the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Micro Review: "The Remains of Being"

The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics 

By Santiago Zabala

Columbia University Press, 2009

Zabala (Potsdam Univ.), part of a younger generation of Italian philosophers, is receiving increased attention in English-speaking philosophy largely, it seems, because of his connection to Gianni Vattimo. Building on his earlier exposition of Ernst Tugendhat in The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008), Zabala seems to want to reach a wide audience with this book--which might explain the strange mix of introductory-level explanations of philosophical terms that nevertheless assume quite a bit of facility with the Heideggerian tradition. Introductory-level readers will be awash in the latter; while those familiar with Heidegger won't need the former. Analytic philosophers are unlikely to have much patience for this book. But why should one let analytic (so-called) "rigor" take all the fun out of "meditative thinking," which seems to be Zabala's project: to reenergize and resurrect the later Heidegger in the milieu of Badiou, to rehabilitate hermeneutics as "postmetaphysical thought." The book's spirit--and even its shape--invites meditative reading in the shadowy corners of a café. And there is a certain virtue to being carried along in this, to be willing to lose oneself in meditative thinking, at least on a first reading.

Micro Review: "Interpreting Excess"

Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics

By Shane Mackinlay

Fordham University Press, 2009

This book could be profitably read as a phenomenological complement to Robyn Horner's Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction. As Mackinlay (Catholic Theological College) rightly notes, Marion's reception in North America has largely been through the portal of philosophical theology, whereas his work over the past two decades has focused on phenomenology proper (even if he still tends to privilege religious phenomena as studies). If Horner provided the closest thing we have to Marion 101, Mackinlay's volume is a very helpful 201 exposition of Marion's phenomenology--though Mackinlay also goes beyond exposition to constructive critique. Mackinlay's prose is lucid and accessible, but the work still assumes familiarity with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, so it probably can't function as an undergraduate introduction (that book is waiting to be written). However, both graduate students and scholars will find this a very helpful study that provides an overview of Marion's phenomenological project. Mackinlay also advances the discussion by suggesting that an implicit hermeneutic is at work in Marion's phenomenology--despite his own critique of hermeneutics. One hopes that this book will generate interest in Marion's phenomenology beyond the circle of those interested in the "theological turn" in French phenomenology.

Trakakis & Manolopoulos, Part 3

Part 3:

Unknowing, or Perceiving the Invisible

 

NT. I have always found it bewildering how one’s words and actions can be misinterpreted by others (and by oneself? – now there’s a question to ponder), no matter how clear and transparent one has attempted to be. Our discussion on agnosticism is a case in point. I thought I had made it quite clear that, by “agnosticism”, I mean the view that one should neither believe nor disbelieve in God, that one should suspend judgement. This idea is part of a venerable tradition of skepticism, going back to the ancient Pyrrhonians such as Sextus Empiricus, who argued that, since the contrary positions and arguments of philosophers cannot be resolved, the only rational response is to “suspend judgement”, to practice “epochê”. Agnosticism of this sort has nothing to do with what you call “existential agnosticism”, where one does not know whether or not one believes. (Is such an idea even coherent? If I believe something, then does it not necessarily follow that I know that I believe it?) Also, I am aware of the form of agnosticism you dub “epistemological agnosticism”, which goes back to T.H. Huxley, the very person who introduced the word “agnosticism”, taking it from the apostle Paul’s mention of the altar to “the Unknown God” (Acts 17:23). But, again, I thought I had clearly distanced myself from this understanding of agnosticism, and that is why I went to the lengths I did in defining the term by way of belief (not knowledge) and the withholding of judgement.   

You are right to lampoon and criticize the lazy dogmatism of some religious believers (though I don’t think that dogmatism is the special preserve of the religious, as the New Atheist movement has shown). But you seem to be creating a red herring with your advocacy of agnosticism. First of all, there is no reason why claims to knowledge must result in hubris, intolerance or violence. Many people, for example, claim to know that Christianity is true, and yet they are tolerant of other religious groups, respecting the freedom of conscience and religious expression of all people. It is simply implausible to think that, if one purports to know the truth on some matter, then one will irresistibly be drawn to fanaticism and fundamentalism. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if one defines “knowledge” in the way you seem to do – viz., as something that is self-evident, incontestable or based on irrefutable proof – then of course no or very little knowledge will be possible for poor, existing individuals like us, thus making even more room for “faith” (whether natural or supernatural). But the problem here, as I mentioned previously, lies with the standard of proof that you demand. Just as there is no point throwing dust in the air and then complaining that you cannot see, so there is little point in raising the bar of proof exceedingly high and then complaining that no proof or evidence is available.

Continuing from this latter point, your standard of proof is again looming on the horizon when you turn to the question of whether certain commonly held beliefs should count as “knowledge”. In your opinion, for example, the belief that the world has existed for more than 10 minutes passes the knowledge-test in virtue of being self-evidently true, whereas the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow fails this test in virtue of lacking self-evidence and being open to some degree of doubt. But note that my willingness to count these beliefs as instances of knowledge has nothing to do with “self-evidence”. Indeed, the view that knowledge requires self-evidence and incontestable proof is a very limited conception of knowledge, one that is modelled on a mathematical account of knowledge that has little application to areas outside of the formal sciences. (Your claim, later on, that “it is self-evident that 9/11 happened” suggests that you have a somewhat unorthodox understanding of self-evidence. The notion of self-evidence is, of course, a philosophically problematic one, but it is usually thought that a proposition is self-evident when, as soon as one understands or grasps the proposition, one can just see that it is true. To defer to some typical examples, understanding the propositions “2 + 2 = 4” and “If Socrates is a philosopher, and all philosophers corrupt the youth, then Socrates corrupts the youth” is all one needs to do in order to apprehend their truth. The situation is complicated if one admits that self-evidence is not a guarantee of truth, or that self-evidence should be relativized, so that what is self-evident to one person need not be self-evident to another person. It is clear, in any case, that self-evident propositions have a radically different status from standard empirical or a posteriori statements, such as “Terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers on September 11”.)  

You go on to state that, although we agree that at least some commonsense beliefs should count as knowledge, I “still demand proof”. But I’m not the one who thinks that these beliefs can and should be proven to be true. I’m simply asking you to make good on your promise that you “can easily prove that [you and I exist], in various ways.” You seem to have had a change of heart. You now describe the attempt to prove these things as “ridiculous” and a piece of “sophistry”, and you don’t want to have any part in this. But why then did you say that you could easily prove in various ways that you and I actually exist?  Was this itself a piece of sophistry?

I might add that your gloss on “any person” as “any reasonable person” is of no help, since it seeks to explain obscura per obscurius, hoping to understand one ambiguous and contested set of terms (“self-evidence”, “incontestable proof”) by way of an even more highly contested term (“reasonable person”). Who counts as a “reasonable person”? What are the limits of “reasonableness”? Many highly sophisticated Buddhist philosophers reject the belief that any distinct individual that could be labelled “you” or “I” truly exists. Are such philosophers thereby condemned as “unreasonable”? Other Buddhist philosophers, those belonging to the Yogacara (“Mind Only”) school, believe that the external world we perceive does not really exist. On this view, the world has not existed for more than 10 minutes because it has never existed in the first place – the world is ‘mind only’, somewhat analogous to a shared hallucination. Again, should this view be dismissed as “unreasonable” simply because it strikes us (that is, Western-minded philosophers) as counter-intuitive or contrary to commonsense?

Your notion of self-evidence is again in play when you discuss the hypothetical case of video footage being found on the life of Jesus. Such footage, you claim, would render traditional Nicene christology self-evidently true, or would “constitute incontestable evidence to any reasonable person” – at least if the footage showed Jesus performing various miracles and recorded him proclaiming that he was the Second Person of the Trinity. The problem, however, is that this ignores a cardinal tenet of hermeneutics: our reading of a text (and similarly our understanding of what we see, whether it be mediated by video footage or not) is always underwritten by the presuppositions or “prejudices” that we bring to bear on the text (or video footage). It may appear to us from the video footage that Jesus is walking on water, or that Jesus is claiming to be the Son of God, but a convinced atheist could dismiss the purported miracles as chicanery and the claims to divinity as self-delusion and mental instability. Even if one accepted the occurrence of the miracles and the divine claims as historically substantiated, the interpretation of these events will always remain contested, as the history of Christianity clearly demonstrates. This is not to say that there cannot be a correct interpretation of anything. It is merely to highlight the futility of searching for pure, unadulterated, self-evident and incontestable facts.

Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion, such as D.Z. Phillips, like to put this by saying that coming to know God is not like coming to know, say, the chemical composition of the planet Saturn. In other words, coming to believe in God involves not so much an extension of one’s store of factual knowledge, but a deepening of one’s understanding and appreciation of certain aspects of life. Although this trades on a dubious opposition between knowledge and understanding (or fact and value), there is an important insight lurking here, and that is that God cannot be conceived as one more object or being among others, as a particular thing or item in the universe. But it is precisely this anthropomorphic conception of divinity that you seem unable to relinquish, as is evident by your claim that the Second Coming is something that could be captured on CNN. Your atheism, as laudable as it is, has yet to purify your theological vocabulary to the extent that talk about God no longer resembles talk about a superhuman being who can be singled out, comprehended, (psycho)analyzed and judged – much like the protagonist of a film, whether produced by Hollywood or CNN (the difference becoming less and less visible). Alas, you are not alone in this.   

If I can briefly venture into more speculative territory, I wonder whether this penchant for photographic realism as the surest path to knowledge and truth is merely a symptom of a more pervasive but uncritical acceptance of modern (and postmodern) ways of understanding the world. A more ancient (and pre-modern) view is that our knowledge is broadened and deepened when it includes things which cannot be seen and cannot be articulated (at least clearly and distinctly). On this view, which runs from ancient Greece to medieval Paris and Byzantium, the wondrous beauty of the creation is a sign of the love and beauty of the transcendent Creator: in perceiving the former we can come to see and know the latter.

Of course, ‘knowledge’ in this context is not scientifically demonstrable or logically irrefutable, but an apophatic kind of knowledge that is predicated on ‘unknowing’ or a docta ignorantia, a ‘learned ignorance’. As Gregory of Nyssa beautifully states in his Life of Moses (2:163), “the true vision and the true knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.”

Reflecting its Platonic heritage, the Eastern Orthodox tradition has usually construed the close connection between Creator and creature in terms of participation. The basic presupposition of this view, as of all Christian anthropology, is that human beings have been created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26). It follows from this that human beings are not autonomous and self-sufficient, but are truly human only insofar as they exist or live in God. In other words, we are made for fellowship with God, for as Augustine stated at the beginning of his Confessions, “You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you” (I.1). This notion found expression in the Greek patristic tradition in terms of the idea of “participation in God” (metousia theou), where such participation is conceived as essential to human being. We, and along with us the entire physical world, participate in God, who is both origin and telos, the source of our being and the end that we desire and are drawn to. However, human life conceived as participation in God is not a static matter, but a challenge to grow and progress – by means of a synergy (or cooperation) of divine grace and human freedom – in the divine life and energies, without end (Gregory of Nyssa, again, developed this beautifully by way of his idea of epectasis). This, of course, brings us to the notion of theosis or deification, which occupies a central place in Orthodox thought and liturgy. We are called to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), to become by grace what God is by nature.

It is participation in the divine life which confers ultimate value and meaning to all things, human and non-human. But this is not the kind of participation that is limited to a few hours on Sunday morning, perhaps with some additional prayer time and other pious activities during the week. Rather, it is participation on an ontological level, pervading all aspects of our existence, leaving nothing untouched. All dimensions of life – not only the incorporeal but also the corporeal, not only our language about God but all language and discourse – are thereby transfigured and saturated with meaning. But to contrapose, if a transcendent signified is made inaccessible or indeterminate (as your agnosticism seems to entail), then there can be no meaning, or meaning itself is rendered meaningless (something we merely create in our own image and likeness). As Catherine Pickstock puts it in After Writing, language has a “doxological character”, in the sense that “language exists primarily, and in the end only has meaning as, the praise of the divine” (p.xiii). This is why, for Pickstock, the language of liturgy represents the true consummation of philosophy. Like the Radical Orthodox, many contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians, from Alexander Schmemann to John Zizioulas, have also highlighted eucharistic communion and liturgy as the locus of truth and meaning. The being of all creaturely phenomena is grounded in participation in and praise of the divine – and praise or doxology is precisely what liturgy is. Correcting Derrida, outside liturgy there is nothing.   

 

MM. I think the world really is in trouble when we – the two of us – can’t even agree on the meaning of ‘agnosticism’ and its relevance for belief. But I’ll try once more: ‘agnosticism’, ‘strictly speaking’, means without gnosis, without knowledge. Let’s go to an objective reference; the OED states that an agnostic is “One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable.” In other words, the agnostic does not know whether there is any divinity. An agnostic may still believe or refuse to believe. When it comes to religion, this does not necessarily mean that the believer should suspend their beliefs – but they should suspend the belief that their belief is knowledge. Anything else is just pseudo-faith. Now, many believers believe humbly, but you certainly can’t deny that the world needs more of this humility when it comes to religion. This leads to my point about the need for more agnosticism and the need for more atheism – yes, yes – precisely because the world is so dogmatic, so viciously dogmatic. Sure, Christians have in the main stopped killing each other and other believers in the name of ‘God’, but this is still going on. Consider that spectacular event on September 11: thousands of people were killed by Islamic fundamentalists. (Of course, other factors were involved, such as political motivation, but religion – religious dogmatism, hatred – was a key factor.) Hence, when you claim that “there is no reason why claims to knowledge must result in hubris”, you’re right in an idealistic, optimistic sense, but the history of humanity has shown that people kill each other when they disagree. Sure, things have come a long way. People are more ‘tolerant’ in the West these days, but, globally, people are still being murdered in the name of ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ or whatever. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

Let’s also return one last time to your continued hyper-Cartesianism: your continued insistence for me to prove that you and I exist and that this exchange is real isn’t contributing to the renewal of philosophy’s good name. Your hyper-skepticism is all-the-more perplexing considering your apparent negativity towards agnosticism and atheism, and your seemingly enthusiastic avowal of orthodoxy. You seem sure that the divine exists, and yet you require evidence for the most obvious of truths. I find this perplexing. The sophistry continues with the mystification of yet another self-evident truth: the ‘reasonable person’. Sure, there are degrees of rationality – we could get caught up in all sorts of qualifications and nuances (some people are more reasonable than others; rational beings are always exposed to irrationality; etc.) which would just take up too much precious time – but I consider you and I to be reasonable beings. I consider a lot of people reasonable. I think reasonable people would accept my arguments – begrudgingly, perhaps, because we don’t like being proven wrong or have our faith exposed for what it truly is – but we accept what is reasonable because it’s reasonable.

You also use the very fashionable tactic of citing Buddhist philosophers and their dissolution of the ‘I’. I don’t buy into that either. I believe the self is multiple, somewhat ‘divided’ (I don’t like that word that much because it implies an original Unity), it’s fluid, and so on, but I think there is some kind of continuous ‘self’ – it may be socially constructed (though I think it’s a combination of socialization and biological impulses), but there’s still a self. Highly problematic? Sure. Elusive and abyssal? Yes, yes. And even if there ‘really’ isn’t such a thing as an ‘I’, existentially we all behave as if we are I’s. Much Western ‘philosophy’ has bought into the idea of the self’s ‘dissolution’. I just don’t buy into the ‘end of the self’ – just another example of the shoddiness of ‘philosophy’, of its sophistry, its utter irrelevance to life, its uselessness, its betrayal of wisdom. ‘Philosophy’ does not love or befriend wisdom – which is its original meaning and perhaps its original ambition – but ‘philosophy’ is – or has become –wisdom’s enemy, its traitor. It’s time we restore philosophy’s good name, and we can start by abandoning sophistry, hyper-Cartesianism, the dissolved self, etc.

You make a remark with which I wholeheartedly agree: “God [if there is any, I would add] cannot be conceived as one more object or being among others, as a particular thing or item in the universe.” But this very nice statement is complicated for Christians, is it not? For Christianity – especially trinitarian Christianity, to which you appear to subscribe – is precisely anthropomorphic insofar as Jesus – who was a human, a being – is also, somehow, puzzlingly, bewilderingly divine. And vice versa. If there is to be a Second Coming, wouldn’t Christ be perceptible to humans as some kind of being, as some kind of thing? I’m not saying that divinity is an object but we humans must surely receive it – or perhaps more accurately: perceive it – as some kind of ‘thing’. Let’s expand this notion a little; think of the ‘burning bush’: the divine was not a burning bush but Yahweh purportedly appeared in some kind of physically apprehensible form. If a CNN crew were up there on that mountain, perhaps that would have averted a lot of atrocities, such as the slaughtering of the Canaanites to make room for the Chosen People. It would’ve been great if their ‘chosenness’ was globally broadcast­ – with all the requisite evidence, such as footage of burning bushes and divided seas. I only have a “penchant for photographic realism” when it comes to the slaughter of millions based on the ‘perceptions’ or opinions of the ancients.

You contrast my ‘photographic realism’ with an alternative: “A more ancient (and pre-modern) view is that our knowledge is broadened and deepened when it includes things which cannot be seen and cannot be articulated (at least clearly and distinctly).” This all sounds nice and romantic, but it is precisely the problem at the heart of the exchange. How can we universalize that which cannot be seen or articulated? – even if seen or articulated vaguely? Why should I accept and live by that which is unreasonable or unverifiable? This kind of mystification lies at the heart of history: one person/tribe claims that they have the correct version of ‘things unseen’ – deities, especially – and then they thrust their ‘truth of things unseen’ onto the rest of us. If you experience something which cannot be validated but insist that I must be sacrificed or circumcised or march in a Crusade or crack a whip during an Inquisition or spark a match during a witch-hunt or fly a plane into a skyscraper, should I then go ahead and do it? This is precisely the tragic story of history. That’s why I’m so darn insistent with evidence, with reasoning, with Reason. That’s why I’m an unabashed child of the Enlightenment – or perhaps more accurately: a champion of a neo-Enlightenment – and why I love the fact that I am becoming more rational, more open, more humble, more agnostic. You cited earlier the New Atheists – they’re just reverse fundamentalists. Hell, I’m still a believer. But I cannot claim that my belief – as tentative and minimal and progressive and provisional as it is – is knowledge. It’s a feeling, a hope. Wishful thinking – that, too. (What’s wrong with wishing? Yes, yes.) But the history of humanity is a history of powerful, persuasive individuals leading a herd of ignorant peoples. Now, it seems you finally come around to my position by referring to ‘unknowing’ or ‘learned ignorance’. ‘Learned ignorance’ is a good thing. Like Socratic ignorance, epistemic humility, agnosticism and a little bit of atheism – these are all good things. Divine things. It’s also true that the men you cite – Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine – exhibited moments of docta ignorantia, but their writings were, on the whole, arrogant, puritanical, sexist. They contributed to that persistent plague called ‘orthodoxy’.

NT.  

“Why can’t you see,” Anomius whispered to him, “that there was once when the Son was not.”

 

Dusk had fallen, and only the two of them were left inside the church building, amongst the flickering candlelights beside the icons. Anomius continued:

 

“We all agree that God the Father is the only truly unique being, the absolute other, and the only one who can be named Unbegotten and Unoriginate. But if we agree on this much, then surely we can also agree that the Son, because he is begotten, cannot be of the same essence as the Father. Indeed, the Son is a creature who has been called into existence out of nothing and has had a beginning. And even though the Son is more exalted as a creature than any human being, his glory is nonetheless infinitely transcended by that of the Father. Do you follow me?”

 

Gregory sat quietly and reflectively, before answering after a few moments:

 

“This, my friend, is to undermine entirely our hope for salvation. For if the Word who became flesh and dwelt amongst us was not truly God, of the same essence as the Father, then how could he reconcile us to the Father? How could a mere creature, even a highly exalted one, heal and redeem the fallen creation? We were created out of nothing, and we were rapidly descending into nothingness. The only one who could put a stop to this descent is God. And he did so by descending to humanity, so that humanity can rise up to God. Surely you see this?”

 

“No I don’t,” Anomius briskly replied in a confident tone. “In any case, why should I accept what you and the bishops around you say, when my reason assures me that my view is the correct one, the one that is in line with the Scriptures and with sound philosophical principles?”

 

“You raise a difficult problem, Anomius. But beware, for it is not our own reason and our own arguments that count most. The ultimate reference point is not our works and achievements, but the free workings of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church. Arrogance is the result of placing ourselves above this cloud of witnesses and presuming that we, and perhaps only we, have privileged access to the truth.”

 

“But you also are presuming to know the truth, so why is your presumption any more justified than mine?”

 

“Truth is not the objectified and conceptualized truth of the Greeks. Rather, truth is life, and life is communion. This is what it means to say that the Son belongs to God’s substance. It means that God’s being, and indeed the ultimate character of being itself, the essence of life and truth, is to be found in communion, in relationship with the other. And so anyone who chooses isolation from the other is inevitably brought up against death and dissolution – and this is hell.”

 

“What rubbish! The wine and incense have finally gone to your head and made you lose your mind!”

 

“Did you know that in hell it is not possible to see anyone face-to-face? Each person is fixed to the back of another, and so no-one can see anyone else’s face.”

 

“That’s interesting, but what’s your point?”

 

“What is it that can hide from us as nothing else can the face of the Other?”

Trakakis & Manolopoulos, Part 2

Part 2:

From Knowledge to Non-Belief, or Becoming More of An Atheist

 

NT. Let me remind you what you said earlier:

‘God’ is a possible reality… The lack of such evidence for deity is self-evident. Nor is there any self-evident or incontestable proof against the existence of deity. Therefore, unless there is some kind of indubitable divine self-disclosure – some kind of ‘Second Coming’, for example – the divine remains a possibility. A possibility. Nothing more – and nothing less.

When you say that the reality or existence of God is a possibility, nothing more and nothing less, that certainly sounds like agnosticism to me. By ‘agnosticism’ I mean the view that the evidence for and against the existence of God is so ambiguous or insufficient that we ought to withhold judgement – that is to say, we ought to neither believe that there is a God nor believe that there is no God.

But now you seem to be saying something very different: you tell us that you do believe in God, after all, but belief (you add) does not amount to knowledge. But if that’s what you think, then in your opinion God is not a “possibility and nothing more”, but a reality, an actuality. You do not claim to know this, but you do believe it. The point is an elementary one: do not confuse metaphysical claims (e.g., God is a possible reality) with epistemological claims (e.g., We can have no knowledge of God).

The passage I just quoted also contains what I regard as an unjustifiably high standard as to what counts as “good evidence” or a “good reason”. In response, you claim that the standard of evidence should be set very high because there is a great deal at stake in the question of the existence of God. I agree that the standard should be set reasonably high, but not ridiculously high. For, as I pointed out, if your standard of self-evident or incontestable proof were adopted, then virtually everything that we ordinarily believe should be rejected. I believe that you exist. I believe that the world has existed for more than 10 minutes. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. (In fact, I think it is more correct to label these as cases of ‘knowledge’ than ‘belief’, but let’s put that aside for now.) But can I offer you any “self-evident or incontestable” proof for these beliefs? Surprisingly, you claim that you “can easily prove” things of this sort “in various ways”. Well, why have you been holding this secret from us for so long? Please show us the proof! And if you succeed you will have succeeded in doing something that no other person in the history of philosophy has managed to do, Descartes included. But keep in mind your standard of evidence: your proof, in order to be valid and sound, must be self-evident or incontestable – by which, I gather, you mean that it cannot be rationally doubted or contested by any person. 

I think you gave yourself away when you said that witnessing the Second Coming on CNN would constitute the kind of evidence that you long for, the kind of evidence that would finally sweep away all doubt and unbelief. But what exactly do you think you would see? Would you see a Christ-like figure descending from the clouds in the sky, amidst trumpets sounding from the angels surrounding him, before taking his place on a splendid throne, ready to pronounce the Final Judgement? If you saw this on CNN, would you be witnessing Christ, or would you be looking at a Disneyland imitation of Christ? Similarly, if CNN were to disclose to the world tomorrow that they have miraculously found video footage of the entire life of Jesus of Nazareth, and they were to broadcast this, would it become immediately obvious to everyone that this wandering Jew is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity? In our visually overloaded age, we uncritically assume that seeing is believing, when in fact belief requires much more than (and sometimes the very opposite of) seeing.

There are fantasies, not only in the sexual life, but in the intellectual life as well. We cannot do without them, but we can at least become aware of the more damaging and pernicious ones and try to let them go. One problematic fantasy that philosophers and theologians are particularly drawn to is that God – that which is the very source of the being of everything, the reality which lies beyond the world and makes it to be as it is – is fundamentally just like us, only infinitely greater, and so we can see and interact with God as though he were like our wise, old grandfather. To believe in a god like that is to believe in an idol. Atheism, insofar as it calls for the rejection of such idols, is a salutary thing. I wonder whether you should be more of an atheist.   

 

MM. Now we’re getting deeper into the abysses, which means more thinking – more joy. The abyss with which you begin this time around is the abyss of ‘possibility’. I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded in conveying my full-bodied configuration of it – perhaps I don’t want to be too hyperbolic about it, which is a risk when I’m speaking of the things I love. The possible – how can one not be in love with it? I’m not sure if I would go as far as Aristotle and Heidegger who privilege it above actuality – no need to play favourites here – but we certainly need to re-affirm its place, its parity with actuality, the two alongside each other, perhaps even intertwined – like lovers. Perhaps that’s why my qualification “nothing more and nothing less” is open to misunderstanding, because people focus on the “nothing more” without paying attention to the radical “nothing less”. Possibility is more – much more – than its typical anorexic caricature, of being barely more than nothing. Part of the richness and fullness of possibility is its ‘twoness’: possibilities may (‘also’) be actualities, and therefore worthy of belief but not befitting the word ‘knowledge’ when evidence is lacking. Full-bodied possibilities, glorious possibilities. Possibilities which are beliefs but are not knowledges, for the time being. Hence, some possibilities remain beliefs – nothing more and nothing less. God-dess, for example.

Next, you refer to ‘agnosticism’ – another thing I love. Like ‘possibility’, it’s another thing that hasn’t received enough attention, something that requires much more attention. Much more loving attention. So let’s participate in giving agnosticism its due by beginning with your definition: “By ‘agnosticism’ I mean the view that the evidence for and against the existence of God is so ambiguous or insufficient that we ought to withhold judgement – that is to say, we ought to neither believe that there is a God nor believe that there is no God.” Now, this kind of definition seems to denote what may be termed ‘existential agnosticism’, for it pertains to the experience of not knowing whether one believes or doesn’t believe. Now, do I experience that kind of agnosticism? I don’t think so; I’m not sure. Perhaps there may be a little bit of that in me – I don’t know. Am I unsure I have faith in my faith? – good question. Like any reasonable person, I have bouts of doubt, but I doubt whether that constitutes an ‘agnosticism’ in which I must “withhold judgement” regarding my belief or unbelief. I’m not sure what to make of ‘existential agnosticism’ – of its possibility and experience. What I do know for sure is that one can believe or otherwise – perhaps simultaneously (who knows?) – precisely because there is a lack of evidence, one way or the other.

And it is this lack of knowledge or validation (for the time being) that takes us – or returns us – to an ‘agnosticism’ that is perhaps more relevant to the questions and abysses we are considering, what may be termed ‘epistemological agnosticism’, which relates to the knowledge claims of belief rather than belief ‘itself’. If what we are actually dealing with here is ‘epistemological agnosticism’, then your definition would need to be modified by substituting ‘know’ for ‘believe’: agnosticism requires that we “withhold judgment” in terms of knowledge claims regarding the thatness (and whatness) of divinity. Agnosticism doesn’t deny the experience of faith or unfaith; it suspends religious knowledge claims like ‘God-dess is’ and ‘Goddess isn’t’. Agnosticism allows such claims to remain articles of belief – but not statements of fact, for such claims cannot be known to be true or false, for the time being. Agnosticism’s crux is knowledge, not belief. Acknowledging its own beautiful nature and scope, agnosticism does not nullify belief or unbelief – indeed, it is, in a certain sense, a condition of their possibilities. Its very name – agnostos, ‘without knowledge’ – discloses what it is, what it does. And so, we must “withhold judgment” – but not in terms of whether a particular belief is a belief (that’s pretty self-evident) but whether a particular belief is a known fact.

And so, (epistemological) agnosticism is the recognition of the nature of the content and claims of one’s faith, not the abandonment of faith itself. And, the greater the recognition, the more provisional and progressive our faith. A true and honest and noble faith – how can one therefore not love agnosticism? How can we afford continuing to ignore it, to repress it, to misinterpret it as a vulgar ‘fence-sitting’ or a lazy ‘cop-out’? No: agnosticism is thoughtful; it allows thinking believers to affirm their faith as faith – contra the devilish religious leaders and their ignorant herds who dogmatically consider their beliefs self-evidently true, some of them believing them to be so self-evidently true that they die for their faith and often take many of the rest of us with them. No: our agnosticism is hard work; it’s relentless, persistent, persevering. It’s hard work reigning in one’s hubris – we need all the help we can get. Armed with arrogance-eroding and mind-opening agnosticism, the believer – at least this one – can believe but not know whether one’s religious beliefs are true.

You then go on to instruct me not to “confuse metaphysical claims (e.g., God is a possible reality) with epistemological claims (e.g., We can have no knowledge of God).” I hope what I’ve just been saying about abysses like ‘possibility’ and ‘agnosticism’ has substantially cleared up any confusion as to whether I’ve been confusing metaphysical and epistemological claims. Just in case: yes, I believe in the metaphysical claim that deity is a possible reality and, yes, we do not presently have any self-evident knowledge of divinity. Yes, yes. That’s faith. That’s reasonable.

You return to the question of my standard of evidence being high, too high – “ridiculously high” (your emphasis). You offer some everyday beliefs: that you believe I exist; that the world has existed for more than 10 minutes; that the sun will rise tomorrow. Let’s begin with the reasonability – more accurately: the degree of reasonability – of these beliefs. The first two are extremely reasonable, so reasonable, in fact, that what you state in parentheses – with the qualification “but let’s put that aside for now”, a statement that now demands our immediate attention – certainly applies to the first two ‘beliefs’; you state: “In fact, I think it is more correct to label these as cases of ‘knowledge’ than ‘belief’ . . .”. I wholeheartedly concur when it comes to the first two everyday beliefs: so reasonable are they that it’s somewhat ridiculous to label the first two beliefs ‘beliefs’ – for they are self-evident knowledges, facts. In other words, they may be ‘beliefs’ but because they are so-self evident, so ridiculously reasonable, it’s more credible and less ridiculous to speak of them as knowledge rather than ‘beliefs’.

The third belief – i.e. that the sun will rise tomorrow – is somewhat problematical. It involves a claim about tomorrow which is a claim about the future, and claims about the future certainly do not have the same degree of certainty – perhaps they are marked by relatively little certainty, if any? – compared to propositions such as ‘I exist’ and ‘the universe is older than 10 minutes’. Remember: we live in a very spontaneous cosmos. Our universe may explode tonight. Hence, it is possible that the sun won’t rise tomorrow. Who knows? Of course, there is a certain amount of incredulity when faced with this counter-possibility, an incredulity not only informed by the fact that scientific theory indicates that the sun will probably still keep rising for trillions of days, but an incredulity also attributable to the fact that we homo sapiens are creatures of habit who anthropocentrically assume that the sun will keep rising for us. Nonetheless, when it comes to the future – even the cosmically-miniscule future of what-will-follow-tonight – many things are possible, including the sun’s non-arising. I would therefore be somewhat wary of figuring ‘the sun rising tomorrow’ as ‘knowledge’. I’m comfortable with the claim that it’s quite reasonable to assume or believe that the sun will rise tomorrow – but I don’t think it constitutes ‘self-evident knowledge’.

And so, to summarize: some beliefs are ‘also’ knowledge (e.g. ‘I exist’, ‘the universe is older than 10 minutes’, etc.) – so much so that it is discordant to label them ‘beliefs’; some beliefs (e.g. ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’) are somewhat reasonable because they have some kind of evidence (e.g. predictive scientific theory), though they remain ‘beliefs’ precisely because it is not self-evident that the sun will rise tomorrow – probable but not indubitable; and then there are some beliefs (e.g. ‘that God-dess is’) that remain beliefs precisely because there is no ‘good evidence’, for the time being.

Now, even though you yourself identify the examples you have offered as ‘knowledge’ rather than belief (and I totally agree that the first two are self-evidently true, the last being more questionable), you still demand proof. You remark that if I could prove their self-evidence I “will have succeeded in doing something that no other person in the history of philosophy has managed to do, Descartes included.” Philosophy is already too ridiculous and ridiculed for me to add to this ridicule by ‘proving’ that I exist and that the world is at least 10-minutes-old. Sophistry is one of the discreditors of philosophy, and I won’t participate in it. I love sophia – not sophistry. Don’t get me wrong: a bit of Cartesian doubt is good and healthy, but I refuse to become a Cartesian extremist. Now, a more productive task is an analysis of the reminder that you immediately attach to your hyper-Cartesian challenge: “But keep in mind your standard of evidence: your proof, in order to be valid and sound, must be self-evident or incontestable – by which, I gather, you mean that it cannot be rationally doubted or contested by any person.” Let’s focus on the last two words “any person”: what is required here is the insertion of the word ‘thinking’ to produce the phrase ‘any thinking person’. Any reasonable person would think that the examples you raised (especially the first two) are self-evidently true. As I stated before: hyperbolic doubt was unique and perhaps remains necessary (anything to break us from our various dogmatic slumbers), and, as I noted before, it’s fun and interesting for philosophy students experiencing the joy of radical questioning. But if we can’t agree that ‘the universe is somewhat older than 10-minutes’ is self-evident while ‘God-dess is’ is not, then we have irreconcilably different understandings of what is obviously true (and therefore knowledge) and what is possibly true (and therefore belief).      

As part of this continuing question on the nature of ‘self-evidence’, you state: “I think you gave yourself away when you said that witnessing the Second Coming on CNN would constitute the kind of evidence that you long for, the kind of evidence that would finally sweep away all doubt and unbelief.” A first point concerns my longing – more accurately: longings, epistemological and existential-theological. To begin with, as a reasonable person, I am someone who longs for evidence for my beliefs. Thus, some kind of Christic ‘Return’ would confirm this belief, would confirm its facticity. Otherwise, it remains a belief. Of course, my longing for Christ’s ‘Return’ is more-than-epistemological, having (‘also’) to do with my very being: a Second Coming would be a good thing – and not a moment too soon. But since we are primarily dealing here with the thinking person’s faith and its relation to knowledge, then, yes, witnessing a self-evident self-revelation like a globally-telecast Second Coming would constitute incontestable evidence. In the same way that the footage of 9/11 – however manipulated – was evidence that this spectacular event did in fact happen, CNN-style footage would constitute good evidence, validation. Given the mass of evidence, it is self-evident that 9/11 happened – hence, the knowledge that it occurred – not ‘just’ the belief that it occurred, but the knowledge that it happened – its thatness. There is no such self-evidence for divinity’s thatness.

Of course, it should also be noted that the details of 9/11 – its whatness – are obviously more blurred, obstructed: the exact contexts, mechanics, and dynamics of 9/11 remain hidden from us. This question of detail also applies to your hypothetical situation in which you propose that newly-found footage of Jesus would not make it “immediately obvious” that “this wandering Jew is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.” Now, if the tape captured any of his purported miracles, this would certainly disclose something of the divine in Jesus – but would it confirm his being “the Second Person of the Holy Trinity”? Well, if the footage captured his miracle-making, and if he himself proclaimed in the footage that he was “the Second Person of the Holy Trinity”, then this would constitute incontestable evidence to any reasonable person – his status confirmed by the telecasted Second Coming and the attendant miracles. But our present situation is very far and very different from this hypothetical: we don’t have good proof of divine existence – let alone a divine personality which is partially constituted by a risen Jewish carpenter. Which, when you think about it, sounds rather ridiculous – but nevertheless remains possible, and therefore possibly true.

I also like your closing meditation/suggestion: “I wonder whether you should be more of an atheist” – which isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. I think it’s noble and valuable for the theist to become “more of an atheist”: a little bit of atheism will ensure that we don’t become religious dogmatists and militants; a little bit of atheism will keep our minds open. Who knows – a little bit of atheism may even make us better Christians. One could even propose – perhaps only somewhat ridiculously – that even Jesus experienced a little bit of ‘atheism’ up there on the stake, asking why he was abandoned by his divine parent. A little bit of atheism isn’t only religiously and theologically valuable, it’s valuable for thinking and living in general. If atheism spawned some Christic doubt; if it spawned the ‘atheisms’ of Marxism and psychoanalysis and Nietzsche – well, then, perhaps I should take up your advice of becoming “more of an atheist”. Then again, perhaps I already am.

Trakakis & Manolopoulos, Part 1

Part 1:

Faith and Doubt in a Revolutionary Divinity

The discussion begins with Nick querying Mark’s defence of hedonism in his new and thus far unpublished work, Wicked Wisdom: A Scandalous A-Z of Over 250 Life Issues (which, as the subtitle suggests, offers a somewhat controversial take on a wide array of topics, from adultery and celibacy to God and the meaning of life).

NT. You have recently defended a form of hedonism. Hedonism is of course the view that only pleasure has value, and taken as an ethical theory hedonism is the view that something is the morally right thing to do only if acting in this way will bring about pleasure. Interpreted in this broad fashion, hedonism is open to a host of objections, above all the objection that it amounts to a philosophy suitable only for pigs: “better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. That is why, I presume, you qualify your hedonism, and so you call for a “responsible” and “ecological” hedonism, where pleasure is not to be pursued at the expense of, say, the welfare of other people. And so you give examples such as the following: “non-smokers shouldn’t be exposed to our smoking, unless non-smokers choose to be in our pleasurable company,” and “the pregnant shouldn’t drink to excess or take recreational drugs, for such hedonism is irresponsible to the extreme, harming the unborn” (Wicked Wisdom, unpublished ms). This sounds reasonable enough, but how do you justify these claims? Why shouldn’t I advocate and live out an unrestrained form of hedonism? Why shouldn’t I try to maximize my own pleasure, even if this means causing great harm to other people or to the natural environment? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not seeking to defend any form of hedonism. And I’m not really asking why you adopt this particular morality or moral viewpoint rather than some other one. Rather, what I’m asking is: What grounds (or reasons) do you have for thinking that (e.g.) it is objectively true that “the pregnant shouldn’t drink to excess”? You certainly write as if you believe that it is objectively true that “the pregnant shouldn’t drink to excess”, but why do you believe this? Why couldn’t someone say that this judgement, that “the pregnant shouldn’t drink to excess”, is nothing more than a puritanical prejudice that we more liberated ones need to overturn?

So as to stop you from guessing, or second-guessing, my intentions, here is my underlying argument: Any morality, yours included, is groundless – that is to say, it is purely subjective and hence can make no claim on anyone else – unless it be grounded in God. 

 

MM. Hedonism, ethics, ‘God’: these are some of the most enjoyable, fascinating, and intertwined ‘Big Questions’; hence, they are a great set of opening questions – so open, in fact, that they are somewhat abyssal. Let us begin traversing this wonderful matrix of abysses with your last opening question or claim – that ‘morality’ can only be grounded in ‘God’. Nothing can be grounded in ‘God’ – for ‘God’ is more groundless than anything. How so? Firstly, ‘God’ is a possible reality – one reason for the scare quotes (the other reason being that ‘God’ is a heavily-masculinized/patriarchal word ‘God’ – I will therefore use alternatives, including ‘God-dess’ [with a hyphen] which connotes that the divine may be both ‘male’ and ‘female’ – and perhaps/probably beyond gender and/or gendered otherwise). The lack of such evidence for deity is self-evident. Nor is there any self-evident or incontestable proof against the existence of deity. Therefore, unless there is some kind of indubitable divine self-disclosure – some kind of ‘Second Coming’, for example – the divine remains a possibility. A possibility. Nothing more – and nothing less.

Secondly, not only do we not know whether there is divinity (its ‘thatness’), but we do not know what it may be like (its ‘whatness’). If there be deity, if there be God-dess, we don’t know what kind of deity or God-dess it may be. What, in other words, is the ‘personality’ of divinity? What kind of ‘person’ is God-dess? What kind of ‘ethics’ – if any – would it have? Who knows? – and how could one prove it? After all, when you say that one’s ethics – you use the word ‘morality’ but I despise the word ‘morality’ and the puritanism it represents – when one’s ethics or values can only be ‘grounded in God’, then one not only presumes divine existence but also its ‘essence’. Can one authoritatively describe or define the divine, and therefore ground one’s ethics in it? On the contrary, is there anything more elusive and mysterious and abyssal – ‘groundless’ in an also-affirmative sense – than the divine? How can one ‘ground’ one’s ethics – and laws and politics, etc. – on something/someone so elusive and abyssal, on something/someone possible. Hence: there is nothing more groundless (in both senses) than God-dess. Hence: the astounding array of human construals of divinity – many/most of them oppressive in varying ways and degrees: patriarchal, puritanical, colonizing, anthropocentric, etc. We have made gods in our image – and justified our ethics and laws and governments by them, and vice versa. So many constructions – so many destructive constructions, so many vicious circles and cyclical violences. A wicked wisdomist, on the other hand, attacks and abolishes these oppressive theologies-moralities-rulerships, and is instead governed by a ruthlessly true Reason(ing) that construes divinity – and laws and politics, etc. – worthy of belief and worth following. Let’s take each of these terms and possibilities in turn, ultimately leading back to the original set of questions, of the abyss and bliss of hedonism. Perhaps my faith in the divine may have its ‘origins’/‘inspirations’ ‘beyond’/‘beside’ a ruthlessly true thinking (certain elements of the Bible and religiously-inspired traditions, for example), but my construals of it must be informed and filtered by such thinking. (I shall speak more of what is ‘true’ and what is ‘thinking’.)

What does all of this mean when it comes to the divine, to ethics, to hedonism? To begin with, I can only believe in a truly progressive deity – indeed, an ethico-politically revolutionary divinity. This kind of revolutionary deity is ‘also’ a hedonistic entity, a divinity that adores corporeality and its attendant pleasures. Such a hedonism is not a vulgar, caricatured one of selfishness and hyper-consumption and irresponsibility – i.e. a hedonism somewhat practiced today. No: our ‘wickedly wise’ hedonism is responsible and disciplined and aware and considerate; it is a primary pursuit but not the only one. It is a hedonism, in other words, that is just and sociable and ecological. An ethical hedonism. A divine hedonism. Hence, it is unsurprising that the hedonism I espouse coheres with the divinity I construe and desire, for both of them are informed by what can be, for the time being (a time without divine self-disclosure), the only ultimate ‘ground’ or ‘justification’ for such abyssal issues: true thinking, a thinking that is open ‘yet’ discerning; liberated ‘yet’ respectful; nuanced and provisional and context-aware and sensitive to the individual and the particular ‘yet’ truly universal – and therefore even forcefully imposable. For the time being, thinking is ‘all’ we’ve got – and perhaps all we need. It may sound paradoxical – it probably is, but this is commonplace when considering the abysses of Big Questions, and perhaps a sign we’re on the right track or traversal – but our hedonism must be thought-ful.

NT. Five points, by way of response.

(1) You need to decide where you stand. Do you stand on the side of theism (belief in God), or on the side of atheism (belief that there is no God)? Or, rather than standing on any side, do you prefer to sit on the fence by adopting an agnostic stance? In saying that God is nothing more and nothing less than a possibility, it seems that you have settled for an agnostic position. For, according to the agnostic, it is possible that there is a God and it is possible that there is no God, and there is no (rational) way to choose between these alternatives. But, later on, you seem to contradict this agnostic position by professing that you believe in a “progressive” and “revolutionary” deity. If that’s the case, then you do accept some form of theism, some form of belief in God, after all. So which is it: God? no God? or you do not know (or cannot decide)?

He looked out the window and was surprised to find that the sun had already set and darkness had enveloped the sky. It was raining heavily, with inaudible flashes of lightning striking across the horizon.

As he was gazing at the crackling wood in the fireplace, he was struck by the large number of falsehoods he had picked up since his childhood, and by the highly dubious and doubtful edifice he had subsequently constructed out of them. He realized that, for once in his life, he must demolish everything, from top to bottom, and start right again from the start. He began to doubt: methodically, maniacally. No stone was left unturned.

He began with the world itself, everything other, other selves as well as other things. And from there he worked his way back to himself, his inner being, the other other.

The rain began to fall harder, and it began to hail. He was worried that the force of the hailstorm would soon shatter the windows. He nevertheless continued his journey, digging deeper, extending the search further, moving ahead more rapidly… until he finally hit rock bottom and could go no further. There was a method in his madness and a madness in his method, and it seemed now to be paying off. He had reached the foundations: something he could not doubt.

(2) Let’s turn, then, to the reasons you give for refusing to commit to belief in God. Here you seem to set the standard of proof so high that it is almost inevitable that the verdict will be negative (against theism, and also against atheism for that matter). It’s as though you do not wish this issue (of the existence of God) to be resolved one way or the other, and so as to ensure this you raise the standard of proof impossibly high.

Now, pay close attention to what standard of proof you demand: “self-evident or incontestable proof”, “some kind of indubitable divine self-disclosure”. By these standards, it is not only the existence of God that would be placed in doubt, but the existence of anything whatsoever, from ordinary chairs and tables to exotic quarks and leptons. If there is anything that is self-evident and incontestable, it is that nothing is self-evident and incontestable. So, I think you need to be more modest in your standards as to what is to count as ‘good evidence’, especially when dealing with subjects such as philosophy and theology, where the standards of proof and justification will differ quite significantly from those employed in more empirical and mathematical fields such as physics and astronomy.

(3) So, is there any ‘good evidence’ (broadly construed) for the existence of God? I do not wish to enter into this well-worn (perhaps overworn) debate here, but I do think you need to get clear on the kind of deity you wish to affirm, deny, or remain agnostic about. For there are innumerable gods, and simply because one is thinking and discussing these matters does not guarantee that one is not beholden to some conceptual idol rather than the real and living God.

But now we run up against another apparent contradiction in your thought. On the one hand, you proclaim that the nature of God (God’s ‘whatness’, as you put it) is simply beyond our ken: it is unknown, if not forever unknowable. But on the other hand, you say quite a bit about the nature of God! For you confidently go on to claim that (the true) God is “an ethico-politically revolutionary divinity”, “a hedonistic entity, a divinity that adores corporeality and its attendant pleasures.” So which is it: the nature of God is unknowable? or there is at least something we can know about God?

(4) Worse still, you have not provided any (good) reason for accepting such a God. You have stressed, and quite rightly, that we often create gods in our own image. But haven’t you done the exact same thing? Isn’t your morally progressive God merely your own creation? Why should I, or anyone else, accept such a God?

Perhaps your view is that the kind of thinking that you describe as “a ruthlessly true thinking” – a kind of thinking that is open, discerning, liberated, and so on – is what ultimately grounds or justifies your conception of divinity. This sounds promising, but why hold that this way of thinking coheres best with your conception of divinity? Perhaps it coheres better with atheism, or some traditional form of theism. How can you rule this out?   

Midnight. It’s always darkest at midnight. The fear of silence. Surreal, but so real. 

In the moonlight he noticed the lines on his hands, the lines that had always been there, unnoticed. He tried to fathom and interpret them, like the lines he was accustomed to reading in books, but he could not. He was startled by how his hands – their rough texture, faded colour, trembling fingers with cuts and bruises – seemed strange, unrecognisable. He grew increasingly worried.

Since that night he would never see the lines again. The silencing of fear.  

 

MM. Perhaps we should have started with one question? – then again, is not every question related to every other question? – is not every Big Question related to every other Big Question? I enjoy your responses, their spirit, their passion. I’ll try to be as brief as possible – but how brief can we be when we’re traversing abyssal questions and provocative responses?

Response to Response (1): “You need to decide where you stand”. It bears repeating, perhaps more formulaically: I believe but I don’t know – the ‘but’ is somewhat superfluous, considering that belief is precisely a lack of knowledge. My faith is a mixture of faith and doubt and agnosticism – all good things. The element of unknowing is what keeps things open and interesting – not to mention modest and humble. Neither I nor you nor any creature on this good Earth ‘knows’ whether the Answer to this Big Question is deity or nothingness. Theism, atheism, polytheism, pantheism, etc., are all matters of faith, and as soon as anyone starts presuming they actually Know, then what we get is dogmatism, fundamentalism, extremism, scientism – sicknesses that oppress humanity and the planet in countless ways.

Furthermore, what should be emphasized in a world that continues to bias actuality over possibility is that  ‘possibility’ also entails the possibility of actuality (albeit an ‘unproven’ actuality), so when I say ‘something is possible’, it’s a stronger assertion than what is normally associated with it. For me (a dreamer, an idealist, a utopian – yes, yes), ‘the possible’ is charged with a certain power: to say that ‘the divine is possible’ is quite a decision, quite a stand – given the lack of evidence for it. And, since I believe and hope in the reality of a deity, I want to believe and hope in a progressive and revolutionary deity – the only kind that deserves the thinking believer’s belief. I therefore don’t ‘contradict’ myself by mentioning belief and agnosticism in one and the same breath: such is the only honourable position for the humble, open-minded believer.

Response to Response (2): You raise the objection that my standard of proof for the existence or non-existence of God-dess is ‘high’ – but shouldn’t it be, considering what is at stake? Shouldn’t the only standard for such an important Question with all sorts of real consequences be some kind of self-evident self-revelation? Faith – true faith (not just conditioning, habit, fear, etc.) – lacks demonstrability, self-evidence, self-disclosure. Hence, the need to be modest and humble about one’s faith; hence, the need to be modest and humble enough to be open to the possibility of being wrong. Likewise for atheists: there is no ‘strong’ evidence, no ‘good’ reason for atheism (not even the reason of bad religion). Hence: the thinking believer respects the decision of the atheist, for atheism is perfectly reasonable. And vice versa.

You do mention that “It’s as though you do not wish this issue (of the existence of God) to be resolved one way or the other, and so as to ensure this you raise the standard of proof impossibly high”. Perhaps/probably I have a wish to keep open the question of the divine, with all its mystery and possibility, but I think my greater wish is to find out the truth – it’s frustrating not knowing, we humans want to know – but only some kind of strong proof could do that for the thinking believer. Furthermore, I haven’t raised the standard: the claim itself demands good evidence. (Should we also propose, perhaps somewhat seriously, that divinity itself has raised the standard? – perhaps to determine who has faith and who hasn’t? – perhaps the divine has also set the standard to keep us on our epistemological toes?)

Of course, the question of evidence becomes even more crucial when people start asserting not only the existence of divinity (its thatness) but also its nature (its whatness) – but how can we know the personality of deity? We can’t, for the time being. You also state: “If there is anything that is self-evident and incontestable, it is that nothing is self-evident and incontestable.” This is very eloquent – but untrue: that you and I are involved in this very exchange is self-evident and incontestable. I can easily prove that, in various ways. But I can’t prove the existence of deity. Hyper-Cartesian doubt (‘nothing is self-evident’) may be fun for undergrad philosophy students who have never been instructed to question and critique, but it also gives philosophy a bad name – philosophy as sophistry.

Response to Response (3): You ask whether there is “any ‘good evidence”. I would say that there is much ‘anecdotal material’: from the scriptural transmission of purported events, to the possibility of ‘paranormal’ experiences (stigmata, ghosts, UFO sightings, ESP, etc.), countless testimonies from often very respectable and honest people, and perhaps even the sheer spiritedness of existence (haven’t you ever felt someone’s gaze from afar?) – all these suggest that there is ‘more’, and involved in this ‘More’ may be divinity. However, despite the number and breadth of this material, it cannot count as ‘definitive’ for various reasons: testimony is not always reliable; our minds and bodies can play tricks on us; there are undiscovered scientific explanations for a number of these experiences; people often lie; etc. A large number of us witnessing the return of Christ on CNN – now that would be good evidence.

You also return to the question of the whatness of deity and suggest that “we run up against another apparent contradiction in your thought…. On the one hand, you proclaim that the nature of God (God’s ‘whatness’, as you put it) is simply beyond our ken…. But on the other hand, you say quite a bit about the nature of God!” But note what I say before I begin to “say quite a bit”: “I can only believe in . . .” – once again, it comes down to a matter of faith. I do not know the personality of deity, but as a reasoning being, I can only believe in a divine ‘More’ that is good and loving and open and liberating. You also end Response (3) with a set of good questions: “So which is it: the nature of God is unknowable? or there is at least something we can know about God?” Answer: Neither the thatness nor the whatness of divinity is knowable; but if we are to believe in the divine, then we should believe in a good God-dess.

Response to Response (4): Your next Response ties into the nature of the divine (if there is any); you state: “Worse still, you have not provided any (good) reason for accepting such a God”. To begin with, perhaps you’re technically right when you remark that I haven’t provided any reason(s) for accepting a revolutionary deity, but I think the reason/ing is implicit: as a thinking believer, I can only believe in a good God. How can I, as a reasoning being, believe in a cruel and puritanical god? How can I believe in a divine tyrant? This is not to say that, if there is divinity, then there is the possibility that it is all these terrible things – perhaps it may be, but such a deity would be a demon. I believe in a God-dess that’s on the side of the poor and the powerless. As to why? – that’s a good question. I’m not sure if you can provide ‘reasons’ for preferring justice and goodness over oppression and evil. Perhaps this ‘preference’ lies before or beyond our ladder of reasoning. Perhaps this preference for one set of values over the other is self-evident and incontestable. Perhaps not. So many ‘perhapses’ – maybe you can help me out there.

You also remark: “You have stressed, and quite rightly, that we often create gods in our own image. But haven’t you done the exact same thing? Isn’t your morally progressive God merely your own creation? Why should I, or anyone else, accept such a God?” These are good questions – abyssal, like the Big Questions. Another ‘perhaps’ is needed here: perhaps I am projecting those values I value onto/into the divine. Who knows? After all, since we don’t know deity’s whatness, then we don’t know whether I am ‘merely’ projecting. However: the difference between my possible ‘projection’ and previous-continuing ones is that they have generally been oppressive (patriarchal, violent, colonial, etc.) while my figuration is closer to what a deity worthy of wonder and adoration should reasonably possess (love, justice, openness, etc.). Furthermore, my ‘projection’ is a good thing for the Earth: by loving a liberating God-dess, we ourselves may become better people transforming a disfigured world. Once again, whether one accepts this kind of figuration depends on one’s ability to think. What kind of deity should the thinking believer believe in? What kind of divinity should we adore? Should we love and desire a good God-dess or a devilish deity?

You do acknowledge that my figuration of thinking (open, discerning, progressive, etc.) is what “ultimately grounds or justifies” my figuration of deity, and you state that it “sounds promising”, but ask “why hold that this way of thinking coheres best with your conception of divinity? Perhaps it coheres better with atheism, or some traditional form of theism”. Another good question followed by valid possibilities. To begin with, an open, progressive thinking also coheres with atheism – that’s why atheism must be considered a possibility. Nothing more – and nothing less. However, this type of thinking allows for a variety of possibilities – it’s a very hospitable logic, with the condition that each path or possibility (theism/atheism/etc.) doesn’t try to kill the other. As long as reasonable theisms and atheisms never forget that they are, for the time being, possibilities (nothing more – and nothing less), then various paths can cohere and co-habitate. Now, why does my figuration of divinity cohere ‘best’ (a word I didn’t use, but perhaps I could) with this kind of thinking? Simple: the same values apply to both. Both faith and reason should be governed by thoughtful values (openness, progressiveness, etc.). This path ends up somewhere amazing: the ‘faith/reason’ binary collapses insofar as our faith can become more reasonable, and our reasoning more divine.