God Without Religion

by Michael Arnheim

  Conclusion

  Intolerance, therefore, is a feature not of monotheism but rather of creed religions as against communal religions. John Lennox’s special pleading on behalf of Christianity based on deaths inflicted by the Inquisition will just not stand up to scrutiny when the whole history of Christian intolerance against other Christians as well as against other religions is taken into account. Lennox would have been better advised to point to the undoubted growth in tolerance in Christianity — towards other Christians and non-Christians alike — especially since the mid-twentieth century. The reasons for this noteworthy development will be examined in the concluding chapter of this book.

  Review of Chapter Two

  “Religion kills”, Christopher Hitchens’s blanket assertion, is not justified. Though religious persecution and religious wars are undoubtedly to blame for a lot of deaths, in other cases religious labels are used in conflicts which are essentially political or economic rather than religious. Northern Ireland is a case in point, as is shown in Chapter 1.

  Richard Dawkins’s remark, “I regard Islam as one of the greatest evils in the world”, is another unjustifiable blanket condemnation, especially when it turned out that he had not read the Koran, an error which he then compounded by remarking, “You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”

  We then have the comical spectacle of Richard Dawkins chasing after an unremarkable one-page letter in the desperate hope of belatedly enlisting Albert Einstein to the atheist cause.

  Einstein specifically denied that he was an atheist and is on record as actually being “angry” with atheists who tried to quote him “for the support of such views”. A trawl through the evidence reveals that Einstein’s religious views were closest to deism.

  Jonathan Sacks builds an elaborate argument on the way a particular Biblical verse is translated. He rejects the usual English translation of Exodus 3:14 where God gives his name in Hebrew as “Ehyeh asher ehyeh”, which is usually translated into English as “I am who I am”. Sacks rejects this translation and substitutes a future tense translation, “I will be what I will be.” The reason that Sacks rejects the usual translation is (a) because he believes it is wrong, and (b) because he regards it as a Christian translation. In fact, Sacks is in error on both counts. The usual present tense translation “I am who I am” is not wrong, although Sacks’s preferred future tense translation is also correct. And the present tense translation is not specifically Christian but originates from the Septuagint translation of the Bible into Greek by Jewish scholars two centuries before the advent of Christianity. But Sacks then builds on these two erroneous premises the conclusion that the translation of this one verse reveals “the most profound difference” between Christian “left-brain” thinking and Jewish “right-brain” thinking. Besides the fact that the two premises on which this is based are incorrect, the identification of Jewish thinking with the right brain is itself a highly dubious proposition.

  Richard Swinburne’s claim that belief in the personal God of Christianity is the best explanation because it is the simplest will not stand up to scrutiny.

  The view “that there is a connection between monotheism and intolerance” is correct insofar as monotheistic creed religions have an intrinsic tendency to be discriminatory. But this is not true of communal religions that happen to be monotheistic. Judaism presents its own problems, which are considered in Chapter 5.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Two Types of Gods

  As we saw in Chapter 1, there is not just one type of God in whom one may believe but at least two types: a personal God and an impersonal God. Theism is the formal name for belief in a personal God, which is the mainstay of most conventional religions, and deism is belief in an impersonal God. In this chapter I show that deism is much simpler than theism and avoids the major problems associated with theism. I also show that the arguments in favour of deism are stronger than those in favour of either atheism or theism.

  There are many varieties of deism, but in general it is the belief in an impersonal God as the creator of the universe and of natural laws but who is not responsive to prayer, does not dole out rewards or punishments and is simply not involved in the day-to-day affairs of the world. Belief depends not on revelation or a leap of faith but simply on reason and observation of the natural world. Deism was put in a nutshell by Professor Martha C. Nussbaum: “Deists think of God as a rational causal principle but not as a personal judge and father.”104

  Some of the greatest minds of all time were deists, including Anaxagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, John Locke, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, James Watt, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Napoleon Bonaparte, Friedrich Schiller, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Mark Twain, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford and (in spite of Dawkins’s efforts — see Chapter 2) Albert Einstein — and possibly Charles Darwin himself, as we shall see later on in this chapter.105

  A close relation of deism is pantheism, which identifies God with nature or the universe. Famous pantheists include Heraclitus, Spinoza, Hegel, Goethe, Beethoven, Emerson, Walt Whitman, Gustav Mahler, Debussy, Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence — and Albert Einstein, who can also be classified as a deist. (See Chapter 2.)106

  Straddling as he does deism and pantheism, Einstein could possibly be classified as a believer in pandeism, a label indicating a hybrid blend of pantheism with deism, which was well described by Raphael Lataster in 2013: “This one god could be of the deistic or pantheistic sort. Deism might be superior in explaining why God has seemingly left us to our own devices and pantheism could be the more logical option as it fits well with the ontological argument’s ‘maximally-great entity’ and doesn’t rely on unproven concepts about ‘nothing’ (as in ‘creation out of nothing’). A mixture of the two, pandeism, could be the most likely God-concept of all.”107

  Another variant of deism is perhaps worth a passing mention, and that is “ceremonial deism”, a term used by the US Supreme Court to refer to the American national motto, “In God We Trust”, references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and in “The Star Spangled Banner”, and legal formulaic utterances such as “God save the United States and this honorable Court”. This awkward category of “ceremonial deism” is used by the US Supreme Court to exempt such usages from falling foul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If anything, these usages are in reality a reflection of theism rather than deism, but classifying them in that way would probably result in their abolition.108

  According to Dawkins: “Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.”109 Neither of these definitions is correct, but is this a tacit admission by Dawkins that atheism is not “sexy”? Despite the efforts of the atheists to rebrand deists and pantheists and enlist them in their own ranks, deism and pantheism are as far removed from atheism as they are from theism.

  Somewhere between all the beliefs in God and atheism comes agnosticism, or the view that the existence of any type of God is unknown or unknowable. The term “agnostic” was actually coined as a self-description by Thomas Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his dogged support of Darwinian evolution. There are many different shades of agnosticism, ranging from “agnostic theism” to “agnostic atheism”. “Agnostic theism” describes the position taken by those who do not claim to know whether there is a God but who nevertheless believe in the existence of a personal God. “Agnostic atheism”, on the other hand, is the position adopted by those who reject belief in God while claiming not to know whether there is a God or not.

  It is also perhaps worth mentioning polytheism, or belief in many gods. The religions of ancient Greece and Rome were of course polytheistic, as were most other religions of the ancient world. Among present-day religions, Hinduism is the chief representative of polytheism, although it also contains monotheistic elements. I shall not be devoting any separate discussion in this book to polytheism,
because it can generally be treated as belief either in personal gods (i.e. theism), in impersonal gods (i.e. deism), or in God as nature (i.e. pantheism).

  Comparison of Theism, Deism and Atheism

  Theism — Belief in a Personal God

  Theism is belief in a personal God, as found, among other religions, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But what exactly is a personal God? A “personal God” is so called because he (and personal Gods are most often identified as male) resembles a human being in having a capacity for love and other feelings (often including negative ones), endowed with supreme intelligence, who reveals himself occasionally to believers, while being at the same time supernatural, invisible and immortal — an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, who epitomises goodness and who, having created the universe, is receptive to prayer, doles out reward and punishment, performs miracles and is active in the day-to-day affairs of the world. Some religions, notably certain Christian denominations, display in their places of worship artistic representations of God, usually as an old man with a long flowing white beard, while Judaism, Islam and certain Christian Protestant churches regard any such representations as being contrary to the prohibition on “graven images” in the Ten Commandments.

  Problems with Belief in a Personal God

  Theism, or belief in a personal God, comes with a lot of baggage. Here are a few of the problems associated with belief in a personal God:

  Omniscience and omnipotence, which are both standard properties of a personal God, are mutually contradictory: Some clever-clever logicians long ago pointed out that if God knows everything, then he must already know what he himself is going to do in the future, which ties his hands as far as his future actions are concerned. So he can’t be omnipotent as well as omniscient. Dawkins gleefully seizes on this point in The God Delusion.110 But the real point (not mentioned by Dawkins) is that, if God is truly omniscient, everything, including all human actions, are predestined or predetermined forever. The famous church father and “doctor of the Church” Augustine of Hippo (354–430) taught that only some people (later known as the “elect”) are predestined to salvation, which depends purely on God’s “grace” and not on the individuals’ actions, merit or will. At the same time Augustine taught that human beings have free will. These two contradictory doctrines were reconciled by teaching that although individuals have the freedom to choose their destiny, God knows in advance how they will choose. The doctrine of predestination was taken to its logical conclusion by the Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509–64), and predestination remains one of the key tenets of Calvinist theology to this day. Calvin’s teachings were used by his followers to resist rulers who were seen as ungodly. A good example was the hostility towards the staunchly Catholic Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87) on the part of John Knox (c. 1514–72) and Christopher Goodman (1520–1603). The way this was justified in Calvinist theology was as follows: whoever your ruler is owes his position to the will of God; but if that ruler acts in an ungodly manner he loses his divine right and must be resisted. The doctrine of predestination is open to attack on many fronts. Calvin’s version of it was early on attacked on the ground that it made God the author of sin. Belief in the “elect” is certainly exclusive and arrogant, and in practice meant that those who believed in this doctrine assumed that they were the “elect” of God and everyone else was damned. Needless to say, there is no evidence of predestination, or even of any of the less extreme versions of divine omniscience or omnipotence.

  Revelation: Most conventional religions rely to greater or lesser extent on a supposedly sacred text or scriptures which supposedly contain divine revelations. The best examples are the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Book of Mormon and the Koran. There are wide variations in the degree of literalness with which these sacred texts are read. These range, for example, from the literal acceptance by some fundamentalist Jewish and Christian “Young Earth Creationists” of the account in Genesis that the universe was created in six days — all the way over to the liberal theology of certain Anglican clerics like Bishop John Robinson, who in his book Honest to God (1963) rejected the idea of “God up there” and “God out there” alike, in favour of the existentialist theological view of Paul Tillich as “God as the ground of our being”. Most conventional religions believe that God has revealed himself to individuals, either in response to prayer or supplication, or at least to specific individuals in history, such as Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus or Muhammad.

  Dogmas: As is shown in Chapter 4, there are essentially two kinds of theistic religions: communal religions and creed religions. Creed religions like Christianity and Islam are based on a set of beliefs or a confession of faith, in some cases involving acceptance of numerous dogmas. Communal religions, by contrast, tend to have only vague beliefs, if any.

  The problem of prayer: Prayer figures very prominently in most religions, and believers are commonly given the impression that their prayers will be answered. The cynical retort that all prayers are answered but that sometimes the answer is “No” will be unlikely to satisfy many devout believers. Some religions actually stick their necks out so far as to guarantee a favourable response to prayer. A good example of this is the Roman Catholic “Never Fail Novena”, a definite promise contained in small slips of paper left lying around in church pews. The instruction on the paper is simple: “Say 9 Hail Marys. Say this prayer for 9 days in succession and leave 2 copies of it in church each day. On the 8th or 9th day your request will be granted. THIS NOVENA HAS NEVER FAILED.” (From a sample actually found in New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in April 2013.) This remarkable promise is available to Catholics in America at the present time. But what happens if the worshipper’s request is not granted? Most religions have a couple of other options to which they can resort, the chief one being to kick the whole problem upstairs, to an afterlife with heaven and hell, with or without purgatory in between (see below).

  The problem of reward and punishment: Religion generally tries to inculcate moral values, and believers are commonly given the impression that they will be rewarded if they are “good” and punished if they are “bad”. However, it doesn’t take long for people to realise that that’s not the way the world works in reality. Hence the modern cynical expression, “No good deed goes unpunished.” The absence of any obvious correlation between human conduct and reward is a major problem for most religions. There are several alternative ways that religions can defuse the issue. In Christianity, divine grace in return for faith is the key to salvation: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”111 A Protestant Christian solution is “justification by faith alone” as distinct from the Roman Catholic doctrine of “justification by faith and works”. The Protestant Reformation was sparked off by Martin Luther’s famous attack in 1517 on the sale of “indulgences” by Johann Tetzel on behalf of Pope Leo X, with the slogan roughly translated into English as: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul into heaven springs.”112 Indulgences are still awarded, in accordance with the Papal bull Indulgentiarum doctrina issued by Pope Paul VI in 1967, but now only in return for “the most important prayers and works of piety, charity and penance”.113

  Another solution, found for example in Judaism, is through repentance: believers are told that, however much they may have sinned, the slate will be wiped clean if they repent. But the favourite religious solution is to promise believers that their reward or punishment will come in the afterlife.

  The problem of evil and suffering: If God is good and all-powerful, how can he allow evil to exist and flourish? The alternatives are either that God is the author of the evil, or that he allows it to exist, or that God is opposed to evil but cannot prevent the Devil, Satan or some other agency from creating and sustaining it. The Christian theologian and philosopher Richard Swinburne got himself badly gored on the horns of this dilemma in regard to the holocaust. “I certainl
y did not attempt to justify the very wicked conduct of the Nazis,” writes Swinburne, “but I did and do attempt to justify God’s non-interference.”114 But, if God was powerless to prevent the holocaust, then he can’t be omnipotent, and if God deliberately allowed the holocaust to take place, then he must surely be thought of as being himself at least partly responsible for it.

  Miracles: Religions all too often pin their faith in God not on the basis of the regularity and harmony of nature but on miracles, which for the most part are exceptions to the regular pattern and in a sense a suspension of the normal laws of nature. Examples can be multiplied. There’s the miracle of the water turned to wine, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the tales of miraculous cures, the countless weeping statues and of course the Shroud of Turin. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) penned a famous attack on miracles in Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding published in 1748. Hume’s argument is based on his belief in empiricism, the theory that knowledge comes solely or primarily from sensory experience:

  [N]o testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish… [T]here is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good-sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves… It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation, and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.115