Sorry, Wrong Question

Seriously, the atheists are on my nerves as much as the fundamentalists are these days.  Below is some crap that I've hashed out before, but it's a scab I can't help but pick.

In Anti-Oedipus, their infamous evisceration of Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari run across the problem of atheism, and connect it to theories of the unconscious shared by Jung and Freud even after their split:

If the unconscious is thought to express itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequation, but they have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious against myth, and that from the start substitutes mere expressive forms for the productive formations.  The basic question is never asked, but cast aside: Why return to myth?  Why take it as the model?  [. . .]  What we mean is that, starting from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most rigorous atheism.  Freud needs to deny the existence of God as much as Jung needs to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret the commonly postulated adequation.  But to render religion unconscious, or the unconscious religious, still amounts to injecting something religious into the unconscious. (Delueze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 57-58)

Freud is casting the unconscious at the level of the "edifying forces of myths and religions", so the function (D & G's "productive force") of the unconscious is essentially the same either way.  D & G continue

Let us recall Marx's great declaration: he who denies God only does a "secondary thing", for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, to put man in God's place (the transformation taken into account).  But the person who knows the place of man is entirely elsewhere does not even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning "an alien being, a being placed above man and nature": he no longer needs the mediation of myth, he no longer needs to go by way of this mediation - the negation of the existence of God - since he has attained those regions of the autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan - immediately atheist, immediately orphan. (Anti-Oedipus, p. 58)

Removing the human from the framework of myth "orphans" it, cuts it loose . . . and, when myth is re-inserted, it is no longer "natural", but must explain itself.  And again, it is this explanation that is important: the objective fact of God's existence is essentially irrelevant.

"Do you believe in God?"  Sorry, wrong question.  How about "Why do believe/not believe in God?"  That answer is going to get much more to the point.

God III

from the Tom Stoppard play, Jumpers:

George: To begin at the beginning --
Dotty (off. Panic): Help! Murder!
(George throws his manuscript on the desk and marches angrily to the door.)
(Off.) Oh, horror, horror, horror! Confusion now hath made its masterpiece . . . most sacrilegious murder! -- (Different voice.) Woe, alas! What, in our house?
(George, with his hand on the door handle, pauses. He returns to his desk and picks up his papers.)
George: To begin at the beginning, is God? (Pause.) I prefer to put the question in this form because to ask 'Does God exist?' appears to presuppose the existence of a God who may not, and I do not propose this late evening to follow my late friend Russell, to follow my good friend the late Lord Russell, necrophiliac rubbish! to begin at the beginning: is God? (He ponders a moment.) To ask, 'Is God?' appears to presuppose a Being who perhaps isn't . . . and thus is open to the same objection as the question , 'Does God exist?' . . . but until the difficulty is pointed out it does not have the same propensity to confuse language with meaning and to conjure up a God who may have any number of predicates including omniscience, perfection and four-wheel-drive but not, as it happens, existence. This confusion, which indicates only that language is an approximation of meaning and not a logical symbolism for it, began with Plato and was not ended by Bertrand Russell's theory that existence could only be asserted of descriptions and not of individuals, but I do not propose this evening to follow into the Theory of Descriptions my very old friend - now dead, of course - ach! - to follow into the Theory of Descriptions, the late Lord Russell --!
(He continues smoothly, improvising off-script.)
-- if I may so refer to an old friend for whom punctuality was no less a predicate than existence, and a good deal more so, he would have had us believe, though why we should believe that existence could be asserted of the author of 'Principia Mathematica' but not of Bertrand Russell, he never had time, despite his punctuality, not to mention his existence, to explain, very good, keep to the point, to begin at the beginning: is God? (To Secretary.) Leave a space. Secondly! A small number of men, by the exercise of their intellects and by the study of the works both of nature and of other intellects before them, have been able to argue coherently against the existence of God. A much larger number of men, by the exercise of their emotional and psychological states, have affirmed that this is the correct view. This view derives partly from what is known as common sense, whose virtue, uniquely among virtues, is that everybody has it, and partly from the mounting implausibility of a technological age as having divine origins - for a while a man might believe that the providence of sheep's wool was made in heaven, he finds it harder to believe the same of Terylene mixture. (He leans into the mirror intently.) Well, the tide is turning his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history . . . there is presumably a calender date - a moment - when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it. (And squeezes a blackhead in the imaginary mirror. The he straightens up and is the lecturer again.) It is now nearly fifty years since Professor Ramsay described theology and ethics as two subjects without an object, and yet, as though to defy reason, as though to flaunt a divine indestructibility, the question will not go away: is God?
Dotty (off): Rape!
George: And then again, I sometimes wonder whether the question ought not be, 'Are God?' Because it is to account for two quite unconnected mysteries that the human mind looks beyond humanity, and it is two of him that philosophy obligingly provides. There is, first, the God of Creation to account for existence, and second, the God of Goodness to account for moral values. I say they are unconnected because there is no logical reason why the fountainhead of goodness in the universe should necessarily have created the universe in the first place; nor is it necessary, on the other hand, that a Creator should care a tuppence about the behavior of his creations. Still, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, nothing is heard either of a God who created the universe and then washed his hands of it, or, alternatively, a God who merely took a comparatively recent interest in the chance product of universal gases. In practice, people admit moral values to give a point to the Creation. But when we place the existence of God within the discipline of a philosophical inquiry, we find these two independent mysteries: the how and the why of the overwhelming question: --
Dotty (off): Is anybody there?
George (pause): Perhaps all mystical experience is a form of coincidence. Or vice versa, of course.
(Dotty screams. It sounds in earnest. Of course, nothing can be seen.)
(Murmurs.) Wolf . . .
Dotty (off): Wolves! --Look out!
(George throws his manuscript down furiously.)
(Off.) Murder -- Rape -- Wolves!
(George opens his door and shouts at the enclosed Bedroom door.)
George: Dorothy, I will not have my work interrupted by these gratuitous acts of lupine delinquency!
(The Procession Music, which had been allowed to fade out, is brought up by the opening of the Study Door.)
And turn that thing down! --you are deliberately feigning an interest in brass band music to distract me from my lecture!
(He closes his door, and from behind it produces a quiver of arrows and a bow. These he brings downstage and places them on his desk.)
(Pleasantly.) Does, for the sake of argument, God, so to speak, exist?
(He returns upstage and finds an archery target, which he leans up against the upstage bookcase, resting on the day-bed.)
(To mirror.) My method of inquiry this evening into certain aspects of this hardy perennial may strike some of you as overly engaging, but experience has taught me that to attempt to sustain the attention of rival schools of academics by argument alone is tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket.
(He extracts an arrow from the quiver.)
Putting aside the God of Goodness, to whom we will return, and taking first the God of Creation - or to give him his chief philosophical raison d'etre, the First Cause - we see that a supernatural of divine origin is the logical consequence of the assumption that one thing leads to another, and that this series must have had a first term; that, if you like, though chickens and eggs may alternate back through the millennia, ultimately, we arrive at something which, while perhaps no longer resembling either a chicken or an egg, is nevertheless the first term of that series and can itself only be attributed to a First Cause - or to give it its theological sobriquet, God. How well founded is such an assumption? Could it be, for instance, that chickens and eggs have been succeeding each other in one form or another literally for ever? My old friend - Mathematicians are quick to point out that they are familiar with many series which have no first term - such as the series of proper fractions between nought and one. What, they ask, is the first, that is the smallest, of these fractions? A billionth? A trillionth? Obviously not: Cantor's proof that there is no greatest number ensures that there is no smallest fraction. There is no beginning. (With a certain relish he notches his arrow into the bowstring.) But it is precisely this notion of the infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.
(He is about to fire the arrow, but changes his mind, and turns back to the mirror.)
Furthermore, by a similar argument he showed that before reaching the half-way point, the arrow had to reach the quarter-mark, and before that the eighth, and before that the sixteenth, and so on, with the result, remembering Cantor's proof, that the arrow could not move at all!
Dotty (off): Fire!
(George fires, startled before he was ready, and the arrow disappears over the top of the wardrobe.)
Help - rescue - fire!
George (shouts furiously): Will you stop this childish nonsense! Thanks to you I have lost the element of surprise!

God II

If you say atheism is faith, what's your definition of science? Is the force of gravity a concept of faith or science? I suppose you hold that atheism is based on the absence of proof, as opposed the observation of proof. I somewhat buy that, but I think the practical difference is not that much. If I've understood your post correctly, then it seems you'd be fine with "intelligent design" taught inside a science class--but maybe I'm misunderstanding.

June 25, 2010 1:15 PM

This was Clark's response to my last post "God". I responded that he "took the bait" because these are subjects I rant about constantly, sometimes to the chagrin of my family and friends.

Easy question first: I do not think that intelligent design should be taught in science class because, as I understand it (and I could be wrong about this), intelligent design takes God as a given and moves from there. Until there is a proof for the existence of God that is internally consistent with the parameters of science, then discussions of God belong in religion class, not science class. Although, are the discussions of the existence of God really all that different from discussions of the existence of dark matter?

As a quick aside, I never understood why religious types were always so eager to attack science. Quite a few scientists are religious . . . I used to have an Irish priest as a professor who said "I absolutely believe in evolution: I believe the world evolves according to God's plan". The two are not mutually exclusive, they are just different ways of seeing.

The concept of gravity is a concept of science, which requires a commitment of faith, as does any thought system. It is not a question of "faith" or "science", as if science is fact and faith is fiction. Science, like any other way of seeing the world, is a system of metaphor. What makes science special is that it is limited to the quantitative, or that which can be measured. This limiting of science makes it a very utilitarian metaphor system and, as such, a very useful system in a concrete way. This does not, however, make science more "true" than any other system of thought: think about the ocean, example. I would argue that Moby Dick tells you as much about the ocean as the description H2O along with a list of its other constituent minerals and all the organisms that inhabit it. On the other hand, if you want to make a diving apparatus or a deep water drilling platform, you are much better off consulting depth charts, geological surveys, etc. . . . you are much better off using science to design your tools.*

Even conceding this understanding of science v. other metaphor systems, we still tend to think of science as objective fact, which is where Clark's citation of gravity comes in to play. If science dealt exclusively in objective fact, then a fact, once discovered, would be forever immutable. We know that is not the case. Science continually perfects its metaphor, as any good thought system would: for example, it has not been that long ago, relatively speaking, that a geocentric universe was scientific fact. Sure, we have an understanding of gravity that is clear to anyone with even a minimal understanding of science, but do we feel the earth spinning? No, we need to have a certain level of faith to commit to science as a system of metaphor. Someday, the theory of gravity may seem as quaint as "humors" in the blood. Even now, with concepts such as chaos theory, fractals, and the uncertainty principle, the complex metaphorical nature of science is becoming more apparent.

* * * * *

Yes indeed, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And yes, the difference is not much above the trivial when it comes to atheism.

It is conceivable to me (though perhaps not likely . . . but that is another discussion that I wouldn't even want to get into) that science may someday discover a creator. But even if science does discover a creator, God is outside of its realm. There are things that science is not designed to do, and crowning a God is one. In this sense, atheism cannot be based on science since it has nothing to do with science, since science neither proves nor disproves God.

I think it is perfectly logical to say "I see no evidence of a God, and therefore I believe there is no God." I think it is also perfectly logical to say "I see evidence of God in everything around me, and therefore I believe God exists." Like I said, neither statement is particularly interesting to me in and of itself. What is interesting is what actions are enacted on behalf of those beliefs. Given the huge destructive power that religion has demonstrated on the world stage, I tend to be sympathetic to atheism, even if I am not an atheist.

And yet, we have to be aware that atheism has its pitfalls as well: it is not accidental that all this Randian Objectivist bullshit has atheism at its core. And as much as the atheist would like to use science to escape the mythology of theism, the objective fallacy that underlies scientific positivism has a Western monotheistic model at its core - "one truth, one law, one word, one God".

All of which comes down to my fundamental problem with atheism: atheism, being solely defined by religious principles (even if in the negative), is just another religion. And not a very interesting one at that.

__________

* Though perhaps an understanding of Moby Dick (specifically, its fundamental hubris motif) would have been useful to BP and the other operators of the Horizon platform.

God

Anyone even remotely versed in current theories of knowledge is aware of the difficulty of knowing anything, objectively speaking. For this reason, I become impatient with the "scientific" arguments against the existence of God: it is nothing but arrogance to declaim that "God does not exist" and expect that to be understood in any definitively factual way. For that reason, atheism is as much a leap of faith as theism, and should be understood and treated as such.

Again, via Nietzsche, the important questions: what is the root force of this faith? What are the implications of these beliefs?

Of course, it should be assumed that whenever someone says "There is no God" that he is actually saying "I believe there is no God". Positivism is its own destruction.

All that said, I've got no problems with atheism . . . as long as it understands itself as faith.

*****

I still read the Bible occasionally . . . though, after 12 years in Catholic schools, I usually feel there are a lot of other things to catch up on. I don't object to the idea of God, it is just my current belief that the question of his existence is uninteresting and irrelevant. I did not leave the Catholic Church because of some crisis of faith (that came before I actually left), I left it because I object to its political structure.*

I do believe that the Christian God we see often in the Bible (the "jealous God") is worthy of our rebellion. It occurs to me that the behavior described therein would not be tolerated from a human being.**

I've been thinking about Buddhism lately.

__________
* Incidentally, I believe the answer to the Church's current problems with pedophilia is not to allow priests to get married, theoretically allowing them some sort of sexual release (since when is marriage, or any kind of sexual relations between adults, a solution for pedophilia?). The best answer would be to ordain women and let them get into the power structure: if women had been in the power structure when the problems started to surface, there is good reason to believe that the cover-ups would have been nipped in the bud.

** I want to write on this more, but not before I revisit C. G. Jung's Answer to Job.