The 6:30 bus was crowded with people happy to be near home before the T shut down completely at 7 for the next 36 hours just to cope with the amount of snow we'd had that day on top of all that had fallen before. Hanging on a strap I read a poster advertising a local start-up church quoting Augustine: 'To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.'
I'd just spent much of the previous hour waiting on a chilly platform with a horde of other commuters waiting for sense in the system, and meanwhile amusing myself finishing Peter Watson's just published The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.
It reviews the heroic and honest intellectual efforts of those from Nietzsche to today who can't or haven't been able in all conscience to conceive or concede a deity like you, God-in-love. What a cast of characters whose thoughts are pretty fairly portrayed: artists, poets, dancers, theologians and philosophers, scientists: Freud, Yeats, Shaw, Chekov, Signac, Gide, James, Proust, Valery, Kandinsky, Heidegger, Joyce, Wittgenstein...on and on up to Rorty, Dworkin, Dawkins and Dennett, atheists all.
It's a history of the bright people of the twentieth century, including atheist militancies from Stefan George and the Soviets to the new atheists of the moment, as well as those more disappointed and wistful, who have faced up to the non-existence of a transcendent deity, and sought to concoct recipes for worthwhile life given that absence. Perhaps some have believed but not in a literally living god and so have produced arguments for living the meaninful lives independent of reference to you. One is led to think that none among the luminaries of the last 150 years ever prayed.
Confronting such a cloud of witnesses, many of whom I sincerely admire, I'm in an awkward position. Believing in you, God-in-love, makes me somehow pitiably pusillanimous, if not laughably deluded, or at least dishonest, like a con artist foisting some self-serving scheme on a credulous population, but not certainly an intelligent, open-minded person truly thrilled by Augustine's assertion.
All the fanaticisms, the unanswered prayers, the absent evidence, the history of coercive power structures and doctrines, the imperfection and hypocrisy of believers, the ridiculous arguments all create the perfect modern storm of outrage and scorn at the center of which, as in any good storm, is emptiness, nothing worth acknowledging, at least nothing like you.
And yet you seem to me a real presence, sometimes directly, usually indirectly, known. I don't feel I am or have to park my mind or my morals to engage with you. I welcome your unforced companionship.
Belief such as I have in you, God-in-love, is equated with a kind of ignorance, perhaps willful, and certainly the very opposite of knowledge. It's as if I when I know something, I stop believing it, and when I believe something, I really don't know it adequately. Put another way, when I feel the bottom, I stop treading water and if I'm still treading water, it's because I'm afraid to put down my feet. It seems to me more that knowledge is a kind of belief (in say systems of verification) more than belief is a kind of ignorance (an absence of or falsification of experience.)
I learned a lot from the book, covering a lot a territory in just a few hundred pages. (Did you really have to be so dismissive of A.N Whitehead?) Particularly well presented was the argument, made by great writers like Robert Musil and Cesar Milosz, for the essential contribution of poetry which 'explores the world piecemeal, detail by detail, as the poet finds a form of words--what Heaney calls the 'jurisdiction of achieved form' (itself a pleasure)--that marries observation and emotion in an intuitive order that can be had in no other way, in which there is as much feeling as understanding.'
'If there is one thing that the thinkers discussed in this book are agreed upon it is that there is no one overbearing benchmark by which the world may be judged, so let us relish that truth, not continually try to deny it. Observation of the world can be heroic. That is what the people in this book have taught us. Observation can be liberating, enlarging--that is what we thank them for.' Yes, yes, yes.
Toward the end, Watson considers all that has been established in this long search across the century:
'The central role of ethics and morals leads us to divide life into three realms: the realm of science, which most of us can't escape and which has brought us so many advances, technological, intellectual and in terms of expanding understanding; the phenomenological world , the world of Sartre's petites heureuses, of art and poetry, the world of small, patient, non-competitive entityhood, which is its own form of understanding and so complements science. And the world of desire.'
'In this one sense (relationships), then, modern life is impoverished, is harder for us to find meaning within. Religious people might claim that they experience an enduring love for their church, or their God, but can a church or a God reciprocate like a wife, a husband or a partner? Is reciprocity not the essence, the pleasure of desire, the heart of its desirability? Is there anything more consoling, satisfying, fulfilling than to be desired and to go on being desired?' Watson arguing here, I think, for the value of wider, deeper human community. Yes, and again yes.
Can you, God-in-love, rub my back that way my wife can? Can I listen to you lecture the way I can Richard Feynman? Can you stare me in the face like the possum my friend told me about that she caught hanging in her closet when she was a girl? No, but you're not absent from any of those encounters. And you're in love, with what includes me and us. And the very providingness of the universe, and beyondness that draws both of us is also you. I should feel like a fool, but instead I feel blessed.
I'd just spent much of the previous hour waiting on a chilly platform with a horde of other commuters waiting for sense in the system, and meanwhile amusing myself finishing Peter Watson's just published The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.
It reviews the heroic and honest intellectual efforts of those from Nietzsche to today who can't or haven't been able in all conscience to conceive or concede a deity like you, God-in-love. What a cast of characters whose thoughts are pretty fairly portrayed: artists, poets, dancers, theologians and philosophers, scientists: Freud, Yeats, Shaw, Chekov, Signac, Gide, James, Proust, Valery, Kandinsky, Heidegger, Joyce, Wittgenstein...on and on up to Rorty, Dworkin, Dawkins and Dennett, atheists all.
It's a history of the bright people of the twentieth century, including atheist militancies from Stefan George and the Soviets to the new atheists of the moment, as well as those more disappointed and wistful, who have faced up to the non-existence of a transcendent deity, and sought to concoct recipes for worthwhile life given that absence. Perhaps some have believed but not in a literally living god and so have produced arguments for living the meaninful lives independent of reference to you. One is led to think that none among the luminaries of the last 150 years ever prayed.
Confronting such a cloud of witnesses, many of whom I sincerely admire, I'm in an awkward position. Believing in you, God-in-love, makes me somehow pitiably pusillanimous, if not laughably deluded, or at least dishonest, like a con artist foisting some self-serving scheme on a credulous population, but not certainly an intelligent, open-minded person truly thrilled by Augustine's assertion.
All the fanaticisms, the unanswered prayers, the absent evidence, the history of coercive power structures and doctrines, the imperfection and hypocrisy of believers, the ridiculous arguments all create the perfect modern storm of outrage and scorn at the center of which, as in any good storm, is emptiness, nothing worth acknowledging, at least nothing like you.
And yet you seem to me a real presence, sometimes directly, usually indirectly, known. I don't feel I am or have to park my mind or my morals to engage with you. I welcome your unforced companionship.
Belief such as I have in you, God-in-love, is equated with a kind of ignorance, perhaps willful, and certainly the very opposite of knowledge. It's as if I when I know something, I stop believing it, and when I believe something, I really don't know it adequately. Put another way, when I feel the bottom, I stop treading water and if I'm still treading water, it's because I'm afraid to put down my feet. It seems to me more that knowledge is a kind of belief (in say systems of verification) more than belief is a kind of ignorance (an absence of or falsification of experience.)
I learned a lot from the book, covering a lot a territory in just a few hundred pages. (Did you really have to be so dismissive of A.N Whitehead?) Particularly well presented was the argument, made by great writers like Robert Musil and Cesar Milosz, for the essential contribution of poetry which 'explores the world piecemeal, detail by detail, as the poet finds a form of words--what Heaney calls the 'jurisdiction of achieved form' (itself a pleasure)--that marries observation and emotion in an intuitive order that can be had in no other way, in which there is as much feeling as understanding.'
'If there is one thing that the thinkers discussed in this book are agreed upon it is that there is no one overbearing benchmark by which the world may be judged, so let us relish that truth, not continually try to deny it. Observation of the world can be heroic. That is what the people in this book have taught us. Observation can be liberating, enlarging--that is what we thank them for.' Yes, yes, yes.
Toward the end, Watson considers all that has been established in this long search across the century:
'The central role of ethics and morals leads us to divide life into three realms: the realm of science, which most of us can't escape and which has brought us so many advances, technological, intellectual and in terms of expanding understanding; the phenomenological world , the world of Sartre's petites heureuses, of art and poetry, the world of small, patient, non-competitive entityhood, which is its own form of understanding and so complements science. And the world of desire.'
'In this one sense (relationships), then, modern life is impoverished, is harder for us to find meaning within. Religious people might claim that they experience an enduring love for their church, or their God, but can a church or a God reciprocate like a wife, a husband or a partner? Is reciprocity not the essence, the pleasure of desire, the heart of its desirability? Is there anything more consoling, satisfying, fulfilling than to be desired and to go on being desired?' Watson arguing here, I think, for the value of wider, deeper human community. Yes, and again yes.
Can you, God-in-love, rub my back that way my wife can? Can I listen to you lecture the way I can Richard Feynman? Can you stare me in the face like the possum my friend told me about that she caught hanging in her closet when she was a girl? No, but you're not absent from any of those encounters. And you're in love, with what includes me and us. And the very providingness of the universe, and beyondness that draws both of us is also you. I should feel like a fool, but instead I feel blessed.
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