Thinking God

Cummings, Cummings

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781630877873
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The last decade or so has seen many books from what might be called the new atheists. One thinks, for example, of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. They have captured the interest of the general reading public and have sold well. Often, however, they have loaded the dice against Christian belief in a most unfair fashion. Arguments and issues have been summarily dismissed after the most cursory of treatments. Thinking God, written by a philosopher and a theologian, father and son, invites the reader to a more reflective consideration of the issues around God and the traditional fabric of Christian belief in a fair and openhanded fashion. Issues, both traditional and more contemporary, have been engaged. The result is an invitation to think of Christian faith seriously, reflectively, and critically.

1

Why Believe?

If he is not to be convicted of special pleading or of belonging to the intellectual equivalent of a holy huddle, the theologian must take his place on the common ground of intellectual learning, teaching and research.

—George Pattison1

We are, in fact, each one of us, intolerably complex: confused, bewildered, bombarded by discordant signals and demands, subject to conflictual desires and motives, unstable moods and fragile loyalties; driven by insecurity and ineffectively smothered by fear.

—Nicholas Lash2

Orientation

Why believe? Why believe in a religion, or in a particular worldview for that matter? How do we know what’s true and what’s not? Isn’t it a matter of opinion since there is no universal acceptance on most issues that are of real human significance? The material in this chapter may be somewhat discomfiting as it moves towards an initial discussion of the nature of truth. Most people, including students of theology, experience a degree of frustration, at times tending towards a judgment of irrelevance, when it comes to more obviously philosophical matters of epistemology and truth. Those who specialize in these foundational aspects of philosophy and theology sometimes write in a language that is far from accessible, even to the philosophical or theological initiate. To help lever us into the chapter let us spend some time thinking about the orientation quotes at the beginning. They will provide us with a nuanced platform from which we may launch our exploration into “Why believe?”

For theologian George Pattison, in speaking about faith, the theologian must be able to speak intelligibly to his peers and contemporaries in language they can understand. Unless this can be achieved, believers indulge themselves in religious positivism, requiring no intellectual underpinning whatsoever. Theology becomes almost a private language with no bridges or connections with the ordinary language of the public forum. For theologian Nicholas Lash, it is more than attempting to articulate our religious point of view in ways that are intelligible to the general public. Lash acknowledges that it is not just about being reasonably clear. We are not discarnate intellects articulating truth in perfectly clear and distinct ideas, in objective and value­-free language. On the contrary, we come carrying a lot of baggage, emotional, intellectual, and even spiritual. So, we ought to look for the greatest possible degree of clarity without subscribing to a specious kind of objectivity. At the outset, these thinkers help us to see that we are not dealing here with black-and-white approaches to truth, with un-nuanced avenues of “knowing” and “believing.” To help us situate more carefully our question “Why believe?” some, albeit very brief, telling of the Western intellectual story seems necessary if we are to make headway in this chapter.

From the Beginning to the Enlightenment

Although it is not possible to date with precision the emergence of human beings on this planet, it seems to be the case that from the earliest recoverable moments of human self-expression, our ancestors have cherished some kind of religious faith or other. One needs to be careful here and not claim too much. The scholar of religions, Ninian Smart, points out that “we shall never know, on purely scientific and historical grounds, what the emergence of human consciousness was really like. The evidence is gone for ever.” Smart is simply stating a fact. He speculates, however, that from earliest times, when we examine “the scanty remains,” “mixed attitudes,” and “the complicated fabric of beliefs” of the ancients, the seeds of religious faith are present.3 Certainly, in the ancient world of common existence between Jews, Christians, and Graeco-Roman “pagans,” religion was a common bond, even if Christians in their “atheism” seemed to be undoing that bond by insisting on their God alone as real. People did religious things, participated in religious rituals, and accepted religion as part of the natural fabric of society. This remained very largely the norm in the West right up until about the eighteenth century when matters began to change.

Beginning with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, questioning of such traditional religious faith and practice took a radical turn. Skepticism about authority emerged, about authority of any kind—philosophical, theological, political—as people looked for sure and certain foundations that would match the new discoveries of science. “Think for yourself!” was the great slogan of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s proclamation is not necessarily bad. His cry frees us from thinking that is harmful or destructive, confining and cramped, and it frees us from superstition. It holds out a certain liberty. It would be sheer foolishness not to applaud the accomplishments of the Enlightenment. Not everything before the Enlightenment was good! John Macquarrie wryly reminds us that “there were plenty of evils in the old pre-Enlightenment days when Christianity had things all its own way and missed its chances.”4 In our post-modern world there is much reflection on the Enlightenment, pointing out its flaws and failings. Even criticism of the Enlightenment, however, seems to stem from a way of thinking espoused by the Enlightenment. This has been well grasped by the philosopher Louis Dupré: “In my opinion . . . critique of the Enlightenment continues to rely on principles inherent in the Enlightenment itself. Its summons to uninhibited critical thinking—sapere aude—challenges any principles that stand in the way of such a critique, including the Enlightenment’s own. Formerly, few dared to turn the power of their critique on the rule of reason itself. Today’s critics are prepared to do so, though the source of the critical impulse lies in the very movement they criticize.”5 If the Enlightenment gave us modernity, the critics of post-modernity are using the same Enlightenment-given tools to make their critique of the Enlightenment. Perhaps most critics might agree that the major Enlightenment flaw was to equate thinking for yourself as thinking by yourself, to isolate one’s thinking from tradition, tradition understood broadly as conversation with others, past and present.6 Simply put, it is impossible to free one’s own thinking from the thinking of others, both past and present. Even if the word “tradition” carries too much freight for some people, the reality behind it, that is to say the thinking of other people, is impossible to avoid. It is there, recognized or not.

Historical Consciousness, Pluralism, and the Free Market of Ideas

Cardinal Avery Dulles suggested that there have been three primary consequences of the Enlightenment for Christian faith: historical consciousness, pluralism, and the free market of ideas.7 First, the development of historical consciousness, that is to say, that people at any given time in history have but a partial access to truth, and indeed, that the understanding of truth is formed and molded by the cultural presuppositions of any given period. Each idea, each person, is a history, and not only has a history. Second, pluralism is the recognition that there are many different and often competing ways of understanding reality. The benefit of pluralism is a respectful tolerance among people of differing views. The downside of pluralism lies in a pervasive sense that it is impossible to know the truth in any clear way. The recognition of many options, of many ways of understanding reality, may “make any particular commitment more difficult if not weaker.”8 Third, is the free market of ideas, a phenomenon closely related to pluralism. Just as we are surrounded in the West with a free market of goods and services answering to every conceivable human need and at times every imaginable human vice, so we are also provided with a free market of ideas through instantaneous and omnipresent information about everything. The benefit here is incremental know...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why Believe?
• Chapter 2: Why Believe in God?
• Chapter 3: Thinking About God
• Chapter 4: Why So Many Religions?
• Chapter 5: Why Evil and Suffering?
• Chapter 6: What about Indifference to Religion?
• Chapter 7: Is There Life After Death?
• Chapter 8: Science or Religion?