How We Believe, 2nd Ed. Read online

  Vince Sarich, another anthropologist, feels that the God Question “may be one of those I have tended to term a ‘wrong question’; that is, one that wrongly assumes there is an answer in a form defined by the question.” In what way is it the wrong question? “Gods that live only in people’s heads are far more powerful than those that live ‘somewhere out there’ for the simple reasons that (1) there aren’t any of the latter variety around, and (2) the ones in our heads actually affect our lives and, of course, the lives of those we interact with and everything else we touch.” Therefore, Sarich concludes, “the whole God Question—atheist, agnostic, theist, whatever—is irrelevant.” How so?

  What difference does it, or can it, make? Who cares? Who should care? Indeed, who even should care about anyone else’s answer to that particular question? That answer will in no sense begin to define what feelings you will have in any particular situation, nor even more important, what actions you will take on behalf of those feelings. The fact is that you will have, indeed you must have, a belief system that has moral and ethical dimensions, while you may, or may not justify that belief system, implicitly or explicitly, in terms of a God or gods. I believe that gods exist to the extent that people believe in them. I believe that we created gods, not the other way around. But that doesn’t make God any less “real.” Indeed, it makes God all the more powerful. So, yes, I believe in, and, maybe, to some extent fear, the God in your head, and all the gods in the heads of believers. They are real, omnipresent, and something approaching omnipotent.

  This is what makes the God Question one of the most potent we can ask ourselves, because whether God really exists or not is, on one level, not as important as the diverse answers offered from the thousands of religions and billions of people around the world. To an anthropologist these differences are scientifically interesting in trying to understand the cultural causes of the diversity of belief. But from a believer’s perspective, the differences are emotionally significant because they tell us something about our personal values and commitments.

  An even more extreme position with regard to the God question is that of Paul Tillich: “The question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered. If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer—whether negative or affirmative—implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.” The God question cannot even be asked.

  THE FAITH OF THE FLATLANDERS

  One problem with arguing God through a series of logical definitions and syllogisms is the impossibility of finding spiritual or emotional comfort in such a rational process. For most people God is not found in the sixth place after the decimal point. Another problem is the impossibility of comprehending something that is, by definition, incomprehensible. Whatever God is, if there is a God, He would be so wholly Other that no corporeal, time-bound, three-dimensional, nonomniscient, nonomnipotent, nonomnipresent being like us could possibly conceive of an incorporeal, timeless, dimensionless, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being like God. It would be like a two-dimensional creature trying to grasp the meaning of three-dimensionality, an analogy a nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar named Edwin Abbott put into narrative form in the splendid 1884 mathematical tale, Flatland. The story powerfully illuminates the insolubility of God’s existence and why faith instead of reason, religion instead of science, is the proper domain of God.

  A human being trying to understand God is like a two-dimensional being trying to understand the third dimension. In his classic tale Flatland, Edwin Abbott describes such an existence, where a circle would only be perceived as a line. Watching a three-dimensional object such as a sphere pass through Flatland, a resident would see only a point and then a succession of circles growing larger at first and then smaller as it returns to a point before vanishing.

  Abbott’s surrealistic story begins in a world of two dimensions, where the inhabitants—geometrical figures such as lines, triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, and circles—move left and right, forward or backward, but never “up or down.” Looking at a coin you can see the shapes within the circle, much like you could see the inhabitants of Flatland from Spaceland looking down; but if you turn the coin on its side, the interior disappears and you only see a straight line. This is what all geometrical shapes look like to Flatlanders.

  One day a mathematician Square in Flatland encounters a stranger that mysteriously changes sizes from a point, to a small circle, to a big circle, back to a small circle, and finally vanishes altogether. Since Flatlanders do not arbitrarily grow and shrink in size, the Square is confused. The stranger explains that he is not a single circle changing sizes but “many circles in one,” and to prove his three-dimensional nature to the Square he employs logic and reason: “I am not a plane figure, but a solid. You call me a Circle; but in reality I am not a Circle, but an infinite number of circles, of size varying from a point to a circle of thirteen inches in diameter, one placed on top of the other. When I cut through your plane as I am now doing, I made in your plane a section which you, very rightly, call a Circle.”

  The Square still does not understand, so the stranger, a Sphere, turns from example to analogy:

  Sphere: Tell me, Mr. Mathematician, if a Point moves Northward, and leaves a luminous wake, what name would you give to the wake?

  Square: A straight line.

  Sphere: And a straight line has how many extremities?

  Square: Two.

  Sphere: Now conceive the Northward straight line moving parallel to itself, East and West, so that every point in it leaves behind it the wake of a straight line. What name will you give to the figure thereby formed? We will suppose that it moves through a distance equal to the original straight line. What name, I say?

  Square: A Square.

  Sphere: And how many sides has a square? How many angles?

  Square: Four sides and four angles.

  Sphere: Now stretch your imagination a little, and conceive a Square in Flatland, moving parallel to itself upward.

  The problem, of course, is that “upward” has no meaning for a two-dimensional being who has never experienced the third dimension of “height.” The Square is still confused, so the Sphere walks him through a clear-cut proof: If a point produces a line with two terminal points and a line produces a square with four terminal points, then the next number is 8, which the Sphere explains makes a cube—a six-sided square in Spaceland. This he further proves with logic: If a point has zero sides, a line two sides, a square four sides, then the next number is 6. “You see it all now, eh?” says the Sphere triumphantly. Not quite. For the dimension-challenged Square, reason is not revelation: “Monster, be thou juggler, enchanter, dream, or devil, no more will I endure thy mockeries. Either thou or I must perish.”

  With failed reason the Sphere, in a throe of frustration, reaches into Flatland and yanks the Square into Spaceland, whereupon he instantly transforms into a cube. Revelation! But then a thought occurs to the Cube. If the Sphere is many circles in one, there must be a higher dimension that “combines many spheres in one superior existence, surpassing even the solids of Spaceland … . [M]y lord has shown me the intestines of all my countrymen in the land of two dimensions by taking me with him into the land of three. What therefore more easy than now to take his servant on a second journey into the blessed region of the fourth dimension?” But the Sphere will not hear of such nonsense: “There is no such land. The very idea of it is utterly inconceivable.” So the Cube, with a touch of ersatz innocence, recalls the Sphere’s mathematical arguments, noting the Sphere’s impatience with the Cube’s impertinence:

  Cube: Was I not taught below that when I saw a line and inferred a plane, I in reality saw a third unrecognized dimension, not the same as brightness, called “height”? And does it not now follow that, in this region, when I see a plane and infer a solid, I really see a fourth unrecognize
d dimension? … [A]nd besides this, there is the argument from analogy of figures.

  Sphere Analogy! Nonsense: what analogy?

  Cube … [I]n one dimension, did not a moving point produce a line with two terminal points? In two dimensions, did not a moving line produce a square with four terminal points? In three dimensions, did not a moving square produce … a cube, with eight terminal points? And in four dimensions shall not a moving cube—alas, for analogy, and alas for the progress of truth, if it be not so—shall not, I say, the motion of a divine cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points? Behold the infallible confirmation of the series, 2, 4, 8, 16; is not this a geometrical progression?

  The Sphere, now fit to be tied, will have nothing to do with this bohemian heresy, so he promptly thrusts the Cube back into Flatland where he becomes, once again, a lowly two-dimensional square. The story closes with the Square in prison, locked up after he attempted to explain to his fellow Flatlanders what divine dimensions he had experienced: “Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I—poor Flatland Prometheus—lie here in prison for bringing down nothing to my countrymen.”

  Like the Cube’s impudent challenge to use the Sphere’s own analogies to argue for yet a higher dimension, the proofs of God can themselves be used to consider the possibility of another being still higher, ad infinitum. Like the two-dimensional Flatlanders who could not grasp the nature of three-dimensionality despite ironclad logic and reasoning, God’s existence or nonexistence cannot possibly be understood in human terms. What cannot be understood, cannot be proved. What is unprovable is insoluble.

  When I was a believer it was always my understanding from reading the Bible that religious belief is ultimately based on faith. In fact, my own “leap of faith,” like the Square’s transformation into a Cube, had nothing to do with logical proofs and mathematical reasoning. Is that not how most people come to believe in God? Is that not what it means to believe in God? Does this not help explain, in part, why, in the most secular society in history, when God is supposedly dead, belief in Him has never been so high?

  Chapter 2

  IS GOD DEAD?

  Why Nietzsche and Time Magazine Were Wrong

  God is dead.

  —Nietzsche

  Nietzsche is dead.

  —God

  Somewhere, on some long-forgotten bathroom wall, a wag scrawled the above graffito. Though it may be too clever by half, it is a telling remark about our times that despite the fact God has been declared dead numerous times, He seems always to have the final word.

  It was barely more than a century ago that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche penned the words for which he has become so famous in a book considered by philosophers to be his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After ten years in mountainous solitude, Zarathustra descends to mingle among men and there discovers a holy man who tells him, “I make songs and sing them, and when I make songs I laugh, I cry and I hum: in this way I praise God.” He then inquires of Zarathustra: “But what gift do you bring us?” Zarathustra replies: “What have I to give you? Nay, let me go, lest I take something away from you!”

  And so they separated, the old one and the man, laughing as two boys laugh. But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: Is it possible that the holy old man in his forest has not yet heard the news that God is dead?

  GOD IN THE 1960s

  Reflecting Nietzsche’s pronouncement nearly a century later on its April 8, 1966, cover, Time magazine brazenly inquired of its readers in stark, red type on a black background: IS GOD DEAD? The cover story by John T. Elson (although oddly no byline was given in the article itself) was entitled “Theology: Toward a Hidden God,” but in hindsight it was really more of a mirror held up to what appeared at the time to be our godless culture. By 1966 the most turbulent decade in memory was in full rage as the baby-boomer generation flexed its moral (and immoral) muscles against the conservative establishment’s vision of America as a God-fearing nation. Political assassinations, campus rebellions, inner-city riots, mass demonstrations, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and especially the Vietnam War led many disillusioned Americans down a nihilistic path into existential angst.

  Is God dead? Almost 100 years after Nietzsche’s famous assertion, Time magazine posed the question on its April 8, 1966, cover.

  At the height of the cold war, most unsettling of all was perhaps the military/political strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. Reflecting the feeling of the day, Barry McGuire’s 1965 guttural rock song, “Eve of Destruction,” warned, “If the button is pushed, there’s no running away / There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave.” What happened to the savior of old? He died. In like manner, the characters in Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, On the Beach, struggle to find meaning in a world made meaningless after total nuclear war results in a slow but ineluctable end of life. If there is no next year, what will you do tomorrow? Oddly, the characters continue to work and love and live in the face of imminent death for a future that will not come. The American captain of the submarine Scorpion, observing Australia as the last outpost of survivors, discovers from one of them that she is taking shorthand, typing, and bookkeeping classes. “I’ll be able to get a good job next year,” she explains, knowing that there is not going to be a next year. “It’s the same at the university. There are many more enrollments now than there were a few months ago.” Why? What else is there to do but to pretend that the world has meaning? After all (and this was one of the deeper messages of the book), what Shute’s doomed survivors face is what all of us face; the only difference is that we do not know how or when our end will come, so the fiction of purpose is preserved. The epigraph from T. S. Eliot on the title page of Shute’s book expresses this poetically:

  In this last of meeting places

  We grope together

  And avoid speech

  Gathered on this beach of the tumid river …

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  Similar cultural images of God’s death bestudded the cultural landscape in this period. Five years after the Time article, John Lennon’s song “Imagine” asked us to project ourselves into a godless future in the hope that we might help bring it about. But this was only the exclamation mark on a statement Lennon made in the very same year as the Time cover story, when he prophesied God’s demise (and nearly caused the Beatles’): “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that, I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus Christ right now.” God may have died, but his fans outvoiced Lennon’s, resulting in mass bonfires of Beatles’ records and Lennon’s public apology.

  Other examples from the era abound. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, opens with ape-men being given the spark of humanity—not from God but from an advanced alien race. Moon-Watcher learns to kill with tools, a gift from the secular gods that would turn out to be more powerful than any they had known before: “Now he was master of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” At the end the story comes full circle with Star-Child being given God-like powers to prevent humanity from taking the leap into nuclear annihilation. After harmlessly detonating a space-based nuclear missile, Star-Child contemplated his newfound powers, also a gift from the alien gods: “Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” Certainly he was not thinking about God.

  TIME AND GOD

  To the star-children of the 1960s it appeared as if God had died, as Time magazine suggested He had—if only by daring to pose the question in the first place. Even for some theologians this appeared to be the case. Noted Time:


  Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.

  Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence. No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who gave the right answer a century ago. Even within Christianity. now confidently renewing itself in spirit as well as form, a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of God’s death, and get along without him.

  Drawing on the results of more than 300 interviews conducted over the course of a year by thirty-two Time correspondents around the world, Elson revealed the existence of a new breed of radical theologians known as “Christian atheists” (an oxymoron if there ever was one), to be contrasted with straightforward Nietzschean atheists: “Nietzsche’s thesis was that striving, self-centered man had killed God, and that settled that. The current death-of-God group believes that God is indeed absolutely dead, but proposers to carry on and write a theology without theos. without God.” In addition to these Christian atheists were the existentialist atheists, mostly literary types such as Simone de Beauvoir. who suggested: “It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.” Yet another brand were the “distracted atheists,” or “people who are just ‘too damn busy’ to worry about God at all.” “Practical atheists” rounded out the field—the folks who fill the pews on Sunday but in reality are “disguised nonbelievers who behave during the rest of the week as if God did not exist.” Philosopher Michael Novak was quoted to represent the general spiritual dolor that was sweeping America: “I do not understand God, nor the way in which he works. If, occasionally, I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see, or hear, or feel. It is to a God in as cold and obscure a polar night as any nonbeliever has known.”