Truth
The Trouble with Theology 4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 11 January 2007
The Nature of God
Some Christians seem to come to their conclusion by thinking about the nature of their assumed God, though, as we saw, the bible discourages any discussion of God’s nature. Still, the so-called son of God likens Him to a father, and urges everyone to call God father. God in the gospels must answer the question He put in Isaiah. God can be likened to a father and presumably, therefore, to other likenesses. Unless, that it, the New Testament is a bogus addition to God’s proper Word in the Old Testament. Still Christians do give God descriptive names. The very passage of Isaiah calls Him “the Holy One”. He is the Creator, He is good. He is almighty, and an absolute being, the Lord of All. Are these not likenesses? Well, yes they are, the theologians admit, but they none of them explain what God is. They have to be taken collectively to get a better idea! So, in a few sentences, theologians have no trouble at all in completely denying what God said Himself, according to the Holy Word of Isaiah. The implication of Isaiah is that God should not be likened to anything, but that means, the theologians convince us, that God must be likened to many things to get to understand Him. Is this or is it not sophistry?
Some things must be excluded by others. Since a father is a male parent, it is hard to believe that God is a female, as some feminist believers try to persuade us. Yet, why must they be wrong, even then? If God is a father to the human race, as He says himself in His incarnation as the Son, then Adam must have been procreated by God. Christians will happily accept that God procreated Christ, but they do not seem happy with the idea that He procreated Adam too, if only because the bible says He did not. He moulded him out of clay. If God made Adam, then He is not a father, He is a maker, a Demiurgos. If this is so, then God is not the true father of the human race but their metaphorical father, just as Count Frankenstein could be metaphorically called the father of the monster, in Mary Shelley’s story. Does God then speak in metaphors, as the Son did in telling us to call God father? If so, then God could be our metaphorical mother too. Either way, according to the bible, God is an actual Demiurgos, not a view that Christians like. The Gnostics knew it well, but Christians prefer to pretend otherwise.
God differs from other things in that the existence of other things is contingent, but God’s existence is not. It is a new dogma to save God from arguments like, “all things that exist must die, God does not die, so God cannot exist”. The syllogism is more convincing than the dogma.
Why must God be considered good? J S Mill wrote:
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply the epithet to my fellow creatures.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Mill then pointed out that God willingly sentenced people to eternal torture by fire in hell. It cannot be considered “good”, so God is not good. “No problem!” declare the theologians. God is a different type of “good” from Mill’s fellow creatures. Christians constantly move the goalposts and redefine their terms so that their arguments are always right. Not that they think of it as manipulation and trickery, otherwise known as cheating. The theologians say it is a “cosmic disclosure”, and it satisfies the ovines. For the rest of us, it simply means that “cosmic disclosure” is a synonym for cheating.
What, then, is wrong with wanting proof of all this theological jiggery-pokery? Why cannot propositions be applied honestly, be tested on the basis of their outcome, and honestly assessed in real life? Wiles claims that any test as strict as this would render meaningless much of what we say, a woeful claim used for the defence of the indefensible. What we say is entirely based on our experience in life, and the scientific method is so successful because it is ordinary experience and practice formalized into a reproducible way of testing our guesses. Theology cannot do it, and so has to say it is impossible or impracticable, though it plainly and demonstrably is not.
The Intangible Elephant
But if evidence can be offered for some proposition, do Christians understand what it is, or even what it means? Wiles raises the question of whether an invisible, intangible and unsmellable elephant is sitting on the words that you are reading. He is categorical that any such proposition is not merely false but is nonsense because nothing pertains to its truth or its falseness. It has no consequences. Yet, how does this elephant differ from God? The theologian’s answer is that there are some things pertinent to the invisible, intangible, unsmellable God, such as the life of Christ. Suppose the elephant were Ganesh, the Indian God, surely something pertains to the truth or falseness of the elephant now, the Indian bible, the Mahabharata, perhaps, which Ganesh is supposed to have written. The Mahabharata must be the equivalent for millions of Indians of the Life of Christ to a Christian. No doubt, the Christian will beef that the elephant God is irrelevant to them, but then the Christian God is probably irrelevant to most Indians. What is purely imaginary to the Christian is sacred to the Indian and vice versa. To the rational observer, invisible, intangible and unsmellable entities do not exist, they pertain to nothing, and nothing can possibly pertain to anything so intangible it can make no unequivocal mark on the world.
As for the Life of Christ, it is barely different from the invisible, intangible and unsmellable elephant. It is attested but so badly that not a few people, mainly clever ones, dispute that there ever was a Christ to have a life, and, even if there was, his life, is scarcely reliable evidence for God, and hardly weighs against the plain lack of consequential evidence for any such amazing being. Maybe the existence of God cannot be ruled out, but then neither can the excistence of the elephant. People are inclined to believe there is a God because they are told that God has consequences for them, but they do not know it. God is no different from the nonsensical elephant except that people have been persuaded that God is important whereas the elephant sounds silly, unless you are a Hindu. Objectively, both are equally silly. The “evidence” for God is simply what people are told—they are stories. Some stories about God are collected in the Christian bible. People believe the bible because it is the “Word of God”, and being taught that the bible is the word of God from an early age is usually what persuades people of God. Isn’t that circular reasoning?
Science and Theology
Christian fundamentalists, the dominant force in Christianity today, hate science because science and literal belief in mythology are incompatible. Fundamentalists reject science, as long as they do not have to give up everything that science has given them. Not only will they not, they pretend that the discoveries of science are biblical! Dinosaurs went into Noah’s Ark, according to absurd Fundamentalist “Museums”. Fundamentalists cannot begin to imagine what the world would be like without science, or whether they would be able to survive in it through faith and prayer. When they wage their holy wars against Moslems, they depend on having the superior weaponry that advanced science gives them, not prayer. Moslems are far more devout generally than the average Christian, but their prayers have not given them superior weapons. If Iran is stopped from having nuclear weapons, it will have nothing to do with prayer, or God, but practical diplomacy and politics. Christian thinking today is inevitably conditioned by the scientific world we enjoy, yet they decry science because it does not uphold their own prejudices. They cannot understand the world they live in, and they pretend they can understand ancient culture like that in the bible. If they changed their prejudices to scientific ones, they would find suddenly that science upholds them!
Wiles admits that the theologian has to begin any dialogue with the scientist with a guilty conscience brought on by the treatment of pioneering scientists like Galileo and Darwin by the clergy in the days when they had real power. (Until 1871, every member of the university of Oxford had to subscribe to The Thirtynine Articles or they could not be admitted as students or teachers.) The theologian can alway finds excuses for it:
If man is so central to the whole creative purpose of God, there would seem to be, at the very least, a symbolic appropriateness in the view that the earth is at the physical centre of the universe.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Like many Christian excuses, it begins with a condition which Christians are trained to ignore. Their egotism convinces them that man is central to God’s purpose because they as Christians are human beings and so God plainly devotes His attention to man, or some of them at any rate. The condition, therefore, is fulfilled and can be ignored. Now that we know the earth is not at the physical center of the universe, should we deduce that man is perhaps not central to God’s purpose? Not at all. That man is central to God’s purpose is a revealed truth. It illustrates how revealed truths, which science later finds evidence against, stops people from thinking properly. Human vanity and hubris puts us at the center of a singularly human God. God made man in His own image means that the human conception of God is that of a superman—a superhuman being. The ancient Greeks of about 3000 years ago knew that the God of horses would be a superhippic horse, and the God of sheep would be a superovine sheep. Christians prove it is so. The sign of maturity in a people is when they realize that any God must be more than a superpowerful version of themselves.
The same vanity, that humans were specially made by God in His own image, has held back, and still holds back, the advancement of science through inhibiting general acceptance of one of its finest discoveries—evolution. The reason is that the biblical notion of creation is incompatible with evolution. Even if a Christian is willing to accept evolution as God’s method of creating variety among species, and ultimately humanity, it is not what the bible says! Wiles admits that the clergy were wrong, and the fundamentalist idol, the bible is faulty. The struggle of theologians to find some principles upon which to build their faculty cannot be solved by accepting arbitrary “truths”. Over and over again in the last 300 years, such “truths”, gaps for God to perch in, have been filled by truth—scientific truth—yet Christians not only will not learn, they get angrier and more unreasonable the more scientific evidence accumulates. There is rarely humility in their acceptance of error, and many of them will accept no error. The advances science has made have been made against the disbelief and hindrance of the people of God. Wiles concedes that the discoveries made by the scientific method and now accepted in practice by everyone, even the most fundamental Christian, affects the way we experience the world around us. But, even so, the theologian will not saw off the branch that supports him:
Theology should be seen as having the same sort of relationship to the other sciences as they have to one another.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
False. Theology is not a science. Why should it be treated by the different branches of science as if it were? If theology accepted the scientific method, and proceeded, henceforth, scientifically, then it could be accepted as a branch of science, but not otherwise, and the trouble for theologians is that they would soon be out of a job because theology has no testable hypotheses. Worse still for the believer is that science has to begin with skepticism. Belief begins with credulity. The two approaches are incompatible. Christian theology had 1500 years as the dominant world view in the west and it discovered nothing worth remembering. Only when it was losing support because of the skepticism centuries of failure had brought did science emerge from the Christian darkness.
What Wiles means, in practice, is not that theology should become a science, but that it should stop asserting its dogmas in the face of their demonstrated falseness by science. Then, creation in the biblical fashion could be abandoned as a primitive idea, and evolution can be accepted as God’s far more intelligent instrument of creation. Many Christians are happy to take this view, but not fundamentalists. Christians were urged by their own God, in His manifestation as the Son, to be humble something they never have been in the main. If they were, they would be willing to consider that what science tells them is God’s way of demonstrating their own presumption, and error. Thus, for Wiles, understanding evolution helps the Christian to understand God. After all, Christians believe it is God’s creation, so what purpose could He have in letting it seem to be what it is not according to the bible. The true Christian would be wiser to take note of what they agree is God’s work, and not a human artefact, because it is out of the range of all human ability, whereas a book is not. It is examination of Nature, God’s creation—to Christians—that yields us the theory of evolution, so it is more certainly God’s than is the humanly written accounts in Genesis. Thus, for Wiles, understanding evolution helps the Christian to understand God.
Gnosis
Christians hijacked an imperfectly written Jewish mythology, and instead of trying to understand it as the authors did, they made it into a Christian dogma. Faith demanded that this dogma then be believed, even when it is shown to be wrong. In the same way, at an early stage, Christians rejected gnosis, or knowledge, preferring ignorance. Yet gnosis was in important element in the original source of Christianity. Without gnosis, which is esoteric knowledge, there could be no salvation, and although gnosis is not science, it is closer to it than faith, in being known and not just believed. At least gnosis could be discovered, and so would have led on more easily to science. It was because Christians rejected all knowledge that we had the Dark Ages.
And why was gnosis forbidden? Because the church that was adopted by the emperors of Rome was meant to control people not to let them be free spirits, yet gnosis taught that everyone already had the spark of God within them. No one needed any sacraments, or institutionalised church. They had to know themselves before they could know anything else, something that Christians reject—they already know everything that they need—they think—and want to force it on to others. Gnosticism was individuality. People sought salvation by personal effort, they did not get it by false belief and magical sacraments. They could be guided by anyone, not just a caste of bishops. The soul of it was humility and individuality, things that would not serve the purpose of the emperors—an organization to control society.
A plain example is the recently discovered Gospel of Judas. Christians claim God had a plan in the passion of Christ and his crucifixion, and Judas had a major part in it. Without his betrayal of Christ with a kiss, the plan could not have worked. Yet Judas is considered devilish, even though he was central to God’s plan. In the Gospel of Judas, Christ appoints Judas to the task of betraying him, and Judas faithfully undertook it. His was a sacrifice as important as Jesus’s own, and Judas was purely a man, unlike Christ in Christian dogma, and had to suffer the mental anguish of doing the task, contrary to his instincts of loyalty to Christ, and knowing that Jesus had prophesied he would be hated. Could any Christian have done the same, if God required it? If they could, then they ought to have compassion for the one who did it, and, by analogy, on all of those who have to do unpleasant tasks that others will not do. Few of them have that degree of self-sacrifice within them, so how can they benefit from Christ’s self-sacrifice? Christianity is not self-sacrifice, it is selfishness.
If Christianity had retained what was lost, would it have had such a fiendish history? Who knows? What we know is that the way it evolved it was fiendish, and it hard to imagine it could have been worse. Christians show no signs of changing, rather the opposite. They get worse themselves, more bullying, more intolerant, more authoritarian, frankly, more fascistic.
They know all they need to know, but cannot understand science, though all they need to understand is the scientific method, not the detailed corpus of knowledge it has revealed to us, if it is too hard for them—how it works and why it is successful. Lord Ashby, a vice-Chancellor of Cambridge university, explained in a popular article of 1975 that the critics of science do not need to understand the second law of themodynamics, but do need to understand why it is true and not an arbitrary invention like Christian belief. There is little to show that Christians have made any attempt to understand science, and why it differs from their own belief. The Christian continues to make untested assertions as dogma, and to fall back upon this or that authority for it. Consequently, they continue to look ridiculous. Fortunately for the theologians and bishops, the common or garden churchgoer apparently does not mind being ridiculous. They take comfort in being ridiculous together. They have been taught that Christians are always persecuted, so the ridicule shows their devotion, though mainly, in fact, Christians have done worse persecuting than ridicule.
The bible can be tested in some respects, and when it is, it is often shown to be wrong. It is sometimes contradictory and sometimes obscure, so it is not clear and needs interpreting. Then, you know what? everyone is certain the interpretation they choose is right. Theology, then, is to put across some common interpretation and commentary acceptable to a majority, but it cannot solve the problem because no Christians accept what the theologians say. How can they? Even when they take the bible to be inerrant, they cannot accept what their own God tells them in simple words. In short, they insist on interpretation so that they do not have to do what God actually says.
Authority
Christian authority is no authority. If Christ was a man he could not have been infallible, but even if he were a God and perfect, the records of his actions and views were recorded by infallible men, a long time later, so the records cannot be authoritative. Christians have to invent the Holy Ghost as a supernatural guardian of the record, but any honest inspection of the bible shows the Holy Ghost was not up to the job. If he were then he has introduced a lot of unnecessary confusion by including what look like errors and contradictions. In any case, what is the Christian’s authority for believing in the Holy Ghost? It is the bible.
The theologian turns around and says that scientists also have authorities. It is true, of course, but scientific authorities are only good for what they have submitted to the scruples of science for testing. Einstein is an authority because he put forward astounding hypotheses that worked. They solved the problems he was addressing. Einstein was a physicist and his success at physics does not make him an authority on archaeology, say. We might respect what he has to say on it, and other subjects he is not an authority on, but we cannot regard what he says as other than the opinions of a clever man, or at least until they were tested in practice and confirmed. Any scientist who has had success with explaining phenomena will be respectfully listened to, but what they say will not be accepted merely because they are an authority. Proposals must be tested, and if they cannot be tested then they are not scientific and are rejected anyway. That is why science begins with skepticism. People like Peacock and Polkinghorn, former scientists who turned to Christianity, are treated by Christians as if they are saints, though they are regarded by science as cracked pots. By turning to questions that cannot be tested, they gave up any kudos they had as scientists.
Catholics accept the authority of men, the divines of the Church, but the Anglicans accept the bible, authorities and reason as their criteria of what should be believed. For fundamentalists there is only one authority, the bible, a wooden idol like those that God forbade, though they will not read their idol for themselves but accept only what their ranting pastors tell them to believe. So their pastors are their real authority, and they read the bible in ways that suit themselves and their Republical masters.
It is impossible to deny the human capacity for fantasy building where there is no corresponding reality.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Unitarians avoid dangerous fantasy by rejecting any idea that God could be unreasonable, and therefore that belief must be firstly based on reason. For God to be believed, it must be demonstrably rational. God cannot have been so unreasonable as to have confined the totality of His message to an ancient and faulty book. God has given multiple clues to what should be believed, and, important as the bible is, it is only part of a message that is being continuously revealed by reason. If some belief seems to lead to devilish behaviour, the Unitarian is sure that mischievous people have misinterpreted the signals. It is a view that is almost compatible with science.
Who came First, God or Man?
How should we approach a statement like, “God created man in his own image”, in comparison with, “Man created God in his own image”? Wiles says the answer is ambivalent. Both can be argued. Maybe, but which is the more reasonable? There is no doubt that men exist, but God is questionable. Christians say they have no doubt about it, but it is their personal illusion, nothing more than belief, a conviction that has no evidence for it. We know for sure that human beings exist. We have them as fathers and mothers, as sons and daughters, as many relatives and friends, taxi drivers, celebrities, authors, and so on. People demonstrably exist, but God does not demonstrably exist. The existence of human beings is in no doubt, but the existence of God is. The assertion that human beings created God is possible. The assertion that God created man in His own image depends on the huge doubt that God even exists. The two statements are not equally likely. We know that mankind is immensely imaginative and creative, but we know nothing about God, except what we imagine. The chances of one of the millions of people that have lived over the development of humanity thinking up the idea of God is very likely indeed, but the chance of a single God even existing let alone making a human being is remote. No one can have any trouble in accepting that we can imagine a God in our heads, but why should we imagine that the God we have in our heads actually exists and actually made us, and not the other way round? We have men, but do not have God until someone imagines Him.
Why then should people invent a God to believe in? Why indeed? The answer is likely that the notion of spirits offered people explanations for why inexplicable things happened. They imbued inanimate things with good and ill, so that some things were beneficent and others were maleficent. The notion had survival value and persisted for a long time, constantly developing until it became what is now believed, but now there are much better reasons for believing, and better things to believe. Why then do people continue to believe? It is a matter for psychology. Needless to say, Christians will not attemopt any psychological explanations of it. Psychology has no need to invoke any supernatural being to explain anything. Human behaviour can explain God. Intelligent Christians cannot deny it, but claim that psychological explanations, although utterly sufficient in themselves, do not exclude God! Science, to repeat the obvious again, does not need to invoke any explanations that add nothing to what is already fully explained. It is the principle of parsimony, and is the reason why science begins with skepticism—believing nothing until it is shown to be necessary. God is not. God is simply a rationalization of the desires of some people. When people feel they need a God then they find just the God they want. If people feel safer believing in a cosmic father, then that is what they believe. When people are more sophisticated and want a more sophisticated God then, Lo! They find God is, for them, sophisticated. Those who are happy to have a buddy Jesus standing by them, find they have it.
Religion is an area where the dangers of self-deception are great.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Quite so. They are so great that the evidence is that religion is, as Freud argued, an illusion. God is a personal God because He is an individual hallucination. Always, despite the evidence presented, the theologian falls back on their standard excuse that whatever is found and shown to be true, it does not exclude god. What excludes God is that what is enough is sufficient—Ockham’s Razor. God is superfluous to everything except the desire to believe., and the belief can be in anything, even a rabbit’s foot. God is offerred as the rabbit’s foot that transcends the universe. It becomes, therefore, everyone’s first choice.
Conclusion
It is entertaining but sad, seeing Wiles struggle between his belief and his honesty. Most do not bother. They simply chose dishonesty or turn away, preferring their faith in ignorance. Wiles adnits that the psychological basis of faith has no, or little, basis in reason:
Neither the history of Jesus nor evidence for the resurrection provides a firm substratum of fact which points inexorably in the direction of supernatural belief.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Christian “reasoning” is a post hoc justification of belief, or sometimes, if rarely, it serves to change belief. Theologians profess reason because, without it, Christian faith held blindly cannot differ from any other blind belief—astrology, Islam, kabbalism, sorcery or even fascism. Each requires total unquestioning obedience, and self-evidential belief. Each is a game that can be played with the same rules as Christianity—formulate dogmas then work out their consequences, and, like Christianity, the consequences can be dire, whether they are part of the belief or not. Wiles concludes:
The theologian has no way of guaranteeing the reality of his basic subject matter, namely God Himself. He has no way of proving that his subject is not in the end as unreal as astrology.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Despite this quite serious problem, Wiles assures us it is not all a waste of time. There is no rational basis for theology, but it has a “quality of rational discussion about it which is appropriate to its subject matter”, a nicely nuanced ambiguity suggesting it is all nonsense. But, theology proceeds. It cannot be concerned about this problematic character it has, but must get on with it. But he finally warns:
The fact that biblical study can be carried on in a coherent and developed way, all the time taking the assumption of God’s existence entirely for granted, is no guarantee there is after all such a reality.Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?
Belief ought then to be rejected, and theology exposed as nothing but attempting to make the impossible seem possible through confusion and obfuscation.
It is obviously hugely disappointing and disheartening to realize that a lifetime’s beliefs are false, but anyone annoyed about it should blame their priests and pastors because they have known, but have perpetuated the fraud. And why? For their own benefit. What could be the purpose of all those apparently insane evangelicals in the USA who broadcast hatred as Christianity? No one who can read can deny that, despite its supernatural faults, the New Testament is a moral story about a God of love being incarnated on earth to advocate love as the law of Moses expressed in one word. This incarnated God expressly tells people they must not hate, but the modern US pastor does hate, and teaches hatred. The pastor says Christians must hate. The pastor does what God said from his own mouth what he must not do.
Why should supposed Christian pastors want to advocate hatred? the only answer is that it brings in more money and support from the deadbeat and deadleg nomarks of middle America, and that they can be coralled more easily to the cause of a Party and President that enjoy killing alien people. In short, the motives are greed and power, and believers so easily fall for it. US Christians believe their hate-mongering pastors, and ignore the Word of God they can all read for themselves and boast is infallible. Then, though they ignore God’s word, they remain convinced that they will be saved. They have faith! It is incredible but true! Theologians will not consider that the Devil has taken over Christianity.
If God is good and His intentions are pure there is no reason why He should want to pretend to be a God of hatred, contrary to His own direct messages. Who would want to do the fooling? That, perhaps, is the real question for modern theologians. It all testifies to the stupidity of just believing, and of making apologetic excuses for every tear that is found in the tattered fabric of Christian belief. The modern US anti-Christs are busy ripping any morality that Christians ever had into shreds. The theologians would have been far better if they had urged their flocks to think about their beliefs rather than just believing whatever they are told. Now they are puppets for the American Taliban—the fundamentalists whose message is hatred. They are preparing all of their mindless flocks for the apocalypse because they—as the promoters of anti-Christ—have been subverting Christianity from within.
