Advent reappraisal: The God Hypothesis in a time of spiritual warfare, Part 3
The ‘cleverness’ which leads us to decide that the God hypothesis is invalid is really just a form of disenchantment. We resent the God we do not believe in.
It takes a Hell of a lot of borrowing to replace God.
When I was preparing for my first Holy Communion, half a century ago, the very first question in our Catechism was: ‘Who made the world?’ The answer provided was: ‘God made the world’. Even then, I figured that this answer had to be either true or false. There was no third option. But somehow, modern man has managed to insinuate a third option, by in a sense avoiding the starkness of the choice. Instead of confronting the question, he has insinuated the possibility of a third, provisional answer: that God neither definitively is nor definitively is not, but exists in a kind of hazy thought bubble, to be lightly placed in the picture but not given a concrete form or outline. This is what I call the ‘fuzzying’ of our religious imagination. This is, as we have seen, a necessary dualism arising from bunker conditions, but it also has, as we have seen, dangers for the person who remains but dimly aware of what is happening to his thought processes. If the response to this blurring is to succumb to a more literalised understanding, there is a real danger that this will eventually collapse under the weight of its own implausibility.
At the literal level, the question is ineluctable: God either made the world or He/he did not. But the word ‘God’ can become as big or as reduced as you allow it to, in different heads becoming a liberating or a restricting concept.
Somehow, today, many Irish people seem to have developed an idea that the challenge of answering ‘true’ or ‘false’ to the God questions can be evaded by maintaining dual access-rights to the Christian story as, simultaneously, both factual history and cultural confabulation designed, perhaps, to support some arcane system of ethical mnemonics. Such dualistic thinking can function adequately provided the correct imaginative software is available, but such a process would need to become something other than an evasion of the question. Its very existence as a process would also need to become a cultural meme, capable of being contemplated and understood in open discussion.
This has not been happening. It is not that we have allowed God to drift into the metaphorical zone — which our culture could find ways of accommodating — but that, while refusing to recognise our own necessity for metaphor, we have refused to confront the contradictions between the content of faith and the logic of the bunker. The result is that the God question and related matters is not treated seriously — either by the secularists or, one often thinks, by the self-describing believers. God is trivialised as something not requiring to conform to the conditions of reasonableness and coherence. He is not taken seriously, and yet not completely denied.
In some ways, things might be preferable — and possessed of less potential negative consequences — if there was, at the formal level of our cultures, an outright rejection of God. Then each person would be forced to decide, each one for himself, what the truth is. You might say: We are getting there, and we are, but we are getting there in a manner possessed of neither clarity nor courage, and therefore in a manner unlikely to be of much help to us as humans. In the prevailing fuzziness, there is something much worse than an insult to the God who, after all, very well may exist: There is a suspension of the central questions of existence. If we straightforwardly declared God to be dead, we would have to deal with His absence, or non-existence, and face the fundamental questions of our own situation as best we might. But our fuzzy solution allows us to ‘park’ these questions as relating only to the issue of whether religion has validity or not, whether it should be ‘tolerated’ or not, or whether it imposes upon our freedom to an extent that renders it indefensible in a ‘modern’ society.
I should perhaps, at this juncture, stress that, although I tend to think and speak — and write — of these questions from a perspective that is essentially Christian, I do not wish them to be necessarily interpreted in this way. I couch the fundamental questions that face humanity in Christian terms because that is the way I have most intimately experienced them, and that is the way they have been purveyed and circulated in my country, Ireland, for a very long time. This background is the context of my own subjectivity in this context, but there is no reason why someone from a different faith, who adheres to different concepts of transcendence or spirituality, should not be able to adapt what I say to his or her own situation. For many people, the fundamental understandings of their beliefs may be radically different, but this implies no essential contradiction in the context of what I seek to explore here, merely that we use somewhat different ‘languages’ in seeking to parse the Mystery that defines us all.
Moreover, the cultural forces I seek to describe come to bear down on us all. The ‘fuzzying’ of our religious imagination has been accomplished as part of an overall narrowing of the terms and operation of public reasoning and the critical effects of almost continuous media insinuation — which is to say by the constant recycling and regurgitation of a reduced set of ideas concerning the human situation. A key factor in creating these conditions is the artificially-constructed collective conversation, which continually plays upon human hoping and desiring, diverting these impulses from their fundamental basis in a transcendent reality in a manner that short-circuits and gradually grinds them down, thus terminally compromising the capacity of human beings to reason adequately for themselves beyond the comfort zone of the common mindset.
In modern culture, there is this constant Voice — the voice of the media, the commentary that describes everything. There used to be something called ‘the collective conversation’, but this has long since been spancelled arising from a fear among the powerful of the loss of reason they have nurtured and curated. From this disembodied Voice, each of us acquires in our mind a version of reality that suggests itself as absolute, complete, even though, at any given moment, it is undergoing a constant, rolling revision. Each of us, in his private, subjective heart, has other things he knows. Because we never hear these things mentioned, we are prone to assuming them to be false, or unreliable, and certainly not shared by anyone else. And since they appear to be unique to ourselves, we tend to keep them to ourselves. And yet, for us they are important, not for sentimental reasons but because they enable us to function more fully, to breathe lustily in reality, to stretch ourselves out towards the horizon as though to an eternal warming fire. The problem is that, with every passing day, the Voice that is supposed to convey the nature of reality to the populace contains fewer and fewer references to this secretly shared knowledge, and less and less sense of the needs this knowledge relates to. The result is a persistent dismantling of the edifice of culture/civilisation as it was constructed to serve man in his deepest questioning.
Unless we open up the box of what we call reason to scatter its contents around us and look at each piece, each remaining fragment, determining that such an inventory will strive to arrest and reverse this process, this dismantling will continue along an inexorable line leading ineluctably to nothingness.
Religion, by rights, is the carrier of codes in respect of handling and verbalising the ultimate desires of human beings, their sense of origin, their natures in the present, their potential for the future and the theoretical possibility of some destination in what we understand as infinity. Even if these hopes are baseless — which we cannot know — it is surely better that we think of things this way, given that we cannot say for sure. The ‘cleverness’ which leads us to decide that this hypothesis is invalid is really just a form of disenchantment. We resent the God, whom we do not believe in, dropping ourselves into the pointless predicament we have conjured up from what we call the ‘evidence’. But there is no such evidence. There cannot be. The only evidence that exists relates to the bunker we have built, and this is of no relevance or use in addressing the questions that lie beyond the bunker.
Any useful analysis of ‘religion’ or ‘religious sensibility’ therefore requires to occur at multiple levels, and needs to involve a lot more than box-ticking for Yes or No. Such an analysis, were it to be formulated in questions as far as possible from the calculated questions of opinion pollsters, might well access the heart of our culture, getting to the nature of the human person as an instrument of apprehension, to the use and limits of language, to the way religious narrative has worked its way into the very fabric of the human entity, to the dynamics of hoping, to a thousand unopened envelopes of our cultural self-understanding. If consciousness is the ‘hard question’ of science, then the original question of humanity is the ‘hard question’ of culture: How, really, do human beings go on? Or, rather, we might more appropriately speak of the hard questions, for there are more than one; or perhaps the point is that this first question is capable of being expressed in a multiplicity of ways:
What is there to know?
What, stripped down to its essentials, is the nature of the human person?
Is it possible, in what is called ’modern society’, to enable such things to become generally known and accessible?
What might prevent us from knowing?
How should we strive to reconcile the mysteriousness of our own existence with acquiring a developed sense of knowledge and familiarity concerning so many things that seem to propose the more concrete existence we experience in the present moment?
Is it possible for human beings to look with equanimity on an existence that leads nowhere except a succession of tomorrows randomly or by attrition truncated by death?
How do we make the manmade parts of reality more visible with a view to seeing past them?
Can an educated man, a contemporary European of 2022, believe — really believe — in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ?’ (What is called Dostoyevsky’s question, more or less.)
What does it mean to pray? To whom do I speak — someone in the sky, someone within myself? How, in a world which insists on visualisation, do I make this reasonable to myself?
And so on.
To my mind, all other discussions about faith, including theological discussions, are peripheral and irrelevant in comparison to this crisis of public reasoning. Unless we open up the scope of our culture's reason to embrace again the absolute and eternal, then a default atheism will be the sole possible destination. We appear to have no idea how calamitous this would be for a society, because we tend to think, in this context, of societies in the way we think of individuals, assuming that the collective will be able to operate on the same a la carte basis as we observe individual atheists operating within our religious societies, overlooking (or being obtuse towards) the ‘having his cake and eating it’ aspects of the atheist’s position therein. A totally secularised, atheistic society will have no means of parasitising, in the manner of a flea on the back of a dog, as is available to the self-declaring emancipated atheist who lives in the midst of a still-religious culture.
Fundamentally, the gradual closing down of our culture in this respect operates on language — on the menu of words that are available to us, and the combinations of them that are permitted for use in public discussion, by which we might hope to plumb the depths beneath the reducing collective mentality.
Most of all, the contemporary revolution of public reason triumphs by virtue of having rendered its destructive operation invisible and deniable, thus allowing developments — or undevelopments — to acquire the appearances of naturalistic phenomena. In this way, the average ‘subject’ of modern culture is led as though sleepwalking into a nightmare of unreason. We are locked into our words and thoughts, by virtue of believing them to be total representations of the reality that confronts us. Unless we become aware of the problem the possibility of external fertilisation becomes ever more remote.
I do not make myself. I am He-who-makes me. When you think about it, these propositions become as irrefutable as saying that, for example, what is happening cannot possibly not be happening — possibly the nearest a human can come to making an utterly irrefutable statement.
In the bunker, such awareness is forced underground by a different logic, which claims its place in my head and gut, and distracts me into believing that this is all there is to think, or think about.
From time to time, I may hear someone utter something that seems to be similar to what is in my own heart, and momentarily look at this person in a different way. Suddenly, the bunker has been demolished between us, and all around us. We may think: Was that an accident, a trick of the moment, or could it really be true that this other person shares this experience, this yearning, with me?
But, usually, the bunker is really efficient at keeping its walls in place, so more and more it becomes difficult for each heart to speak to the other. The culture we have developed becomes more sceptical, more pessimistic, more cynical, more nihilistic, because, when reality is reduced, the result is always a deep and desperate but indescribable sense of disappointment. But then the bunker encroaches once again, encircling us in its tentacles, and we decide that the feeling must have been illusory, for have I not everything I need right here? We follow the drift of this logic in ourselves, oblivious that we are becoming more shrunken with every passing moment. Even as life seems to be safer and more secure, everything becomes thinner, less satisfying, more despair-making.
The result of all this has been a division of humanity that occurs within the human person — each human being divided against him- or herself: outwardly pledging allegiance to a secularised public thoroughfare; inwardly starved of the means of a comprehensive self-understanding, and unable to speak of this condition.
In the new version of reality, the world seems to operate, more or less, according to the plans and will of humankind, solely. The stories that once fed the individual human person’s sense of a place in absolute reality have come to seem thin and far-fetched. In such a culture, it is pointless to, for example, simply reiterate Christian truths, in conventional religious language. This merely consolidates the new dualism. Because of the divergent languages in which the two logics are expressed, the religious and bunker ways of understanding become isolated from one another, exacerbating the sense of implausibility adhering to transcendent possibilities. Hence, questions about the fundamentals of origin, destination and meaning become either abstract philosophical questions or matters for theological hypothesising. They are not matters that concern humankind in its everyday endeavours, even though, individually, many humans continue to miss this without knowing what they’re missing, or even that they are missing something. In this scenario, the human person is lost and isolated, sleepwalking into a new dispensation in which he or she will no longer be able to breathe adequately in the deepest realms of being.
The blurring of our religious imagination, then, has occurred as part of an overall narrowing of the scope and capacity of public reasoning. In this, the human situation is defined exclusively in bunker terms which means ideology, politics, economics, psychology, biology, et cetera — all objectified understandings in which a clerisy of ‘expertise’ is nominated, ordained and appointed to explain to us on a daily basis why we think and behave as we do. An artificially constructed collective conversation, conducted exclusively on these terms, plays upon human hoping and desiring, diverting the most fundamental human impulses from their basis in transcendent reality, to baser and more ‘concrete’ concerns, further grinding down the capacity of human beings to reason adequately for themselves outside the common mindset.
This leaves a gaping hole in the individual human’s sense of self-comprehension, impacting forebodingly, consciously or unconsciously, upon each human person. It is far from original to observe that this hole is most likely God-shaped. It may be possible, even practical, to exclude God from the collective endeavours of mankind, but this cannot be achieved without also occluding God from the vision of every human being inhabiting the affected culture. There is a paradox here, relating to the distinction referred to earlier about the separate dispositions of the individual and the collective. In one context, the individual may, by privatising his understandings and responses, be able to survive and even — in the short term — prosper with the disintegrating spirituality of the society. But, as things deteriorate, and the aggregate of such thinking shrinks invisibly within the collective, the metaphysical ‘air’ becomes thinner and thinner. At an earlier stage, it was the vibrancy of the society that was most discernibly affected; now, it is the individual who struggles for breath in the deteriorating conditions of the ‘culture’.
Whereas the consequences at a collective level are capable of being managed for a time — to a degree — and therefore pushed out of sight for quite long periods, the accompanying hollowing-out of the human understandings concerning origin and destination are more profound and incapable of being overcome by technical, medical or political methods. This is part of the process I call ‘de-absolutisation’: the reduction of the human imagination in such a fashion as to atrophy the natural human tendency to wonder about what is mysterious and ask, each one of himself, the most fundamental questions about existence. In the final stages, the resulting individual slide from hopefulness and comprehension becomes re-aggregated at the collective level, sparking a rapid self-propelling downward spiral to the abyss.
The increasing despair of our society is undoubtedly connected to this phenomenon. For the moment, we have what might be termed the ‘luxury’ of explaining the present chaos of pessimism and anxiety in our societies as resulting from, for example, this economic or that social crisis — each of which, it is implied, is capable of being addressed by a technocratic intervention. What such approaches tend to overlook is that calamities such as the slow, intermittent but certain economic collapse the world has been experiencing of recent years are made inevitable by the level of borrowing that arises from the perversion of the meaning of money, and the unleashing into the human community of unprecedented debt that is incapable, by definition, of being repaid. Indeed, right across the Western world, human beings have been trying to cheat reality; or, to put it another way, to compensate for the elimination of transcendent hope from human cultures by borrowing vast amounts of money in order to create new kinds of hope to sustain human optimism. Because we could not trust the future, we have destroyed even the present. What we have recently experienced, then, has been at its roots a symptom of an absolute human crisis rather than a merely economic one, and this flows directly from a collapse in our understanding of our own natures.
The technocratic ‘solutions’ on offer for this situation, as anyone with a mind to think with must know, are destined to make a bad situation worse. It takes a Hell of a lot of borrowing to replace God. The ‘remedies’ on offer so far appear to be the usurping of rights and freedoms, so that the growing desolation of humans will not create problems for the ‘social order’. Hence, within present logics, totalitarianism is all but inevitable. So far, the religious institutions have been lined up with the would-be tyrants, as though waiting to fulfil their longtime historical role: providing a gracing aspect to the plundering and despotism of ‘elites’.
Clearly, the world desperately needs to generate some kind of cultural/spiritual intervention that is not merely a ramping-up of conventional preaching or supernaturalism, or, say — what many religious people seem to be anticipating from the present crisis, and not without sanguinity — a contrived calamity calculated to bring us back to our knees. Put another way, we need something that takes a form other than moralism, miracles or Chastisements.