The Dish

Douthat continues the debate about Church reform sparked by Damon Linker’s recent column, which included NPR caller Trish’s comment that “Catholics do not care about doctrine”:

There are dangers in reading too much into an NPR caller, obviously, but Linker is putting his finger on a real tension within liberal Christianity today — or, if you prefer, a real fork in the road, with one path leading in the direction that he assumed dissenting Catholics wanted to take (which seeks to alter church teaching precisely because it still believes that teaching really matters), and the other leading toward a kind of Emersonian, therapeutic, basically post-ecclesiastical form of faith, in which “Roman Catholicism” just happens to be the name of the stage on which your purely individual spiritual drama is taking place.

He wrestles with where this discounting of doctrine comes from:

Now some of those would-be reformers would argue that Trish-ism (which as Linker describes it is basically a Catholic version of Sheila-ism, Robert Bellah’s Reagan-era gloss on individualistic spirituality) is what happens, more or less inevitably, when the church’s leaders hollow out their credibility by trying to enforce the unenforceable, and that a church that had evolved with the culture forty years ago would have actually preserved a sense that doctrine actually matters. This argument is problematic, though, because the (mostly Protestant) churches that did evolve along those lines often seem to be churches where Trish-ism is fully enthroned and all talk of traditional doctrine is a dead letter. Hence the appeal of the conservative counter-argument that actually Trish-ism is the fruit of the Catholic hierarchy’s inattention to doctrinal matters, its eagerness to soft-pedal the tough stuff, its attempt to keep everyone on board in an age of division and dissent: “It’s not that dissenting Catholics don’t care what the Church teaches,” Matthew Schmitz writes in a response to Linker’s piece, “it’s that the Church has taught them not to care. To that lesson, they’ve paid close attention.”

But I wonder if this argument doesn’t oversimplify things as well.

Dreher comments:

Even after I left the Catholic Church, I would find myself in the bizarre position of arguing with Catholics, and defending Catholic doctrine. The thing is, it was impossible to find common ground, because a) they knew nothing about doctrine, not even basics, and b) whatever the Church taught didn’t matter to them, because they didn’t see it as binding anyway; and c) they genuinely did not understand why this had anything at all to do with their status as Catholics. The freaky thing, to me, was that this wasn’t a pose; they were as sincere as they could be.

Megan Hustad was raised by overseas Christian missionaries. She describes adapting to life in NYC:

All I wanted was to listen carefully and master correct pronunciations. I wanted to take note of how the beautiful people held forks and chopsticks and admired certain books but never others, not unless they were trying to be funny, and I wanted to exploit the fact that my accent made me sound wealthier than I was and slightly smarter, too. Mainly I sought forgetfulness. For a long time I was happy to have outrun God, because he really wasn’t going to be much help here.

On occasion the subject would come up. My evangelical background. Wow, flushed faces at parties leaned in to ask, what was it like growing up with adults so hooked on fairy tales? My ability to quickly change the subject eventually outstripped my embarrassment, but not before I had internalized every critique of what faith in God now signified in America: intolerance, sanctimony, tut-tutting over Hollywood and the welfare office, a yawning void where curiosity and compassion could be.

But when I felt led to a conversational place wherein I was expected to confirm that everyone who takes part in the rituals of organized religion drags their knuckles on their way to stoning the town slut, I would stop. I couldn’t. That I would have to drop the word “soul” from my vocabulary I hadn’t expected.

Oliver Burkeman expands on Damon Linker’s reading of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.  He calls Hart’s work “the one theology book all atheists really should read”:

God, in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it. Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question of why there’s existence to begin with. … Since I can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn, it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.

But too often, instead of being grappled with, this argument gets dismissed as irrelevant. Sure, critics argue, it might be intriguing, but only a handful of smartypants intellectual religious people take it seriously. The vast majority of ordinary folk believe in the other sort of God.

As Hart points out, there are two problems with this dismissal.

First, you’d actually need to prove the point with survey data about what people believe. But second, even if you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that. Which is also why atheists should read Hart’s book: to deny themselves the lazy option of sticking to easy targets.

Isaac Chotiner is less convinced that Hart’s book poses a serious challenge to atheist thought:

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, and the amount of time I have spent with deeply religious people (Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims) is relatively limited. But I have talked somewhat extensively with people in each of these religions and not a single one of them has ever described his or her belief in God in anything like these terms. As Jerry Coyne puts it in response to Linker, “Yes, it turns out that the 99% of believers who see God as an anthropomorphic being are wrong, and only the theologians—that is, some theologians—truly know what God is.” (Ideas such as answered prayers, or the parting of the seas, don’t really mesh with what Linker is laying out.)

But let’s say Linker is right and many people do believe in this type of God. He still seems to be conceding that less “transcendent” beliefs in God don’t make much sense, or at least that atheists who confront these beliefs are not confronting a strong case for God. This is a giant concession.

Linker fires back at Chotiner and Coyne:

The charges against me (and Hart, whose book neither Chotiner nor Coyne has read) boil down to two: Practically no one holds the view of God that I sketched in my review, and even if they did, that view is nonsensical. The core of my response is simply to say that the classical theism that Hart elaborates in his book and that I cursorily laid out in my review is far more widely held than Chotiner and Coyne appear to believe. It is found, in varying forms, in the work of Christian (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas), Jewish (Maimonides), and Muslim (Avicenna) theologians, as well as numerous Hindu and Sikh sages. All of these sundry thinkers, and many others, describe a God who is (in Hart’s words) “the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all would exist.” Chotiner and Coyne are free, of course, to follow A.J. Ayer and other strict logical positivists in saying that such language is meaningless mumbo jumbo. But they should understand that in taking that tack they are going easy on themselves in the way that people always do when they dismiss their opponents rather than engage with them.

Coyne rejoins the debate:

[I]t’s obvious that the bulk of harm committed in the name of religion is done by those not who see god as a Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral system. For it is the belief that God has wishes for humanity, and a code of right and wrong, that drives people to do things like oppose abortion and stem cell research, deny rights to women and gays, burn “witches,” throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and torture Catholics with guilt about masturbation and divorce.

The vast majority of believers don’t even read theology, and are barely aware of the arguments for God made by Sophisticated Theologians™. So is it our duty as atheists to refute those arcane theological arguments, or to prevent instead the harm done by religion? To me, the latter course is preferable. Still it’s both fun and intellectually profitable to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided beforehand must be true. Theology is the only academic discipline where people get paid not to investigate their beliefs, but to rationalize them. Certainly it’s more useful for atheists to point out to “average” believers the lack of evidence for their faith—and that is precisely what Dawkins did in The God Delusion—but it’s more fun to chase the tails of obscurantists like Alvin Plantinga and John Haught.

Background on Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard:

Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret. Much against Heloise’s will, Abelard insisted on marriage to soothe her enraged uncle Fulbert, and spirited their child off to his sister’s farm in Brittany. The pair married secretly at dawn, then went their separate ways. A resentful Heloise denied all rumours of the marriage, so Abelard, to protect her from Fulbert’s wrath, clothed her in a nun’s habit and hid her away at Argenteuil, the convent where she had been raised. This proved to be the last straw for Fulbert, whose hired thugs surprised Abelard in his sleep and ‘cut off the parts of [his] body whereby [he] had committed the wrong’. For want of a better option, the eunuch philosopher turned monk, while Heloise became a nun in earnest, prefacing her vows with a public lament.

The couple believed in “what philosophers call the ethics of pure intention: it is not the real or even the foreseeable consequences of an act that make it good or evil, but solely the intent of the agent”:

Since only God can discern intentions, however, that position complicates any attempt to render moral judgments. While many thinkers have adopted mitigated versions of the premise, Heloise was ruthless in its principled application. Thus she judged her exemplary religious life worthless in the eyes of God because she had done everything for Abelard’s sake, nothing for God’s. On the other hand, she held her love affair morally blameless because she had loved Abelard purely for himself, without regard to material advantage. Every inch the stylist, she shocks and thrills readers with the deliciously hyperbolic way she conveys that boast: ‘if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would seem to me dearer and more honourable to be called not his empress but your whore.’ Not mistress or girlfriend, but whore – Heloise used the coarsest Latin words she could find (meretrix, scortum) to make her point. What is more, she went on to argue that the real prostitution is marriage itself, since women enter it for property and money rather than love. Such sentiments would have been radical even in the 18th century, let alone the 12th.

(Image of 14th-century depiction of Abelard and Heloise via Wikimedia Commons)