HT: @EricJDirksen for this one
Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker “Bigger than Phil”, James Wood interviews Gopnik here
Quotes from the Gopnik piece
Only in the last hundred or so pages does the real contention of the book appear. For Watson, we are divided not so much between believers and non- as between what might be called Super-Naturalists, who believe that a material account of existence is inadequate to our numinous-seeming experience, and Self-Makers, who are prepared to let the human mind take credit even for the most shimmering bits of life.
That really useful history of atheism would, presumably, try to distinguish between Watson’s subject, the late-arriving romantic agony of Nietzsche and his disciples—which responds to God’s absence the way fifth graders respond to the absence of the teacher: you mean now we can do anything?—and the older tradition of Enlightenment rationalism: the tradition that gave God a gold watch and told him the office was now so well ordered he wouldn’t be needed any longer. This more polite but, finally, more potent form of non-faith has played a larger role in politics than the no-more-teacher kind, if a lesser role in the arts. It’s the subject of “Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World” (Palgrave), by the N.Y.U. journalism professor Mitchell Stephens.
The most effective and far-reaching case against Christianity in eighteenth-century England is Chapter 15 of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Gibbon concedes—that is, “concedes”—the obvious truth of the Christian religion, and then asks, deadpan, what worldly mechanism would nonetheless have been necessary for its triumph? In a manner still not improved upon for concise plausibility, he enumerates the real-world minority politics that made it happen. The Christians had the advantage of cohesion and inner discipline that the dissipated majority, pagans and Epicureans alike, did not. Religious history becomes a question of human causes and events. Divinity is diminished without ever being officially doubted.
Comte, in his way, did more damage to organized religion than Diderot, not by quarrelling with it but simply by imitating it. He brought an aggressive form of “humanism” to nineteenth-century France, inclining toward a form of worship that replaced the God above with Good Men below. His kind of humanism created chapels (one still exists in Paris) filled with icons of the admirable: Héloïse, Abélard, Galileo. It’s still a cozy space. Instead of making us God-size, he made faith us-size. Just as religious tolerance was established less by argument than by exhaustion, infidelity was made appealing by atmosphere. Argument mattered chiefly through the moods it made.
Something that much bigger than Phil is so remote from Phil’s problems that he might as well not be there for Phil at all. This God is obviously not the God who makes rules about frying bacon or puts harps in the hands of angels. A God who communicates with no one and causes nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology—the dinner guest legendary for his wit who spends the meal mumbling with his mouth full.
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” not “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” is the Super-Naturalists’ anthem these days.
But, just as surely, most noes believe in something like what the Super-Naturalists would call faith—they search for transcendence and epiphany, practice some ritual, live some rite. True rationalists are as rare in life as actual deconstructionists are in university English departments, or true bisexuals in gay bars. In a lifetime spent in hotbeds of secularism, I have known perhaps two thoroughgoing rationalists—people who actually tried to eliminate intuition and navigate life by reasoning about it—and countless humanists, in Comte’s sense, people who don’t go in for God but are enthusiasts for transcendent meaning, for sacred pantheons and private chapels.
If atheists underestimate the fudginess in faith, believers underestimate the soupiness of doubt.
Stephens, for that matter, takes his title from the seemingly forthright John Lennon song “Imagine.” Lennon, having flirted with atheism for about nine months, from Christmas of 1970 to the fall of 1971, fell back into a supernaturalist web of syncretism of his own, flying the “wrong,” or westerly, way around the world and practicing astrology. Stephens says diplomatically that Lennon “remained intermittently susceptible to belief”—but in truth Lennon was entirely captive to whatever superstition had most recently tickled his fancy, or his wife’s. Imagine there’s no Heaven—but pay attention to the stars and throw the I Ching as necessary. The maker of the great atheist anthem was anything but an atheist.
We were just divided on one big point. And the big point that divides us now is that the Super-Naturalists don’t want only to be reassured that they can say their prayers as much as they like to whomever they like. They also want recognition from the people they feel control the culture that theirs is an honored path to truth—they want Super-Naturalism to be respected not just as a way of living but as a way of knowing.
Given the diminishment in divine purview, from Galileo’s time on, the Super-Naturalists just want the language of science not to be actively insulting to them. And here we may come at last to the seedbed of the New Atheism, the thing that made the noes so loud: the broad prestige, in the past twenty years, of evolutionary biology. Since the Enlightenment, one mode of science has always been dominant, the top metaphor that educated people use to talk about experience.
What if, though, the whole battle of ayes and nays had never been subject to anything, really, except a simple rule of economic development? Perhaps the small waves of ideas and even moods are just bubbles on the one great big wave of increasing prosperity. It may be that the materialist explanation of the triumph of materialism is the one that counts. Just last year, the Princeton economist Angus Deaton, in his book “The Great Escape,” demonstrated that the enlargement of well-being in at least the northern half of the planet during the past couple of centuries is discontinuous with all previous times. The daily miseries of the Age of Faith scarcely exist in our Western Age of Fatuity. The horrors of normal life in times past, enumerated, are now almost inconceivable: women died in agony in childbirth, and their babies died, too; operations were performed without anesthesia. (The novelist Fanny Burney, recounting her surgery for a breast tumor: “I began a scream that lasted unremittingly during the whole time of the incision. . . . I felt the knife rackling against the breast bone, scraping it while I remained in torture.”) If God became the opiate of the many, it was because so many were in need of a drug.
Quotes from Douthat
And the same would go for an awful lot of the “ayes” whom Gopnik implies have replaced the old-time religion with a more abstract, post-personal God. Of course there are believers whose conception of divinity is functionally deistic, liberal religious intellectuals for whom apophatic faith substitutes for revelation rather than enriching it, and probably Gopnik’s social circle includes more examples of this type than it does of Hart’s more traditional sort. But make a list of prominent Christian scholars and philosophers and theologians (to say nothing of apologists and popularizers … artists and novelists … or, God help us, journalists), and you’ll find that plenty of the names — from Charles Taylor to Alvin Plantinga, Alasdair McIntyre to N.T. Wright, Rowan Williams to Joseph Ratzinger — do actually believe in all that Nicene Creed business, believe that the God of philosophy can still care about Phil and Ross and Adam, and share Hart’s view that religion can be intellectually rigorous without making prayer empty and miracles impossible.
But this is not at all what Hart is doing … any more than it’s what most of the people populating the Society of Christian Philosophers are doing … any more than it’s what Jacques Maritain or Elizabeth Anscombe or Hans Urs Von Balthasar or Edith Stein or Karl Barth were doing, or John Henry Newman or Blaise Pascal or John Calvin or really any famous figure that you want to pick, going back across the centuries of atheism’s challenge to Christianity and further back still, until you get all the way back to Aquinas and the medievals … who obviously weren’t doing it either. And Gopnik’s failure to grasp that fairly elementary point — that the possible conceptions of God are not exhausted by the lightning-hurling sky-god and the mostly-irrelevant chairman of the board — suggests, not for the time, how little they know of religion who mostly secularism know.
My initial thoughts (shared with CiC)
Gopnik is of course a wonderful writer and the piece was delightful on many levels. When Gopnik finally fully revealed his hand in the last three paragraphs I thought this Miroslav Volf’s quote from Exclusion and Embrace:
“My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.”
Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf pgs. 303-304
Gopnik I think too easily dismisses a god who cares what we eat and drink because why should any god care about things like this. The irony of course is that even as this god recedes from the bubble of affluent western secularism the moralist gap is filled by naturalists and supermaturalists who are quick to tell us what not to eat and drink for the sake of the planet or the sake of our biological health. “Do drink red wine, it’s good for your blood pumper (‘heart’ is religiously baggaged word), don’t eat meat because it’s bad for the planet.”
I think Gopnik does get right that evolutionary biology and it’s child evolutionary psychology does put us in a strange place. “What does it mean that am just a meat robot? What does it mean that the conscious me is simply the man on the elephant who runs post hoc rationalization for the evolutionary programming of the pachyderm beneath?” Read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. This new brand of materialist determinism is of course what Alvin Plantinga and Thomas Nagel protest because it’s an alien world that seem unthinkable and that no one seems to really believe or live within anyway.
Leadingchurch.com 