Armstrong's answer to the new atheists: Apophaticism

[BurtWorm]

This is a new word to me, but I remember being turned way on by the concept when I was actively mystified by God.

From a review at truthdig by Troy Jollimore of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God (my favorite point bolded below):

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/print/troy_jollimore_on_karen_armstrongs_the_case_for_god_20091203/

...

Throughout the book Armstrong frequently indicates an attraction to apophaticism, which she sees as promising a response to this worry. Apophaticism, as she understands it, claims that God is ineffable and that talk about God literally has no content at all. Since God transcends all human attempts at understanding, humans cannot think or say anything meaningful about God:

The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God—conceived as a powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable—is a recent phenomenon. It was born in a more optimistic time than our own and reflects the firm expectation that scientific rationality could bring the apparently inexplicable aspects of life under the control of reason. <…> We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge in a facile theology that says—as some have tried to say—that God knows what he is doing, that he has a secret plan that we cannot fathom, or that suffering gives men and women the opportunity to practice heroic virtue. A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter the cloud of unknowing.


This rejection of the theistic God, and acknowledgment that the problem of evil cannot be swept away through theodicy, might sound like music to atheists’ ears. And what could any skeptic find objectionable about revelation once we accept Maximus’ view that “<p>aradoxical as it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God”? Surely if this view were widely accepted the most serious problems with religion would simply dissipate. Would people who admitted that they “knew nothing about” God’s will support laws to prevent “unholy” same-sex marriages? Would people who saw God as “that mystery, which defies description” be moved to reject Darwinian views of evolution, contra all the available evidence?

But rather than characterizing such a position as a significant concession to the new atheists, Armstrong insists on continuing to regard them as her primary opponents. Moreover, she is unable to hold herself consistently to her own apophatic view. Indeed, passages like the following, in which she relates with apparent approval the reasoning of Athanasius, suggest that on her understanding the apophatic position, rather than discouraging metaphysical speculation, in fact licenses and encourages it:

It was only because we had no idea what God was that we could say that God had been in the man Jesus. It was also impossible to say that God’s substance was not in Christ, because we could not identify the ousia of God; it lay completely beyond our ken, so we did not know what we were denying.

In other words, it is precisely our lack of knowledge of God that enables us to say, well, pretty much whatever we want about God—except, of course, that God was not in Christ (but only an atheist or heathen would want to say that anyway). This is mysticism and metaphysical hand-waving raised to a truly objectionable level. If you do not know what you are denying then you also do not know what you are asserting; our inability to conceptualize cannot, on the one hand, prevent skeptics from denying Christ’s divinity while at the same time allowing the faithful to assert it.

Armstrong’s apophaticist’s disavowal of God thus appears to be a conceptual Trojan horse—a sop to the skeptic whose real intent is to permit religious speculation to go on as before, unchecked by rational criticism and debate. The strategy reduces to saying “God isn’t this, God isn’t that” without ever giving a positive account of what God is, while still regarding oneself as justified in talking about and orienting one’s life around God. This is like the debater who responds to every objection by insisting “Well that’s not what I meant” without ever managing to say what he does mean.

Ultimately it is doubtful that apophaticism can be made to work. If the concept of “God” is genuinely empty, as it needs to be if evidence and rational criticism are to be considered irrelevant to God-talk, then in a quite literal sense people who talk about God cannot say and do not know what they are talking about. (If I walk around constantly referring to “bizzers,” and rebuff any request for clarification by saying “I will not place limits on bizzers by defining them, for bizzers transcend all human attempts to come to know them,” I am simply talking nonsense.) In her more radical mode, Armstrong wants to preserve religious talk from questions of truth—in our ordinary sense of “truth”—by draining them of content. But when we lose content we do not only lose truth, we lose meaning as well. The apophatic retort to the skeptic, then, seems to reduce to: “You don’t know what you’re talking about—indeed, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. So how dare you contradict me!”

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[Deep13]

1. In that case we have no reason to think god is real.

Any conclusion that there is a god must be based on human understanding. Since human understanding is inadequate to know anything about god, we have no reason within that understanding to suppose god is real.

Anyway, "god" does not mean some transcendent whatever. It means a being who is more powerful than humans, immoral, lives apart from ordinary reality, but is free to intervene in it. In most religions, god is also responsbile for creating the world, sustaining it, rewarding "godly" behavior and punishing "sin." The god described in the article is not one any actual believers would recognize.

Anything that can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without it.

[dmallind]

3. Oh sure it does

God must be both transcendent and immanent to be God. Without being both the whole idea of Aquinas' five proofs falls down before it starts. God cannot be part of the universe, or there is something beyond God. he cannot be wholly apart from the universe either, or he could not interact with it. True enough mouth-breathing fundies tend not to use this language, but even they when asked the right questions will claim a god that is both.

[dmallind]

2. It's an old viewpoint, and one which definitely supports atheism despite Armstrong's wish it didn't.

In fact it's almost inescapable. An entity that is both transcendent and immanent, an uncaused causer, is so far beyond the scope of human understanding that only the slightest details of its existence would be understandable if the darn thing set up a website and answered every question we could ask in excruciating detail. So if we accept that not only can we not understand the limits of God, but cannot even understand the nature or essence of God, we are left with the inevitable conclusion that nothing we say about God can ever be considered anything but conjecture. It's not a Trojan horse that allows speculation to continue, since nothing can stop speculation anyway. It is a tacit acceptance that all knowledge of God is and must by its nature remain only speculation. There will never be a testable hypothesis of the divine, let alone a coherent theory about God's nature or desire.

Once you accept ineffability you accept a God about which nothing can be said to be true or tested to verify its truth. You then accept a God limited only to metaphysical speculation, not one that interacts with the physical world in any knowable way. From a materialist point of view (and absent some Buddhists and New Agers, atheists tend to be pretty much materialists) that means a God that does not exist in any way relevant to humanity.

Funnily enough this is an old debate tactic of mine in this arghument - to get the theist to accept ineffability in an awed acceptance of God's unknowable nature, and then draw the obvious conclusion that ineffability means nothing at all can be said to eb true about God, even his existence.

[BurtWorm]

6. Well said!

:applause:

And well played. I'd like to see how they respond to that!

[laconicsax]

4. For someone who believes that nothing can be said about God,

she sure writes a lot of books on the subject. The only good thing about apophatic theology is that it prevents theists from making the sockpuppet claim that "God" is on their side.

Albert Mohler (SBC President) has an interesting take on Armstrong.

She makes statements that amount to elegant nonsense. Consider this: "In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had -- somehow -- brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis." So she would have us to believe that, in centuries past, cosmology was merely therapy. She simply makes the assertion and moves on. Will anyone believe this nonsense?

Armstrong calls for the emergence of "a more authentic notion of God." Her preferred concept of God would be about aesthetics, not theology. "Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form," she intones.

Interestingly, it is Dawkins, presented as the unbeliever in this exchange, who understands God better than Armstrong. In fact, Richard Dawkins the atheist rightly insists that Karen Armstrong is actually an atheist as well. "Darwin's Rotweiller" sees through Armstrong's embrace of a "God beyond God."

...

So the exchange in The Wall Street Journal turns out to be a meeting of two atheist minds. The difference, of course, is that one knows he is an atheist when the other presumably claims she is not. Dawkins knows a fellow atheist when he sees one. Careful readers of The Wall Street Journal will come to the same conclusion.

Read the full thing at http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/mohler/11608516/

[BurtWorm]

7. That is an interesting take indeed.

I haven't read Armstrong, myself. Now I really don't see the point of reading her.

[Odin2005]

5. This is why I respect the Buddhist's agnosticism.

They basically say "deities don't matter".