9/7/2018 Enlightened thinking?

| The limits of trying to speculate about God

PHILOSOPHY SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

John Gray
SEVEN TYPES OF
ATHEISM
176pp. Allen Lane.
£17.99.

Edward Feser
FIVE PROOFS OF THE
EXISTENCE OF GOD
360pp. Ignatius Press.
$19.95.

Euston Road, London © Facundo Arrizabalaga/REX/Shutterstock

Enlightened thinking?
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SIMON BLACKBURN
books and big
ideas from only Gone, evidently, are the days when religions could be left quietly to sink,
£1.50 or $2.40 fatally holed beneath the waterline by philosophical scepticism, evidence
per week of historical unreliability, and a liberal distaste for authoritarian yet
apparently arbitrary commands and prohibitions. In those days Hobbes,
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Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and many others were credited
with firing the sceptical torpedo, historians had fired the second, and
sociologists and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim, together with a
newly liberal moral climate, had fired the third.

A religion, according to Durkheim, is “a unified system of beliefs and

practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and
forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral
community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”. In other
words it is human beings who manufacture religions, as practices that turn
a morally lawless mob into a congregation, with a shared sense of what
can and cannot be done. In this description Durkheim is not saying
whether it is a good or bad thing that we go in for these practices, for they
are too much part of social life for us to draw up a cost–benefit account.
But it is clearly a dangerous thing, liable to fetishize the difference
between those who go in for what Hume called frivolous observances,
and others who do not.

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9/7/2018 Enlightened thinking? | The limits of trying to speculate about God

Of course it would not be a frivolous matter that there be such

observances, if they are indeed necessary to turn a mob into a society,
even if it is arbitrary what form they take at different places and times.
But are they necessary? Enlightened self-interest should be enough to
explain the emergence of the normal conventions and norms whereby we
live, without any aid from ritual, rules, mysteries and maledictions.
Nevertheless, even if we accept coins of the realm and obey the rules of
grammar without visions of rewards in heaven, or fear of hellfire, there is
no doubt that zealotry beefs up tribal solidarity, stiffens military ardour,
and above all generates convictions of unique righteousness.

Functional explanations of the prevalence and survival of religions are not

calculated to appeal to practitioners themselves, who typically suppose (at
least in the Abrahamic traditions) that the Word is God-given rather than
man-made, so that there is nothing arbitrary or frivolous about the
particular set of places, objects, rituals, or words that have been embraced
as sacred. Nevertheless it is the sharing of practices and words that does
the emotional work of binding the congregation or offering us
consolations for the evils of life. By comparison, theological theories
about the transcendental origins of this or that creed are optional, so it
becomes possible to strip out this element, and this is a course that can be
taken by some believers, as well as their critics. As John Gray points out,
the idea that religion involves doctrine about what exists, a “three-decker
universe” in John Robinson’s words, was never orthodox in Eastern
religions, and has become outmoded in many modern circles in the West,
as much as it has among those who simply do not join in and who practise
no religion at all.

It is a virtue of Gray’s latest book that he defines atheism as simply a

matter of having no use for any conception of God. To have no use for the
idea means avoiding the word and the practices in which it occurs
altogether. It is not to assert that some defined thing definitely does not
exist. This is surely the right way to think about it, although at first sight
it makes it as hard to suppose that there are seven ways of being an atheist
as it is to suppose that there are seven ways of having no use for anything
else. The seven examples Gray finds are the ideas of “new atheists” from
the nineteenth century to the present, who see religion as discredited
proto-science; optimistic secular humanism; an atheism that makes a
religion of science; various modern political religions; the atheism of
those who loathe God; and finally two varieties with which Gray has
some sympathy – atheism that has no illusions about humanity itself; and
the atheism of mystical and negative theologies. These are not really
kinds of atheism, but attitudes adopted by some of those who have no use
for a conception of the deity.

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After this taxonomy the book is largely an indictment of misguided

thinkers and writers since the Enlightenment, peppered with discreditable
stories from their biographies. The examples are sad enough, and Gray
uses them to support a general pessimism about human beings altogether,
other people being just as bad as religionists. Woe to those who think that
things have been or could be improved! Eventually the list becomes
reminiscent of Monty Python’s “What have the Romans ever done for
us?” substituting the Enlightenment for the Romans. We are all lying in
the gutter, and the right things to look at are not the stars above, but the
rubbish all around us. The only thing we progress towards is death.

En route there are some surprising claims. Noticing that atheists often
insist that unbelievers can be highly moral people, Gray argues that “it
does not occur to them to ask which morality an atheist should follow”.
This is surprising coming from someone who for many years taught
Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, since a large part of that
course is devoted precisely to that question and the philosophers who
have wrestled with it. It is scarcely credible that Gray failed to notice that
he was surrounded by people of no religion who taught it, debated it, and
examined it. But his historical methods are often unusual. He holds that a
liberal belief that it would be better if everyone went in for a liberal
society is a “vision inherited” from the Christian belief that it would be
better if everyone were Christian. I suppose that later ages can always be
said to have inherited something from the past, but otherwise this is a bit
like supposing that republicanism is a vision inherited from monarchism.
In any event, the take-home message, repeated in many of Gray’s
writings, is that whether or not they have a use for the concept of God,
human beings are apt to get silly ideological bees in their bonnets, and
then make a terrible mess of things.

That there is nothing to say about the deity is the conclusion of Thomas
Hobbes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, each of whom is in a way
sympathetic to the pressure towards thinking that “there must be
something more”, but each of whom counselled that we can make nothing
further of that thought. Hobbes mocked the idea that it is possible to give
intelligible descriptions of the deity, comparing the awkwardness of
theologians trying to do so with that of a countryman coming into an
unfamiliar court, and who “stumbling at his entrance, to save himselfe
from falling, lets slip his Cloake; to recover his Cloake, lets fall his Hat;
and with one disorder after another, discovers his astonishment and
rusticity”. Hume thought that looking for an author of nature is a natural
enough temptation, but that “we can never, according to the rules of just
reasoning, return back from the cause with any new inference, or making
additions to the common and experienced course of nature, establish any

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new principles of conduct and behaviour”. And Kant thought that while it
was actually a “legislation of our reason” to wonder about the sustaining
cause of all things, it was taking reason beyond its proper field, which is
confined to nature itself, so that theological reasonings “give rise by a
dazzling and deceptive illusion, to persuasion and a merely fictitious
knowledge, and therewith to contradictions and eternal disputes”.

None of these three great philosophers described themselves as atheists,

and there is an intellectual as well as a prudential reason for that. It is
natural to suppose that a theist believes something, an atheist disbelieves
it, and an agnostic sits on the fence. But this presupposes that there is a
definite question, with an answer yes, no, or don’t know. Whereas the
philosophers are instead denying that there is a definite question that can
be framed. They, too, have no use for theological language.

Edward Feser, a Roman Catholic philosopher, disagrees. His book is an

exercise in the drive to go where Hobbes, Hume and Kant said we could
not go, finding something lying behind the world as we know it,
something necessary and unchanging that sustains and in some sense
explains the contingent, shifting, natural world and our capacity to think
about it. His five proofs come from Aristotle, Plotinus (the third-century
Neoplatonist thinker), Augustine, Aquinas and Leibniz. They each
purport to prove not only that there is a sustaining being, but that it is
“immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, fully
good, intelligent, and omniscient”. The governing principles are these:
every potential depends on something actual (Aristotle), composites
require unchanging simples (Plotinus), abstract concepts must exist in a
necessarily existent intelligence (Augustine), contingent things must
depend on something whose essence is existence (Aquinas), or the view
that if the principle of sufficient reason did not hold we would not be able
to trust our faculties at all (Leibniz), together with other dicta of a
similarly abstract nature.

These principles are scholastic, both as a matter of history, and in the

sense that they work in highly abstract terms that have little or no place in
physical science. So in spite of Feser’s admirable industry the whole
enterprise does little more than suggest Kant’s description of a dazzling
and deceptive illusion. If reason did get us this far, it could only be
because it had trespassed against its proper limits, suggesting, for
instance, that we understand phrases like “subsistent existence itself”, or
“purely actual actualizer”, giving them more content than a vacant
“something-we-know-not-what”.

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Or if we prefer, it throws us into Hume’s arms since we cannot infer a

single point of politics or morality from the whole exercise. Even if we
were to follow Feser up into his timeless, sunless realms, we could not
come back with any luggage that we had not first introduced ourselves.

We can compare the whole endeavour to the easier exercise of proving

what is indeed in some sense true, that there is a unique thing, immutable,
timeless, simple, immune to evil and necessarily existing, between zero
and two. Light a candle and kneel in silent contemplation by all means –
it is after all good, in the sense that there is nothing deficient about it (you
cannot imagine a better number one). But then adding that this number is
something you might one day see face to face, or something that sends
messengers to earth occasionally, or has a chosen people, or something
that prefers humanity to the ebola virus, or that underwrites the kinds of
edicts that Feser’s Church typically makes, commanding that we ban
assisted suicide and birth control, and avoid gay sex, strongly suggests
exactly the confusions besetting Hobbes’s rustic.

Edward Feser himself is not at all drawn to silent contemplation inside the
monastery walls. He is a vigorous proponent of a morality of natural law,
holding, for instance, that abortion is as bad as murder. His ancient
exercises in logic are more than just intellectual amusements. They are
preludes to the will to power, and if it were not for the Enlightenment, so
little admired by John Gray, they would doubtless have continued to be
preludes to persecutions and the auto-da-fé.

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