but in terms of action or good works, and interprets the religious consciousness as “a participation in the ideal values of the social consciousness.” It is, therefore, always suspect of Pelagianism.
The second strain—which stresses the impiety of applying human standards to God—is exemplified in existentialist theology whose roots go back to Paul, Augustine, Pascal, and Calvin, but which has put forth its finest modern flower in Kierkegaard. In his remarkable commentary on the Abraham-Isaac story in the essay Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard praises Abraham as the most pious of men, greater in his religious heroism than all the tragic figures of history because Abraham was prepared to carry out his absolute duty to God—a duty which as a merely finite creature he could not possibly understand but one which cut sharply across his ethical responsibilities as father, citizen, and compassionate human being. Kierkegaard calls this “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” which means that in serving God, one is beyond all considerations of good and evil. One “acts by virtue of the absurd.” In the strongest contrast between the ethical and the religious mode of feeling and conduct which has ever been drawn, Kierkegaard says that Abraham must be regarded either as a “murderer” (the term is his) from the ethical standpoint, or a “true believer” from the standpoint of absolute religion. The truly pious man is prepared to accept any command whatever as a test of his faith.
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The position of the religious humanist, whether that of Ludwig Feuerbach or John Dewey, reverses this appraisal in a most dramatic way. Its principle might be called “the ethical suspension of the theological.” Religious humanism analyzes the parable of Abraham and Isaac quite differently in order to show that a new moral insight was born when Abraham identified the voice which bade him stay his hand as the voice of God. Thus the parable illustrates the Feuerbachian contention that men create and worship Gods in their own moral image and confirms the Kantian principle of the autonomy of moral reason with respect to traditional conceptions of religion and God.
Feuerbach’s insight is sometimes recognized by existentialist theologians, but they then compromise it by bringing in some obscure—and irrelevant—metaphysical or ontological conception. For example, Paul Tillich interprets religion as an expression of man’s ultimate concern. God, therefore, can be defined as the object of man’s ultimate concern. This means that there are as many Gods as there are objects of ultimate concern, and their existence can be established not in the way we establish the existence of atoms or stars or genes or anything else outside our consciousness but only in the way we determine what a man’s overriding concern may be. So we say, “He is a worshipper of Mammon” or Venus, or Minerva, or Mars, or Apollo, depending upon whether a man makes a fetish of money, love, knowledge, war, or art. Tillich thus reduces the conflict of Gods to the conflict of moral ideals. This is good as far as it goes, especially because it contains a suggestion of moral pluralism and religious polytheism, and because it is coupled with the explicit denial of God’s existence as a supernatural power. Indeed, in this respect Tillich seems to go even further than avowed atheists. Literally construed, he is saying that it is simply meaningless, a confusion of dimensions (or what Ryle calls a category mistake), to affirm that God is an entity among, but greater than, other entities. Such extremism, in my opinion, would make almost all the historical religions irreligious and many forms of irreligion profoundly religious. Moreover, since all human beings are passionately concerned about something—unless they are already half-dead—we must call them all “religious.” Because the objects of their ultimate concern are what they are, many people are characterized as “Godless,” in accordance with proper English usage. Why, then, give the term “God” to their object of concern, and convert “erring souls” by arbitrary definition? This is not the only difficulty. Matters become even more obscure when God is also identified by Tillich as “the Unconditioned,” as “beyond finitude and infinity,” as “the ground of Being,” as “Being-itself” which “includes both rest and becoming.” These terms, as I have shown elsewhere,2 defy logical analysis and require some kind of Feuerbachian resolution to become intelligible.
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VI
I wish to conclude with a few observations about the humanist conception of God. The great problem which Humanism as a religion must face is not so much the validity of its conception of God but how to justify its use of the term “God.” The defense can be made briefly. All large terms in human discourse are historically variable in meaning or actually ambiguous in use: “atom,” “substance,” “experience,” “reason,” “love,” even “man”—all show this variation in meaning. Each term stands for a family of meanings (like the term “game” in Wittgenstein’s analysis) which resemble one another but are nevertheless not completely consonant. Consequently, it is argued that if the same penumbral complex of attitudes (intellectual humility, piety, reverence, wonder, awe, and concern) are manifest in a use of the term “God” which designates no thing or person but our highest ethical commitment, no legitimate objection can be raised—providing, of course, we make it clear that the new use or meaning is different from the old.
The criticism can be made just as briefly. The new use always invites confusion with the old use, and there is, after all, such a thing as the ethics of words. By taking over the word “God” as the religious humanists do, the waters of thought, feeling, and faith are muddied, the issues blurred, the “word” itself becomes the object of interest and not what it signifies. When Margaret in her simple faith asks Faust whether he believes in God, Faust replies with a kind of pantheistic, pre-Whiteheadian doubletalk about luck, heart, love, and God, call it what you will!
Ich habe keinen Namen
Dafür! Gefühl ist alles;
Name ist Schall und Rauch
Umnebelnd Himmelsglut.
To which Margaret makes reply:
Das ist alles recht schön und gut;
Ungefähr sagt das der Pfarrer auch;
Nur mit ein bischen andern Worten.
This may be called a paradigm case of religious misunderstanding.
Is, then, the religion of Humanism justified in using the term “God” for its conception of the moral enterprise? John Dewey answered the question affirmatively. I answer it negatively. Each one of my readers must answer it for himself.
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1 My italics. I am drawing here on the illuminating account of my colleague's exposition and criticism, Milton Munitz, Space, Time and Creation (1957). Cf. also for analysis of the concept of creation, the chapter on “The Metaphysics of the Instrument,” in my The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (1927).
2 See my “The Quest for Being,” Journal of Philosophy, November 19, 1953.