Eyre Lines

Peter Rollins’ “Atheism for Lent” course has reached its third week; after the introductory stuff and the atheist week, we’ve arrived at the mystics, and in general I have nothing to say about the mystics beyond “I wish I’d been able to write that well”.

However, he spends significant time in his talk introducing this week talking about Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

The first thing which occurred to me during the talk (and on re-reading the argument itself) was that I hold to my general principle that, when talking with a philosopher, you should never accept that philosopher’s premises (and if you feel really compelled to grant them some validity, you should not accept that they are universally true; at the most, they may apply in every case you’ve encountered). Unless you’re a philosopher yourself, of course, in which case you’re actually going to enjoy the ensuing argument. I’m not a philosopher. I’ve learned by bitter experience that any time I do accept some such premise, I’m going to end up confused (hence the title).

So, when Anselm opens by saying the God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, I immediately say “No, that’s not what I mean by the word”. Similarly, in ploughing through Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs of God, I kept finding the refrain “…and this all men call God”, to which my response was “No, Tommy-boy, I’m a man and that’s not something I call God”. Actually, even if I hadn’t formulated my general principle, I’d still say that in response to Anselm and Aquinas.

For me, “God” is a term which explains (or, perhaps more accurately, describes) an aspect of my experience, namely the peak mystical experience, and although this indicates that where mystics talk of God, there’s a very good chance (at least) that I’ll resonate with their descriptive language, it does not mean that I have any particular certainty about most aspects of what it is that I experience. Far from it, in fact; the experience is fiendishly difficult to describe in human language, and almost all attempts result in the verdict that yes, it’s something like that, but not exactly. It’s for that reason that apophatic language, saying something by negating it, as with Dionysus the pseudo-Areopagite’s “It is not soul of mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech of understanding” is so attractive – yes, it’s something like all of those, but not quite.

[In passing, I note that love is similarly very difficult to describe anything like adequately; in both cases, those with poetic abilities seem to do best.]

Thus, I can say of the mystical experience that it is supremely unitive (there appears to be no boundary between the self and the other) but not feel the need to state unequivocally that that unity extends to everything there is (merely everything I have so far been able to perceive), and I can say that it is of a reality which is immeasurably large without saying that it is infinite and that it is something astonishingly powerful without saying that it is omnipotent.

In point of fact, claims of infinity of any sort are ones which I treat extremely sceptically; I do not make any general rule of this, but there is a very strong tendency in any area of science for theories to break down (as the underlying mathematics tends to break down) when any variable tends towards infinity. Many also break down when a variable tends to zero, something which you can replicate on a calculator by trying to divide by zero, so I have an equal aversion to claims that anything is truly zero.

This all points up a problem which I think has been endemic in Christian theology since the New Testament writers started to put down their ideas in Greek (actually, the problem dates back a little further, to the intertestamental period, during which Greek became the dominant language of the Middle East). Greek (as with any other language) is not just a vocabulary and grammar, it comes with a set of embedded concepts, and in the case of the Greek of the first century, this was Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy. Neither philosophy works well with the concepts of Judaism to that date. Judaism is extremely experiential (even materialist) in it’s approach; it does not, for example, think in terms of qualities or forces which can be separated from actual instantiation in a situation. After all, the whole basis of Judaism is that the Jews are God’s chosen people, a particular instantiation of the divine-human relationship. Judaism holds, for instance, that if you save one person, you save the world, but with the corollary that unless you save at least one person, you save nothing. Perhaps the only absolute claim that Judaism makes about God is that there is one, and not two, three or myriads.

Thus I tend to look at philosophical Theologians and think of much of what they say “well, that’s cute, but it’s just messing around with concepts which have no necessary relationship to anything in reality”. Sometimes it can be read as a form of poetry, and at that point might have some traction, but there is no necessity there.

All that being said, I’ve long observed that when the likes of Anselm and Aquinas delve into their philosophies in search of something which, perhaps, “all philosophers call (or at least used to call) God”, what they are talking about is, to me, something more akin to a “theory of everything”. It’s certainly not personal or relational in any sensible way (and thus the problems with Christology and with the apparent void between immanence and transcendence which plagued the early church and to some extent are still with us), and it is entirely reasonable to consider it to be impassible and immutable, and in all probability to possess aseity. But that’s something like natural law.

Although I have some misgivings about his method, which in my view rests on something including itself with remainder, which I consider dubious,
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems could be regarded as stating that no system of thinking can be absolutely complete (his proof is for a mathematical system, but as science rests on mathematics, the generalisation seems valid). There will always be truths which cannot be proved from within a system, and no system can ever demonstrate itself to be consistent. It seems to me that Anselm’s proof, which Pete uses to suggest that we cannot really conceive of that-which-is-God, is actually talking along the same lines as the incompleteness theorems. I’m speaking poetically, not necessarily philosophically there, and in much the same way, it seems to me that Derrida’s concept of différance, in which meaning is forever based on difference but is also forever deferred to be further explained later is, in fact, talking about the same thing.

In general terms, of course. I know better than to make an absolute claim.

None of those concepts, however, are talking about what I call God…