Deciphering the Divine Unintelligibility

The Sun Singer at sunset.

“The mystics endlessly repeat the same thing. It is always the myth of the lost tribal paradise, the hysterical refusal to carry the cross of civilization.”

     — Karl Popper

By Dan Hagen

I am a theological non-cognitivist.

That means I don't think the term “God” has any discernible, consistent meaning, so the whole enterprise of religious debate is just as pointless as the argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

In ordinary discourse, people mean several dozen completely different things by the term “God,” and usually switch meanings several times during the course of a conversation — sometimes honestly, sometimes dishonestly.

Theists like to switch their meaning of “God” in mid-argument, even in mid-sentence, so as each one of their definitions is exploded by argument they can dance away to another while pretending they haven’t.

They generally start by parading a fancy Aristotelian Unmoved Mover around and eventually sneak whatever tribal god their grandparents believed in through the back door.

Informally, I call myself a freethinker, meaning one who is free of religious dogma. I find the term “atheist” inadequate because the default position on religion should not be “theist.”

That fuzzy middle of religion supporters, inhabiting that vast but curiously featureless landscape between the freethinkers and the fundamentalists, resorts to vague, sentimental, impossible-to-pin-down statements about warm feelings that don’t contribute anything useful to the actual debate about the nature of reality.

Distinguishing between what is ACTUALLY TRUE and what is only METAPHORICALLY TRUE but is FACTUALLY FALSE is something they are always oddly reluctant to do. The distinction is not trivial. Metaphorically, you can soar above the tall buildings on the wings of imagination. Try it in reality, however, and this metaphor will very swiftly point you in the direction of being squashed flat.

I am sadly amused that religious people strain to put themselves through such mental and verbal contortions in an attempt to convince themselves they believe what obviously is not the case, that the universe is run by all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing beings who are invisible, intangible and inaudible, who never appear in public and do not take any discernible action in the world.

Freethinkers simply prefer not to believe things for which there is no evidence. That’s the insurmountable difficulty the religion pushers always have in these debates, and it's what makes them so frustrated and snippy. I sympathize. They’re trying to lift the dead weight of an immovable fact.

The assumption that religion is the basis of morality is, by the way, another strenuously spread bit of theological propaganda. That’s because people are always in danger of finding out that it isn’t true.

Fundamentalist Christians don’t obey God because they think he is good. They tremble before him because they think he is omnipotent. They do not call themselves “God-inspired” Christians, do they? They call themselves “God-fearing” Christians.

You wouldn’t call the cowering subjects of a tyrant “moral,” would you?

In the Book of Joshua, to take one example, God orders the Hebrews to slaughter every man, woman and child in the land of Canaan. What a moral inspiration that God is, eh?

Far from having any exclusive claim to morality, Judeo-Christian religion often has nothing to do with morality or even works against it, as during the Spanish Inquisition.

Humans have values not because their values are “divine,” but because of their natures as thinking mortal beings — as beings who live or die, together with their fellows, based on the rationality or irrationality of their choices.

THAT is the basis of morality, and it arises not from any ancient book of myths but from empathy, from the child’s recognition that other people can be hurt the way he can be hurt. From that beginning, we’ve filled whole libraries with philosophical explorations of how humans should live — ethics.

Organized religion remains dangerous precisely because it is based on the premise that everything important is already known, and even known without effort. In fact, the opposite is true.

Vast numbers of people no longer particularly care whether or not there are gods, as Davidson Loehr observed.  Even if they exist, they don’t seem able to do anything in the world. If they’re omnipotent, they appear to be indifferent to the small and large-scale wars, tragedies and slaughters around us. And if they’re impotent, who needs them?