Review of “The Experience of God” (Part 2)

Okay, I kinda lied yesterday, saying that there’d be two parts, because I’m adding a third. This one is going to take on the specific comments from Coyne about how the “Ground of Being” God isn’t, in fact, the God of the Folk, the one that the ordinary person believes in, and the distinction between the Sophisticated God and the Folk God that he and other Gnu Atheists rely on so much.

If you take nothing else from this book, you should take the idea that, yes, indeed, God in all of the major traditions has never been a simple “Being”. God has indeed never been a being just like us, only better in all ways. We’ve always considered God to be something transcendental, something special, something that we can only understand through analogy to us instead of being a progression from us. We’ve never thought that if we tried really, really hard, ate all of our vegetables, and evolved in just right way that we would, one day, turn into Gods ourselves. Sure, science fiction tropes loved to hint at that, but in terms of religion we never really believed that. But in order to think about God, we had to make analogies, and so we made arguments about God and about proofs of God’s existence through an analogy to ourselves. And one of Hart’s better arguments is that a lot of arguments against and for the existence of God are arguments that take the analogy too far, and treat the analogy as the reality … in short, arguments that treat God as us, only better.

We can see this clearly in arguments like Dawkins’ “God must be more complex than we are to do what He does”. One can easily see that that sort of argument clearly relies on God being just like us, only better, and if we have to be complex to do our things, God has to be more complex than us. But that assumes that God is indeed just like us, only better. But God is completely different from us, in a very transcendent way. There are similarities by analogy, but you can’t win the argument by assuming that the analogy is the reality. And many other Gnu Atheist arguments do that as well. But Hart points out that it isn’t only atheists that do that, but also theists, and cites the Ontological Argument — rightly, in my opinion — as an argument that at least risks making the same mistake. By stripping away the transcendental portions of God, God is turned into something that is easier to relate to and to argue about … but also something that is easier to refute or to point out contradictions in. In their attempt to make God more amenable to scientific or mechanical proof, many theists seem to have made God into something like us, just another part of the world, and so something that we can indeed dismiss as easily as we’d dismiss unicorns and leprechauns. But it is certainly reasonable to note that this takes away from God what critically makes God, well, God, and so a proof or refutation of God as one of us is proving or refuting the wrong God, the sort of God that no one actually does believe in but the sort of God that we use as an analogy to try to wrap our heads around the transcendental concept that we are really talking about.

So, yes, Hart is right that Gnu Atheists are going after the sort of God that no one actually believes in, and is right to note that they aren’t alone, and that many good philosophers and theologians are also talking about the sort of God that no one actually believes in. We mistake the analogy for the reality, and that confuses us. We may not need to go right back to the God of classical theism, but we do need to recall that God is transcendental, and is not just us, only better.

Tags: Examining Sophisticated Theology