The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (42 page)

Kriegman is joking; Dale prefers him zealous, evangelical on behalf of nonbelief. Esther has vanished from the archway. New guests keep arriving: Noreen Davis, the black receptionist who so smilingly gave him those forms seven months ago, with her bald co-worker in the Divinity School front office, and somebody who looks like Amy Eubank but can’t be, his recognition apparatus must be out of whack. He masochistically asks Kriegman, “How about the origin of life? Those odds are pretty impossible, too. I mean, to get a self-replicating organism with its own energy system.”

Kriegman snorts; he twists his face downward as if suddenly very shy; his whole body beneath its garland, in its dirty corduroy jacket with patched elbows and loose buttons, appears to melt and then to straighten again into a bearing almost military. “Now that just happens to be right up my alley,” he tells Dale. “That other stuff was just glorified bullshit, way out of my field, I don’t know what the hell a Borel set of points are. But I happen to know
exactly
how life arose; it’s brand-new news, at least to the average layman like yourself. Clay. Clay is the answer. Crystal formation in fine clays provided the template, the scaffolding, for the organic compounds and the primitive forms of life. All life did, you see, was take over the phenotype that crystalline clays had evolved on their own, the genetic pass-down factor being entirely controlled by the crystal growth and epitaxy, and the mutation factor deriving from crystal defects, which supply, you don’t need me to tell you, the stable alternative configurations you need for information storage. So, you’re going to ask, where’s the evolution? Picture the pore space of a sandstone, young fella. Every rainstorm, all sorts of mineral solutions are percolating through. Various types of replicating crystals are present, each reproducing its characteristic defects. Some fit together so tightly they form an impervious plug: this is no good. Others are so loose they’re washed away when the rains come: this is no good either. But a third type both hangs in there and lets the geochemical solutions, let’s even call them nutrients, wash through: this is good. This type of crystal multiplies and grows. It
grows.
Now in that sandstone pore you have a sticky, permeable paste that replicates itself. You have a prototype of life.” Kriegman takes a long swallow of my Almaden and smacks his lips. A half-empty glass sits abandoned on the walnut end table beside the red settee, and my beloved neighbor deftly swaps it with his own, emptied glass.

“But—” Dale says, expecting to be interrupted. “But, you’re going to say, how about us? How were the organic molecules introduced? And why? Well, not to get too technical, some of the amino acids, di- and tricarboxylic acids, make some metal ions, like aluminum, more soluble. This gives us a proto-enzyme. Others, like the polyphosphates, are especially adhesive, which, like I say, has survival value in this prezoic world we’re trying to picture. Heterocyclic bases like adenine have a tendency to stick
between
the layers of clay; pretty soon, relatively speaking, you’re going to get some RNA-like polymer, with its negatively charged backbone, interacting with the edges of clay particles, which tend to bear a positive charge.
Then
—listen, I know I’m boring the pants off you, I can see from your eyes you’re dying to mix it up with somebody over my shoulder, maybe one of my girls. Miriam’s the one you might take a shine to, if you don’t mind a little Sufi propaganda; it’s the no-alcohol part of it that I couldn’t hack. Then, as I was saying, once you’ve got something like RNA in
not
the primordial soup this time—nobody in the know ever was too comfortable with that crackbrained theory: too—what’s the word?—soupy—but a nice crisp paste of clay genes, organic replication is right around the corner, first as a subsystem, a kind of optional extra parallel with the crystal growth, and then taking over with that gene swap I mentioned earlier, and the clay genes falling away, since the organic molecules, mostly carbon, can do the job better, once they’re established. Believe me, pal, it fills a lot of theoretical holes. Nothing to matter, dead matter to life, smooth as silk. God? Forget the old bluffer.”

(a) The Challenge of Nihilism

We may approach our conclusion by considering Hans Küng’s massive work,
Does God Exist?
1
Subtitled “An Answer for Today,” this book not only brings together many lines of thought that bear upon this question, but also sets out to interpret our whole present moral and intellectual situation. It displays a fantastic wealth of learning; it is also extremely diffuse. Time and again after raising an issue Küng will slightly change the subject, and often when we need an argument he gives us a quotation, a report of the views of yet another thinker, or even a fragment of biography. I think he is also unduly concerned with contemporary relevance, and is liable to tell us that some statement or argument is out of date, when all that matters is whether it is true or false, sound or unsound. Nevertheless, as we shall find, there is a main connecting thread of argument, and his final answer, at least, is explicit(p. 702):

After the difficult passage through the history of the modern age from the time of Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Hegel, considering in detail the objections raised in the critique of religion by Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, seriously confronting Nietzsche’s nihilism, seeking the reason for our fundamental trust and the answer in trust in God, in comparing finally the alternatives of the Eastern religions, entering also into the question “Who is God?” and of the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ: after all this, it will be understood why the question “Does God exist?” can now be answered by a clear, convinced Yes, justifiable at the bar of critical reason.

However, the substance of his discussion is far less satisfactory. One crucial question is whether his final “Yes” is to the god of traditional theism or to some “replacement for God”; but the answer to this question is far from clear. For example, in his
Interim Results II: Theses on secularity and historicity of God
we find this (pp. 185–186):

God is not a supramundane being above the clouds, in the physical heaven. The naive, anthropomorphic idea is obsolete…For man’s being and action, this means that God is not an almighty, absolute ruler exercising unlimited power just as he chooses over world and man.

God is not an extramundane being, beyond the stars, in the metaphysical heaven. The rationalistic-deistic idea is obsolete…For man’s being and action, this means that God is not now—so to speak—a constitutionally reigning monarch who is bound, for his part, by a constitution based on natural and moral law and who has largely retired from the concrete life of the world and man.

God is in this world, and this world is in God. There must be a uniform understanding of reality. God is not only a (supreme) finite…alongside finite things. He is in fact the infinite in the finite, transcendence in immanence, the absolute in the relative. It is precisely as the absolute that God can enter into a relationship with the world of man…God is therefore the absolute who includes and creates relativity, who, precisely as free, makes possible and actualizes relationship: God as the absolute-relative, here-hereafter, transcendent-immanent, all-embracing and all-permeating most real reality in the heart of things, in man, in the history of mankind, in the world…For man’s being and action, this means that God is the close-distant, secular-nonsecular God, who precisely as sustaining, upholding us in all life and movement, failure and falling, is also always present and encompassing us.

And, after rejecting both the “Greek-metaphysical” and the “medieval-metaphysical” concepts of God, he adds (Chapter 26):

God is the living God, always the selfsame, dynamically actual and continually active in history. Precisely as the eternally perfect, he is free to seize the “possibility” of becoming historical…. For man’s being and action, this means that God is the living God who in all his indisposability and freedom knows and loves man, acts, moves, and attracts in man’s history.

Later, for comparison with Eastern religions, he reports and seems to endorse “the Western tradition of a negative theology from Pseudo-Dionysius to Heidegger”: (pp. 601–602):

God cannot be grasped in any concept, cannot be fully expressed in any statement, cannot be defined in any definition: he is the incomprehensible, inexpressible, indefinable.

Neither does the concept of being embrace him…he is not an existent: he transcends everything…but…he is not outside all that is; inherent in the world and man, he determines their being from within…

In God therefore transcendence and immanence coincide…Before God, all talk emerges from listening silence and leads to speaking silence.

Later again, in discussing “the God of the Bible,” he says (p. 632):

God is not a person as man is a person. The all-embracing and all-penetrating is never an object that man can view from a distance in order to make statements about it. The primal ground, primal support and primal goal of all reality…is not an individual person among other persons, is not a superman or superego.

But also (p. 633):

A God who founds personality cannot himself be nonpersonal…God is not neuter, not an “it,” but a God of men…He is spirit in creative freedom, the primordial identity of justice and love, one who faces me as founding and embracing all interhuman personality…. It will be better to call the most real reality not personal or impersonal but…transpersonal or suprapersonal.

But, despite all this, Küng also accepts in some sense the God of the Bible who, he says, is wholly and entirely essentially a “
God with a human face
” (p. 666). It is “overhasty” to dissociate the God of the philosophers from the God of the Bible, but also “superficial” simply to harmonize them. Rather, we should “
see the relationship in a truly dialectical way. In the God of the Bible, the God of the philosophers is the best, threefold sense of the Hegelian term
“sublated” (aufgehoben)—at one and the same time affirmed, negated, and transcended.” What is more, he “venture[s] without hesitation to declare:
Credo in Jesum Christum, filium Dei unigenitum
” (I believe in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God) and “can confidently say even now:
Credo in Spiritum Sanctum
” (I believe in the Holy Spirit) (pp. 688, 699). That is, for all the contrary appearances, he affirms his own orthodoxy.

Küng is obviously fond of having it all ways at once. This is further illustrated by his remarks about miracles (pp. 650–651). Miracles recorded in the Bible “cannot be proved historically to be violations of the laws of nature”; a miracle is merely “everything that arouses man’s wonder,” not necessarily a divine intervention violating natural law. The miracle stories are “lighthearted popular narratives intended to provoke admiring faith.” (If so, we may comment, they have no tendency to support any kind of supernaturalism or theism.) Yet “no one who links belief in God with miracles is to be disturbed in his religious feelings. The sole aim here is to provide a helpful answer to modern man for whom miracles are a hindrance to his belief in God.” That is, if your belief in God is supported by miracles, Küng will endorse them for you; but if you find them an obstacle to belief, he will explain them away! Similarly he quotes with approval Bultmann’s remark: “By faith I can understand an idea or a decision as a divine inspiration, without detaching the idea or decision from its link with its psychological justification” (p. 653).

One main strand in Küng’s thinking brings him close to Hume’s Demea, who stands for an infinite and incomprehensible god against the anthropomorphism of Cleanthes. But then we should recall how Hume uses Demea’s view to prepare the way for Philo’s skepticism. A god as indescribable and indeterminate as the one Küng seems to offer provides no purchase for reasoning, nothing of which argument can take hold in order to support the thesis that such a god exists.

Nevertheless, Küng claims to have given an argument. As we saw, he says that his “Yes” is “justifiable at the bar of critical reason.” Against such writers as Norman Malcolm and D. Z. Phillips, he says firmly that “the question of truth cannot be avoided. And this truth can be tested by experience, as we shall see, by indirect verification through the experience of reality” (p. 505). And again (p. 528):

No, theology cannot evade the demands for confirmation of belief in God:
Not a blind, but a
justifiable belief:
a person should not be abused, but convinced by arguments, so that he can make a responsible decision of faith. Not a belief devoid of reality, but a belief related to reality.

Part of his case consists of his replies to the various arguments for atheism, essentially various proposed natural histories of religion. As we saw there, despite the weaknesses of some oversimplified theories, a satisfactory natural history of religion can be outlined. Küng’s criticisms come in the end to no more than what we have conceded and stressed, that such an explanation of religious beliefs is not a primary argument against their truth. He still needs a positive argument for theism; and indeed he tries to give one.

He concedes (p. 533) that “There is no direct experience of God.” Equally he explicitly rejects (though for inadequately stated reasons) the cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs (pp. 534–535). But he says that though “the
probative character of the proofs of God is finished
today,” yet their “non-demonstrable content” remains important. For the ontological proof, he offers only the (deplorable) suggestion that it should be “understood less as a proof than as an expression of trusting faith”; but, as we shall see, he really uses the cosmological and teleological arguments in an altered form—indeed, in a form that has some resemblance to Swinburne’s, in that he proposes that “belief in God is to be verified but not proved” (p. 536). Küng, however, combines this with echoes both of the moral proofs and of the will to believe:
“an inductive lead does not seem impossible, attempting to throw light on the experience of uncertain reality, which is accessible to each and everyone, in order thus—as it were, by way of “practical reason,” of the “ought,” or (better) of the “whole man’—to confront man as thinking and acting with a rationally justifiable decision that goes beyond pure reason and demands the whole person
.” Since his argument thus brings together several different strands, we may be able to use discussion of it to introduce the fulfillment of the undertaking…not merely to examine separately the various arguments for the existence of a god, but also to consider their combined effect, and to weigh them together against the various arguments on the other side, before reaching our final conclusion. This conclusion will be reached in section (b) below.

For Küng the question is not whether we can or cannot advance from an already established knowledge of the natural world, or of consciousness, or of morality, to further, specifically theistic, hypotheses or conclusions. His strategy is rather to argue that in present day thought rationality, both speculative and practical, is threatened along with theism by a pervasive tendency to nihilism. This nihilism, of which he finds the most powerful exponent in Nietzsche, is summed up as the denial of the three classical transcendentals: there is no unity, no truth, no goodness. Man deludes himself in thinking he has found any totality, system, or organization in events; he has sought a meaning in events that is not there; there is no absolute nature of things nor a “thing-in-itself”; the world is valueless and purposeless. Nihilism presents itself “as insight into the nothingness, contradictoriness, meaninglessness, worthlessness, of reality” (Chapter 44).

Küng insists that “
The thoroughgoing uncertainty of reality itself makes nihilism possible, whether in practical life…or in philosophical or unphilosophical reflection.
” Moreover, it is irrefutable: “
There is no rationally conclusive argument against the possibility of nihilism. It is indeed at least possible that this human life, in the last resort, is meaningless, that chance, blind fate, chaos, absurdity and illusion rule the world
” (Chapter 44). On the other hand, nihilism is not provable. It is not
a priori
impossible that “
in the last resort, everything is nevertheless identical, meaningful, valuable, real
” (Chapter 44). Consequently the basic question is, “Can nihilism be overcome, and, if so, how?” (Chapter 44).

The fundamental alternative, Küng says, is between trust and mistrust, “in which I stake myself without security or guarantee…either I regard reality…as trustworthy and reliable—or not”—a choice which he explicitly compares with Pascal’s wager (Chapter 44). Fundamental trust, he adds, is natural to man, it makes us “open to reality,” and “
The Yes can be consistently maintained in practice,
” whereas the opposite of each of these holds for fundamental distrust (pp. 443–446). There is a
“way of critical rationality
” which is ‘
a middle way between an irrational ‘uncritical dogmatism’ and a ‘critical rationalism’ that also, in the last resort, rests on irrational foundations
”; it is a “
completely
reasonable
risk, which, however, always remains a risk
” (Chapter 44).

So far so good, though Küng has rather exaggerated the threat. That there is
some
reality is beyond doubt. The extreme of nihilism would be to deny that reality is discoverable or understandable; but there is no serious case for this denial. Küng differentiates the critical rationality which he defends from the “critical rationalism” which he rejects (and which he finds, perhaps mistakenly, in Karl Popper and Hans Albert), on the ground that the latter dispenses, as the former does not, with any critical examination of the foundations of our knowledge and so involves an irrational faith in reason. We can agree that nothing is to be exempt from criticism, not even the critical method itself, though of course not everything can be criticized at once: while we are examining any one issue, we must take various other things for granted. This precludes the attainment of certainty, and it should exclude the search for certainty. But there is no great mystery about this, nor any great modernity. Some of the essential points…were made by William James in defence of a fallibilist, experimental, but optimistic and risk-taking empiricism. As James says, a risk which gives us our only chance of discovering the truth, or even approaching it, is indeed a reasonable risk.