And a further adaptation has been grafted on: it is impolite to ask about these matters. If you persist, you are likely to get a response along these lines: âGod can see you when youâre doing something evil in the dark, but He does not have eyelids, and never blinks, you silly rude person, and of course He can read your mind even when you are careful not to talk to yourself, but still He prefers you to pray to Him in words, and donât ask me how or why. These are mysteries we finite mortals will never understand.â People of all faiths have been taught that any such questioning is somehow insulting or demeaning to their faith, and must be an attempt to ridicule their views. What a fine protective screen this virus providesâpermitting it to shed the antibodies of skepticism effortlessly!
But it doesnât always work, and when the skepticism becomes more threatening, stronger measures can be invoked. One of the most effective is also one of the most transparent: the old diabolical lieâthe term comes from de Rougemont (1944), who speaks of âthe putative proclivity of âThe Father of Liesâ for appearing as his own opposite.â It is, almost literally, a trick with mirrors, and, like many good magic tricks, itâs so simple that itâs hard to believe it could ever work. (Novice magicians often have to steel themselves to perform tricks the first time in publicâit just doesnât seem possible that audiences will fall for these, but they do.) If I were designing a phony religion, Iâd surely include a version of this little gemâbut Iâd have a hard time saying it with a straight face:
If anybody ever raises questions or objections about our religion that you cannot answer, that person is almost certainly Satan. In fact, the more reasonable the person is, the more eager to engage you in open-minded and congenial discussion, the more sure you can be that youâre talking to Satan in disguise! Turn away! Do not listen! Itâs a trap!
What is particularly cute about this trick is that it is a perfect âwild card,â so lacking in content that any sect or creed or conspiracy can use it effectively. Communist cells can be warned that any criticism they encounter is almost sure to be the work of FBI infiltrators in disguise, and radical feminist discussion groups can squelch any unanswerable criticism by declaring it to be phallocentric propaganda being unwittingly spread by a brainwashed dupe of the evil patriarchy, and so forth. This all-purpose loyalty-enforcer is paranoia in a pill, sure to keep the critics muted if not silent. Did anyone invent this brilliant adaptation, or is it a wild meme that domesticated itself by attaching itself to whatever memes were competing for hosts in its neighborhood? Nobody knows, but now it is available for anybody to useâalthough, if this book has any success, its virulence should diminish as people begin to recognize it for what it is.
(A milder and more constructive response to relentless skepticism is the vigorous academic industry of theological discussion and research, very respectfully inquiring into the possible interpretations of the various creeds. This earnest intellectual exercise scratches the skeptical itch of those few people who are uncomfortable with the creeds they were taught as children, and is ignored by everybody else. Most people donât feel the need to examine the details of the religious propositions they profess.)
Mystery is declared to surround the various conceptions of God, but there is nothing mysterious about the process of transformation, which is clear for all to see and has been described (and often decried) by generations of would-be stewards of this important idea. Why donât the stewards just coin new terms for the revised conceptions and let go of the traditional terms along with the discarded conceptions? After all, we donât persist in the outmoded medical terminology of humors and apoplexy or insist on finding something in contemporary physics or chemistry to identify as phlogiston. Nobody has proposed that we have discovered the identity of élan vital (the secret ingredient that distinguishes living things from mere matter); itâs DNA (the vitalists just didnât have the right conception of it, but they knew there had to be something). Why do people insist on calling the Higher Power they believe in âGodâ? The answer is clear: the believers in the belief in God have appreciated that the continuity of professing requires continuity of nomenclature, that brand loyalty is a feature so valuable that it would be foolish to tamper with it. So, whatever other reforms you may want to institute, donât try to replace the word âGodâ (âJehovah,â âTheos,â âDeus,â âthe Almighty,â âOur Lord,â âAllahâ) when you tinker with your religion.6 In the beginning was the Word.
I have to say that it has worked pretty well, after a fashion. For a thousand years, roughly, weâve entertained a throng of variously deanthropomorphized, intellectualized concepts of God, all more or less peacefully coexisting in the minds of âbelievers.â Since everybody calls his or her version âGod,â there is something âwe can all agree aboutââwe all believe in God; weâre not atheists! But of course it doesnât work that well. If Lucy believes that Rock (Hudson) is to die for, and Desi believes that Rock (music) is to die for, they really donât agree on anything, do they? The problem is not new. Back in the eighteenth century, Hume had already decided that âour idea of a deityâ had shifted so much that the gods of antiquity simply didnât count, being too anthropomorphic:
To any one, who considers justly of the matter, it will appear, that the gods of all polytheists are not better than the elves and fairies of our ancestors, and merit as little any pious worship or veneration. These pretended religionists are really a kind of superstitious atheists, and acknowledge no being, that corresponds to our idea of a deity. No first principle of mind or thought: No supreme government and administration: No divine contrivance or intention in the fabric of the world. [1777, p. 33]
More recently, and chiding in the opposite direction, Stark and Finke (2000) express dismay at the âatheisticâ views of John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal bishop in Newark, whose God is not anthropomorphic enough. In his 1998 book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong dismisses the divinity of Jesus, declares the crucifixion âbarbaric,â and opines that the God of most traditional Christians is an ogre. Another eminent Episcopal cleric once confided to me that when he found out what some Mormons believed when they said they believed in God, he rather wished they didnât believe in God! Why wonât he say this from the pulpit? Because he doesnât want to let down the side. After all, there are lots of evil, âGodlessâ people out there, and it would never do to upset the fragile fiction that âwe are not atheistsâ (heaven forbid!).
2 God as intentional object
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
âPsalms 14:1 (also 53:1)
Belief in belief in God makes people reluctant to acknowledge the obvious: that much of the traditional lore about God is no more worthy of belief than the lore about Santa Claus or Wonder Woman. Curiously, itâs all right to laugh about it. Consider all the cartoons depicting God as a stern, bearded fellow sitting on a cloud with a pile of lightning bolts at his side, to say nothing of all the jokes, bawdy and clean, about various folks arriving in heaven and having one misadventure or another. This treasury of humor provokes hearty chuckles from all but the most stuffy puritans, but few are comfortable acknowledging just how far weâve come from the God of Genesis 2:21, who literally plucks a rib from Adam and closes up the flesh (with his fingers, one imagines) before sculpting Eve on the spot. In A Devilâs Chaplain Richard Dawkins (2003a), offers some sound adviceâbut knows in advance it will not be heeded, because people can see the punch line coming:
â¦modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. [p. 150]
The trouble is that, since this advice wonât b
e heeded, discussions of the existence of God tend to take place in a pious fog of indeterminate boundaries. If theists would be so kind as to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash before proceeding further, we atheists would know just which topics were still on the table, but, out of a mixture of caution, loyalty, and unwillingness to offend anyone âon their side,â theists typically decline to do this.7 Donât put all your eggs in one basket, I guess. This double standard is enabled if not actually licensed by a logical confusion that continues to defy resolution by philosophers who have worked on it: the problem of intentional objects.8 In a phrase (which will prove unsatisfactory, as we will soon see), intentional objects are the things somebody can think about.
Do I believe in witches? It all depends what you mean. If you mean evil-hearted spell-casting women who fly around supernaturally on broomsticks and wear black pointed hats, the answer is obvious: no, I no more believe in witches than I believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. If you mean people, both men and women, who practice Wicca, a popular New Age cult these days, the answer is equally obvious: yes, I believe in witches; they are no more supernatural than Girl Scouts or Rotarians. Do I believe these witches cast spells? Yes and no. They sincerely utter imprecations of various sorts, expecting to alter the world in various supernatural ways, but they are mistaken in thinking they succeed, though they may alter their own attitudes and behavior thereby. (If I give you the Evil Eye, you may become seriously unnerved, to the point of serious illness, but if so, that is because you are credulous, not because I have magical powers.) 9 So it all depends what you mean. And does it ever!
About forty years ago, in England, I saw a BBC news program in which nursery-school children were interviewed about Queen Elizabeth II. What did they know about her? The answers were charming: the Queen wore her crown while she âhooveredâ Buckingham Palace, sat on the throne when she watched telly, and in general behaved like a cross between Mum and the Queen of Hearts. This Queen Elizabeth II, the intentional object brought into existence (as an abstraction) by the consensus convictions of these children, was much more interesting and entertaining than the real woman. And a more potent political force! Are there, then, two distinct entities, the real woman and the imagined Queen, and if so, are there not millions or billions of distinct entitiesâthe Queen Elizabeth II believed in by teen-agers in Scotland, and the Queen Elizabeth II believed in by the staff at Windsor Castle, and my Queen Elizabeth II, and so on? Philosophers have argued vigorously for the better part of a century about how to accommodate such intentional objects into their ontologiesâtheir catalogues of the things that existâwith no emerging consensus. Another eminent Briton is Sherlock Holmes, who is often thought about even though he never existed at all. In one sense or another, there are both truths and falsehoods about such (mere) intentional objects: It is true that Sherlock Holmes (the intentional object created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) lived on Baker Street and smoked, and false that he had a bright-green nose. It is true that Pegasus had wings in addition to four ordinary horse legs, and false that President Truman once owned him and rode him to the White House from Missouri. But of course neither Sherlock Holmes nor Pegasus is or ever was real.
Some people may be under the mistaken impression that Sherlock Holmes actually existed and that Conan Doyleâs stories arenât fiction. These people believe in Sherlock Holmes in the strong sense (let us say). Others, known as âSherlockians,â devote their spare time to becoming Sherlock Holmes scholars, and can entertain one another with their encyclopedic knowledge of the Conan Doyle canon, without ever making the mistake of confusing fact with fiction. The most famous society of these scholars is the Baker Street Irregulars, named after the gang of street urchins that Holmes enlisted for various purposes over the years. Members of these societies (for there are many âSherlockianâ societies around the world) delight in knowing which train Holmes took from Paddington on May 12, but know full well that there simply is no fact to be learned about whether he faced forward or backward in the train, since Conan Doyle didnât specify it or anything that would imply it. They know that Holmes is a fictional character, but nevertheless they devote large parts of their lives to studying him, and are eager to explain why their love of Holmes is better justified than some other fanâs love of Perry Mason or Batman. They believe in Sherlock Holmes in the weak sense (let us say). They behave very much like the amateur scholars who devote their spare time to trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was, and an observer who didnât know that the Holmes stories are fiction whereas Jack the Ripper was a real murderer might naturally suppose that the Baker Street Irregulars were investigating a historical person.
It is quite possible for a mere intentional object like Sherlock Holmes to obsess people even when they know full well that it isnât real. So it is not surprising that such a thing (if itâs right, in the end, to call it a kind of thing at all) can dominate peopleâs lives when they believe in it in the strong sense, such as the people who spend fortunes hunting for the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. And whenever a real person, such as Queen Elizabeth II, dominates peopleâs lives, this domination is usually accomplished indirectly, by setting up a manifold of beliefs, giving people an intentional object that is featured in their thinking and the decisions they make. I canât hate my rival or love my neighbor without having a pretty clear and largely accurate set of beliefs that serve to pick this person out of the crowd so I can recognize, track, and interact effectively with him or her.
In most circumstances, the things we believe in are perfectly real, and the things that are real we believe in, so we can usually ignore the logical distinction between an intentional object (the object of belief) and the thing in the world that inspired/caused/ grounds/anchors the belief. Not always. The Morning Star turns out to be none other than the Evening Star. âTheyâ are not stars; âtheyâ are one and the same thingânamely, the planet Venus. One planet, two intentional objects? Usually the things that matter to us make themselves securely known to us in a variety of ways that permit us to track them through their trajectories, but other scenarios do occur. I might sneak around thwarting your projects, or, alternatively, giving you âgood luck,â dominating your life one way or another without your ever suspecting that I existed as a person or a thing or even a force in your life, but this is an unlikely possibility. In the main, things that make a difference in a personâs life figure in it as intentional objects one way or another, however misidentified or misconstrued. When misconstruals occur, problems arise about how to describe the situation. Suppose youâve been surreptitiously doing me good deeds for months. If I âthank my lucky starsâ when it is really you I should be thanking, it would misrepresent the situation to say that I believe in you and am grateful to you. Maybe I am a fool to say in my heart that it is only my lucky stars that I should thankâsaying, in other words, that there is nobody to thankâbut that is what I believe; there is no intentional object in this case to be identified as you.
Suppose instead that I was convinced that I did have a secret helper but that it wasnât youâit was Cameron Diaz. As I penned my thank-you notes to her, and thought lovingly about her, and marveled at her generosity to me, it would surely be misleading to say that you were the object of my gratitude, even though you were in fact the one who did the deeds that I am so grateful for. And then suppose I gradually began to suspect that I had been ignorant and mistaken, and eventually came to the correct realization that you were indeed the proper recipient of my gratitude. Wouldnât it be strange for me to put it this way: âNow I understand: you are Cameron Diaz!â It would indeed be strange; it would be falseâunless something else had happened in the interim. Suppose my acquaintances had become so used to my singing the praises of Cameron Diaz and her bountiful works that the term had come, to them and to me, to stand for whoever it was who was respons
ible for my joy. In that case, those syllables would no longer have their original use or meaning. The syllables âCameron Diaz,â purportedly a proper name of a real individual, would have been turnedâgradually and imperceptiblyâinto a sort of wild-card referring expression, the ânameâ of whoever (or whatever) is responsible forâ¦whatever it is I am grateful for. But, then, if the term were truly open-ended in this way, when I thank âmy lucky starsâ I am thanking exactly the same thing as when I thank âCameron Diazââand you do turn out to be my Cameron Diaz. The Morning Star turns out to be the Evening Star. (How to turn an atheist into a theist by just fooling around with the wordsâif âGodâ were just the name of whatever it is that produced all creatures great and small, then God might turn out to be the process of evolution by natural selection.)
Breaking the Spell Page 23