Theological non-cognitivism: The argument that religious terminology doesn’t make any frickin’ sense, and just clutters up language meaninglessly.
From Urban dictionary
The Wall St Journal (WSJ) has posted a couple of opinion pieces by two authors whose work I have previously enjoyed, Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong. At issue in the WSJ’s pieces is what is left for God to do, and indeed be, in our scientific world.
Armstrong‘s piece seems even more of a retreat while shouting “Victory!” than I expected. She writes:
Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
I find myself wondering if Armstrong’s “God” deserves the title. Is Armstrong’s “God” a god? Armstrong seems to recognise that, in general usage, “God” means something far more anthropomorphic. I have known people who seriously believe God intervenes in our universe in order to help them get consumer electronics at a good price, even sending angels to evade customs duty. People of this sort of religious belief will certainly regard Armstrong’s God as not their own. They will not regard it as a god at all.
It’s not just those who believe in this highly interventionist, human-centred God that will not recognise Armstrong’s God as theirs or, indeed, a god at all. If you listen to the more “philosophical” god botherers you find that while their god is certainly less anthropomorphic, it’s still a creator god who, in some sense, cares for and watches over us. When challenged, they’ll hide their god behind dense, impenetrable, meaningless arguments while saying we aren’t being sophisticated enough (see the Courtier’s Reply), but it’s still just a watered down version of the electronics-loving god above.
A little later in her piece, Armstrong writes:
Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.
Here, Armstrong almost gets it. Yes, religion is, in part, folk psychology. Shortly after this, Armstrong asserts that:
Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead.
Here I think Armstrong is wrong. While Armstrong’s logos appears in some cultures, the role of explaining the larger picture of the real world was one part of religion (Armstrong’s mythos): it was, in part, folk science. The stories are also shaped by folk psychology and folk ethics. Religion has existed and created its myths shaped by the uneasy tension between these three roles. Armstrong seems to know that the folk science aspect of religion is now dead and should be buried, but tries to excuse it by saying religion was never meant to fulfil that role. She seems desperate to cling to the folk psychology and folk ethics. We need religion for neither.
If Armstrong says “there is a God”, I have wonder what definitions she is using for “God” and “is”.
Dawkins, needless to say, espouses something far closer to my point of view. While he did not read Armstong’s piece before writing his own, but he seems to have known what was coming and addressed it fairly well:
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: “Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn’t matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism.”
Well, if that’s what floats your canoe, you’ll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.
Myself, I think it would be nice if we accepted that there are no gods, and hence there is no God. We should abandon the term because it just seems to confuse things. For whatever it is that Armstrong seems to be describing, let us come up with a better term. It isn’t a god, and calling it “God” just makes people think their bearded old fart in the sky with a good eye for flat screen TVs has some support from intelligentsia.
Read the WSJ’s articles at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html
Others seem to have thought much the same as me . Check out commentary from others at:
