God part 2 of 3: the meanings of things

Preface, or 'pre-post tangential interlude': Before I get into blog post proper I wanted to share a discovery I made today thanks to David Webster's Gloucestershire Uni course blog. It is a discussion by academics of Socrates' life from BBC Radio 4. It was interesting for a variety of reasons: the problem of the written word (vs oral teachings), problems of democracy, questions of virtue and the good life, and (for me) connections with Kant and the nature of God.

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One of the points made by Socrates, found in Plato's Euthyphro, is that we cannot reasonably place the gods (or in our case God) above morality. That is, if we can know right from wrong in human affairs, then we should judge the claimed actions and wishes of god(s) by these same criteria. As Socrates asks Euthyphro in that dialog (quoting from memory):

Is it right because the gods accept it,
or do the gods accept it because it is right? (my emphasis)

Socrates of course supports the latter option. Morality, virtue, rightness, goodness and the likes all supersede the whims of the gods.

But for the Greeks the gods (and Old Testament followers of God as mentioned in the radio show) were heavily personified beings, basically humans with certain qualities exaggerated and with added magical powers. They had their faults, inconsistencies, and foibles just as the rest of us. Socrates was thus a radical for saying, in effect, "don't waste your time trying to please them, put your effort into a virtuous life, a self-examined life, and you will find happiness."

Ironically, I noted in the last post that things hadn't changed much between Kant's time and our own, and it seems that even more so things remained amazingly constant between Socrates life and that of Kant.

"GOD"

Now, neither Kant nor Socrates denied the existence of God, both simply demanded a rational understanding of the deity. And while for Socrates this is mainly a moral matter, for Kant it is both moral and extends to the natural world (following the inspirational works of such thinkers as Newton, Galileo and Copernicus). But, once we have rationalized morality and the good life, as well as the physical world, what is left of 'God'?

And that exact question has been the prime battle ground for over two hundred years (at least) of Western theology.

Kierkegaard, for one, argued that Kant and others missed the whole point: that God and reason have nothing to do with one another (and for that matter God and morality). He famously retells the story of Abraham and Isaac. He admits that what Abraham is about to do, kill his own son, is morally wrong, but then says that in religious terms it is right. So for Kierkegaard 'God' means something beyond our categories of reason and morality.

A thinker closer to home (for me) is Albert Borgmann who, as it was explained to me, treats God as a moral necessity. For Dr. Borgmann it is God to whom we must give thanks that there is existence at all (recalling the Parmenidean question, "why is there something instead of nothing?"). Dr. Borgmann accepts that it is science to which we should turn to explain all that is in existence, but that it is God that has ensured that there is existence in the first place.

A good exercise you can do now is to to play:

Battleground God (a witty Q&A to see if your views are at least consistent with each other)
Do-it-yourself-deity (a simpler, one-step game raising the typical objections to the Judeo-Christian notions of God)

As either game suggests (especially the second) 'God' has problems. If we give her the typical attributes that people have since time immemorial then she no longer seems to fit into our world (ruled by physics and rational ethics). If we strip her of these in the hopes of keeping her here (a God'ess' in the gaps) then the game-makers openly wonder if what is left deserves the name 'God' in the first place.

In the end I tend to just give up and join another former philosophy professor of mine (retired), Dr. Burke Townsend, and say that I don't believe in God because I don't know what that means. (It's not that I disbelieve, but only that I don't know what it is that I am supposed to believe in here.)

I believe in the fundamental morality of the universe, as I have felt it tugging at my own conscience and I have discovered practices that I have experienced to better attune me to that universal moral nature. I believe in the inexhaustible beauty of the natural world, from mountain sunsets to the ant's antennae, from the cosmic singularity to the evolution of human beings, it all makes me bright-eyed and grinning with wonder.

But that's it.

I must laugh at its simplicity, but also the sheer complexity when you get right down to it. It is simple because it is all right here, every action and item before me opens the worlds of morality and nature. It is complex because, in Kantian terms, I am heteronomous, pulled in dozens of directions at once, tugged by forces outside of my moral center, forces other than my own reason. And the physical world, too, reveals a depth of complexity that thwarts our eager probing at every turn. In Buddhist terms both (our understanding of morality and the natural world) are clouded by ignorance, clouds that are sometimes equated with language (conceptuality) itself.

But again, that's it.

For both Kant and Buddhism the task is thrown upon us, each of us, to lift our own veils of ignorance, to unravel the bounds of unknowing, to come face to face with reality. To appeal to God for either would be to side-step this responsibility, an escape from the here-and-now reality of our lives.

But then, that is just one conception of God, namely the traditional Judeo-Christian conception (and the roughly parallel Brahmanic/Hindu conception). There are other conceptions of God that bring him (or, preferably her) down to earth and into our lives. Think of Native American ideas of the Great Spirit, or perhaps certain gnostic ideas of God-within-all.

In the last part of this series I will explore other conceptions of God, asking if reconciliation may be found.