The space between belief and disbelief - by Tabish Khair - first published in The Hindu

The space between belief and disbelief

From The Hindu of  23 July 2017

Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair

JULY 23, 2017 00:05 IST

UPDATED: 

The concept of an unknowable god roots us in our humanity, but also makes it possible for us to strive for more

I recently witnessed an acrimonious debate between a New Atheist and a couple of religious people (a Muslim and a Christian, actually). The New Atheist wanted to prove that god did not exist, and the Muslim and Christian believers were just as adamant that god existed. Finally, as often happens, all three turned to the non-participant in the room, and asked him to adjudicate. That was, alas, me.

I did not want to answer them. It is usually my policy not to comment on matters of belief and disbelief, both of which tend to be put in highly reductive terms. But they insisted. So, I gave them an honest answer: “You cannot disbelieve in god without having the concept of god, and you cannot have any conception of god without disbelieving in god.” Thankfully, they thought I was being facetious and continued their discussion without me.

But I am convinced that the main divide runs not between religion and atheism but through each of them. Thinking atheists and thinking religious believers actually share a lot, just as half-thinking atheists and half-thinking believers share a lot too.

Beyond form-time-space

While all religions finally deal with some personification of deity — incarnation, son of god, names or attributes of god, etc. — all religions also have a similar concept of god as beyond human comprehension of form-time-space, and as unchanging and impossible to fully define. Even so-called ‘primitive’ tribes worshipping totems have this concept, for the totem is not just a plant or an animal but something more than just that plant or animal.

In other words, the concept of god eludes human imagination and language. One of the first modern thinkers to try to go beyond the unnecessary antagonism of religion and science was the German Oxford University don, Friedrich Max Müller. In the 1870s, he explained the concept of gods, ranging from those in Vedic India to classical Greece, by arguing that these were powerful forces of nature that got personified in language over the centuries. So, initially, Apollo meant just the Sun, but later Apollo got constructed as a male god, with increasing human (and superhuman) attributes.

Max Müller’s version has long been dismissed in intellectual circles, but he had made a valid incidental point: the concept of god eludes human constructions, including those of language. Whatever we say about god does not exhaust the concept of god, and hence our beliefs can only be personal. They cannot be imposed on others. As the medieval Sufi poet, Rumi, suggests in one of his poems, any person’s conception of god can be valid only for that person; to pass it on to another person (by persuasion, argument or force) is to pass on what cannot be communicated, what is bound to be reduced in language. Many major religious thinkers have seen this too: the Muslim Avicenna or Ibn Sina (11th century) and the Christian Thomas Aquinas (13th century), among others.

The opposition to images of divinity that we find in iconoclastic religions, most obdurately Islam, is a consequence of this realisation. The divine, such religions argue, cannot be given a human shape. Hence, we have the Taliban blowing up the ancient statues of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. Incidentally, though, this does not get us out of the conundrum: there is not that much of a difference between imagining god in human or animal shapes and attributing human (or animal) attributes to god.

When we say that god is merciful or loving, we use a human concept to talk of god; it is not entirely different from saying that god is blue or wears a crown of thorns. This was the hidden gem in Max Müller’s perception: we can imagine anything only through language and our own experiences, and hence there is a tendency to personify the concept of god. It is a bit like saying that a quantum particle is both wave and particle and neither wave nor particle. What we mean is that we cannot really imagine quantum particles except by using what we have experienced in life and language: waves and particles.

The concept of god is exactly this point, which escapes our imagination. We need it for two main reasons. One, because it is only by situating ourselves between the knowable and the unknowable that we become human. Two, because to let go of the concept runs the risk of reducing everything to the known (which is sacrilege for the truly religious and hubris for the truly scientific) or to give up our claim on that which exceeds our current understanding. The concept of an unknowable god roots us in our humanity, but also makes it possible for us to strive for more — including more knowledge, which only comes with the knowledge that we do not and cannot have perfect knowledge (which belongs only to ‘god’).

That is why thinking atheists cannot do away with the concept of god. That is also why the religious cannot claim to know god. We become human in exactly that space where we are not animals (whose possibility of knowledge is restricted to what they already know) and where we are never ‘god’ (whose possibility of knowledge is complete and infinite).

No religion - in Britain and in Australia - statistically

The above headline is from Daily Mail Australia

Monday, Aug 4th 2014

The Guardian report comes complete with maps showing "where the atheists live'.

And what is the situation in Australia?

The above graphs is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics

The pope, the atheist - and an increasingly selfish world

The atheist meets the pope!

My good friend Margaret Lay - who is also a member of the Ballarat Interfaith Network - has sent me this article. It is worth reading.  It is a bit question and answer-ish in style but what lies between - at the heart of this unusual conversation - is a wise commentary on modern society.  Where is the this world at?  Where is this world going? What are or should be its values?  What is worthwhile? What impedes the good that would be done or should be done to others?

Picture above from here

And you think that mystics have been important for the Church?"They have been fundamental. A religion without mystics is a philosophy."

And St. Francis?"He's great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier."

Jesus, as you pointed out, said: 

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Do you think that this has happened?"Unfortunately, no. Selfishness has increased and love towards others declined."

We embrace. We climb the short staircase to the door. 

I tell the Pope there is no need to accompany me 

but he waves that aside with a gesture. 

"We will also discuss the role of women in the Church. 

Remember that the Church (la chiesa) is feminine."

Oh to be in New York just when Eagleton is there!

The title of this post expresses how I felt when I saw this information.  For those readers of Beside The Creek who are not familiar with Terry Eagleton, this post serves to provide a starting point for your introduction to him and his work.

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Dawkins, Hitchens and the New Atheism

Eagleton has become a vocal critic of what has been called the New Atheism. In October 2006, he published a review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. Eagleton begins by questioning Dawkins's methodology and understanding: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology". Eagleton further writes, "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us."^[14] He concludes by suggesting Dawkins has not been attacking organised faith so much as a sort of rhetorical straw man: "Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals."^[15]

Terry and Gifford Lectures

In April 2008 Eagleton delivered Yale University's Terry Lectures with the title of his subject being, Faith and Fundamentalism: Is belief in Richard Dawkins necessary for salvation? constituting a continuation of the critique he had begun in The London Review of Books. Introducing his first lecture with an admission of ignorance of both theology and science Eagleton goes on to affirm, "All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens—a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins—is talking out of the back of his neck."^[16][17] His "Terry Lectures" were published in 2009, in Reason, Faith, and Revolution.

Now if that is insufficient to whet your appetite, please pop over to the Wikipedia entry from which the above paragraphs have come. If you scroll to the bottom, you will find the Eagleton book list.  For some other Eagleton information, please go this site.

An atheist has his say: Politics in the Pulpit : Religious Lobbying & Australian Politics

Over at Only The Sangfroid, Mark - who says he is an atheist - has a view on religious leaders taking part in public policy debates.  You might like to comment on what Mark has to say.

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20 September, 2013

The picture below is from here

Quick Post: Politics in the Pulpit: Religious Lobbying & Oz Politics

Over on the ABC Religion & Ethics Twitter stream, there’s an open discussion about the extent to which religious leaders should take specific policy positions on issues like climate change and gay marriage. For various reasons, I have a locked down Twitter account at the moment, so I thought I’d scratch out my thoughts here.

As an atheist, I am strongly in favour of religious leaders taking strong policy positions in public debate.

The point of opinion writing, as I’ve argued before, is to translate the bellyfeel intuitions of the broader community into political discourse. Good opinion writers will translate those feelings into useful political language, giving people greater ability to express their own views about important political problems. Opinion writers can only go so far. Not only is it unfashionable for opinion writers to express strong religious convictions, it’s also ineffective. We don’t look to opinion writers to express religious convictions. We look to religious leaders.

Religious leaders have a responsibility to translate the religious intuitions of the various faiths into useful, productive political language. It’s not good enough to abandon their flocks to lay-theological notions about the sanctity of life, for example, or inter-faith relations.

If religious leaders are formally excluded or socially discouraged from entering into political discussions, then we don’t open up an acceptable outlet for religious expression in politics. When that happens, we get the America effect: people turning their homes into Westborough Baptist Churches, starting weird fruitloop cults to troll the legal system.

It also has the effect of domesticating and socialising religious groups. When religious leaders enter the political arena, they’re criticised by everybody — including adherents of their own religion. Thus, if religious leaders want to hold socially inappropriate, backwards, and odious prejudices, they end up being judged by the broader community and younger generations of religious people can affect change within their institutions.

We see this a lot in the Catholic Church, much to their credit. Although I have a lot of time for him and his theological views, Pell’s social views are a remnant of an older age. Already, we’re seeing a new generation of Church leaders come up through the fold who are finding ways to be theologically conservative while socially liberal. Why is this? Because we included Pell in the political discussion and gave him all the rope he needed.

Is it a problem that groups like the Australian Christian Lobby go about their business unchecked? Yes, but no more so than any other lobby group. Australia has a longstanding problem with ensuring that it’s political dealings are in the public space. But this is a secular — rather than a religious — problem.

Atheists should not only be happy for religious leaders to express political opinions, they should encourage them. Encourage the best theologians to enter the public debate and watch the quality of our religious communities improve.

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And after those thoughtful remarks you might want to tune into this (this is an embedded Tweet):

The 'Politics in the Pulpit' debate will resume this Sunday, on local ABC Radio nat'lly, at 10pm. Tune in - we'll be taking calls.
— ABC Religion&Ethics (@ABCReligion) September 20, 2013