God’s invitation to Play
The Beauty that lights the path to the Truth and Goodness of the World
Ecology friends on social media shared, with approval, this article by Dr Glen Barry, The Appalling Meaninglessness of Being in a Post-Modern, Pre-Apocalyptic World. The article opened up with this claim:
Nothing really seems to matter much when your Planet is needlessly collapsing and dying. Big important ideas to base your life upon are in short supply. Pretty much god myths, stuff, and clans are all we got. There is nature. And she needs us.
The rest of the article was as dull and unenlightening as that opening suggested. There are plenty of big ideas out there for those with the wit, nerve, and nous to find them. And the interest in following them up practically. Those short on ideas are bereft of life and its liviIt is evident that the author – and those who share his views - is without hope. He holds religion in contempt and thinks religious folk backward. There is no engagement with major political philosophies and platforms. No doubt he thinks as little of politics as he does of religion and ethics. His religion and ethic is this ‘nature’ he refers to. He disparages ‘god myths’ only to indulge in the most infantile delusion of all, this reversal to a primal fantasy when difficult issues were addressed by others. I note the extent to which people who think like this refer to nature as ‘Mother Nature.’ I note how Barry refers to nature as female: ‘she needs us.’ How does he know? Can he tell us the same about trees, rocks, interesting fungi and fauna? To say that these things should be respected and preserved rather than trashed and destroyed is right and good. But it isn’t an ethic.
Note the dismissive tone with respect not merely to religion but politics. All we have are ‘god myths’ and ‘clans.’ Human beings are social beings, they build public lives and spaces for themselves and organised their affairs communally in such a way. I wonder if Barry would be as dismissive of the ways in which other species claim niches and organise themselves. Humans, evidently, can do no good. Human beings are meaning seeking spiritual beings too, hence the ‘god myths.’
But the likes of Barry are bigger and smarter than the herd. He tells us so, too, taking his stand on truth, reason, and knowledge. That may sound so grown up. But it isn’t. Such fantasies are puerile. He combines hard science with the softest form of nature-worship. These are the fantasies of the man-child who looks to ‘Mother Nature’ to make all the problems of civilized life go away. This is the man who is incapable of dealing with the demands of living in complex societies, eschews the dilemmas and deliberations of politics, and dreams of returning to a vision of a primordial unity that exists nowhere other than in his impoverished imagination. It is a case of reversion, and judging by the extent to which I have seen similar misanthropic earth-worshipping decadence expressed in ecology circles, it is by no means uncommon. It is far from constituting the whole of the Green movement, I hasten to add. And the emphasis on truth, reason, and knowledge is most refreshing in an age of whirling relativism and confusion.
But the claim that there are no big ideas in the world struck me forcibly, having exchanged communications with academics and students, having advised students with their PhD’s, having supported those working in eco-design and commons transitions, having used up hour after hour day after day pouring over the ideas that are out there in the world. Anyone who says that there are no big ideas out there either isn’t looking or has such a narrowed, blinkered, jaundiced view of the world that he is incapable of seeing what is beyond his nose. I’d say the latter. To sum up the history of religion, with an immense wealth of wisdom and of experience, both good and bad, in terms of ‘god myths’ indicates a self-defeating depression. To sum up politics as merely a matter of ‘clans’ the same. It doesn’t matter which clan wins, then? The cost of such complacency becomes apparent whenever such reasonable people come to be confronted by an unregenerate fascist monster.
The rejection of politics and ethics and the disdain for civilization indicates a personality type that is incapable of facing up to the demands of adult reality. Such a type eschews the responsibilities that living in the world as a contributing member of society involves. They don’t like the society in any case, so see no reason to contribute to it. There is a strong anti-civilization undercurrent in ecology, a lot of it based on an unscientific and unhistorical view of nature as benign. I believe that contemporary civilization is out of harmony with the ecology of the planet and that a new biospheric politics is required. But I am clear that this will be a politics and will involve forms of governance and economic provision, and ‘clans,’ in the sense of social organization, and ‘god myths’ in the sense of norms and values and ideals to live by. That’s pretty basic sociological thinking. But it seems to be beyond those who have given up the ghost.
‘Nothing seems to matter much,’ Barry says, when the planet is ‘collapsing and dying.’ I most certainly protest the way that socio-economic arrangements are implicated in the unravelling of the planetary ecology. But the language employed by Barry is emotive rather than scientific. I don’t have a problem with that, in that I very much argue that there is an emotional intelligence. But I want to see more care being exercised in bringing reason, intuition, emotion, and feeling together. The planet is not ‘dying,’ but will go on long after the human species has gone, and could care less one way or the other. Barry says of nature that ‘she needs us.’ There is no ‘she.’ That’s a myth. I don’t disagree with myths. I argue that we need both the Logos and the Mythos. My problem here is that Barry, from a stern rationalist position dismisses ‘god myths’ only to reinstate one himself, and the most infantile one at that.
I checked Dr Glen Barry out, and discovered him to be virulently anti-religious. He seems to be more passionate about extirpating religion that he is about presenting a positive vision of an alternate ecological society. That’s revealing. In himself, Barry is not important. But it is the fact that so many in environmental circles can respond so positively to his decidedly debilitating message that interests me. I note the complete absence of a critique of political economy at this end of environmentalism. Instead of an analysis of specific social relations and forms, there are general assaults on industrialism and civilization. Instead of ideas of alternate social and economic arrangements, there is a repudiation of all such notions.
(Note well, my criticisms here are targeted at the anti-civ end of environmentalism. I absolutely commend those working in eco-design, commons transitions, and alternate technology. If we do ever succeed in achieving the future society that saves civilization, it will be the hard work and expertise of the people working in these areas who will give us the practical mechanisms of existence.)
Barry writes:
There is no god, and god pollution must be resisted if we are to survive. Those who don’t believe superstitious god myths have every right to speak up – at least as much as those promoting a plethora of god myths – as we watch the damage done to ecology, truth, peace, and society by adherence to unknowable fairy tales in an age of science and ecocide.
Arguments over God and religion are utterly pointless and are based on a simple category mistake. Religious beliefs translate only very imperfectly and inadequately into the language of reason, science, and philosophy. The God that atheists waste their time deconstructing is the God of the scientists and the philosophers, the God of those who thought belief in a supreme deity could be grounded in reason. That’s a nonsense. Abrahamic spirituality cannot be translated into the language of scientists and philosophers without the essential emotional, interrelation, and experiential core being lost. Lose that, and God is lost. Try to prove the existence of God by reason, and the end result is atheism. God is indeed non-existent. No theologian worth his or her salt every said otherwise, and the fact that someone thinks this a decisive claim indicates the extent to which the terrain is colonised by amateurism, ignorance, and bigotry. Strip God away and, indeed, all that is left is Nature.
So why the crying? And who or what, exactly, are you crying to? Nature? Nature is not responding. Nature doesn’t hear. Nature could care less. Other human beings? Very probably. But there is no general ‘humanity,’ only human beings divided up within determinate social relations. That indicates the reality of ‘clans’ and politics, then. But the author has already expressed his disdain for these things. The classic problem of politics, which every age is charged with solving, is that of combining diverse elements in concordance with a common good. Some societies and ages do it better than others. Those that fail fall into civil war, war, and collapse. Politics matters. Political ideas and movements matter. To say that ‘clans’ is ‘all we have’ dismisses the very arena where human beings come together to determine the terms by which they come to live together and, hopefully, live well. The author claims ‘we have each other.’ That says precisely nothing socially and politically. That kind of appeal to a general ‘humanity’ is tantamount to arguing that merchant bankers and revolutionary socialists are one. Biologically they may well be, but socially and politically they are not, they belong to different ‘clans.’ The implication seems to be that human community should be a natural community of beings forming a biological one. But that view isn’t true of non-human animal society: there are hierarchies and divisions and orders in such societies. This isn’t serious thinking, it is reversion.
The claim that struck me was this:
“we watch the damage done to ecology, truth, peace, and society by adherence to unknowable fairy tales in an age of science and ecocide.”
Read that again. (And leave aside that it is always a transcendent hope beyond given facts that motivates us to journey into the unknown in creating a future worth having). We are being told that the twin social and ecological crisis that confronts us is as a result of religion, and that such a thing shouldn’t be happening in an age of science. This is errant nonsense, politically and sociologically illiterate. The causes of crisis are to be located in a particular system of production. This pitching of science vs religion, identifying scientific reason as liberatory and religion as repressive, belongs to the Enlightenment. Characters such as this are peddling an eighteenth century materialism that falls far short of the richness, nuance and radicalism of real Enlightenment thinkers.
So why waste time on it? Precisely because it makes claims which are fairly common in certain environmental circles, because there is a strong science vs religion bias in these circles, because there is a tendency to scapegoat religion for problems generated by the new gods of science, technology, and industry within capitalist social relations (note what I did there), and because there is a seemingly congenital incapacity on the part of some to take politics, ethics and the critique of political economy seriously. Instead of a critical analysis which locates the source of the convergent crises of civilisation in the capital system, Barry points the finger at religion:
You can never know my dismay and outrage as society and governments – with innumerable social and ecology crises threatening the very existence of us all – are run by mythical edicts from absent gods rather than by truth, logic, wisdom, and knowledge. There can be no human progress or even survival from ecocide if the bastardized words of mythical ancient carpenters and warlords are all we have to go on.
There is a whole lot more to the Judaeo-Christian tradition than that. I will come to that later. Establishing the infinite superiority of the religious ethic over such dead-end thinking is my concern in this article. The claims that Barry makes in these articles are common currency in the modern world, extending generally beyond environmental circles. Liberal modernity dissolves morality into irreducible subjective opinion, mere value judgements. There is no authoritative moral framework, least of all one grounded in a belief in God. That has been the case for a couple of hundred years. We have had the progress through science, technology, and industry, God has been overthrown and the overarching moral framework has been dissolved to liberate individual will and desire from constraint. At the heart of it all is a capital system organised around an accumulative dynamic that recognises no limits, moral, social, and ecological. The ecocide that is upon is to be located in those developments. But it is easier for those wedded to the system to scapegoat religion and continue to fight a phoney war against imaginary enemies that don’t exist. It saves having to be big and strong, engage in politics, and go after the real enemy. That’s the problem with a real enemy – they are big and strong enough to fight back, apply sanctions, make life very uncomfortable.
The idea that if we get rid of God and religion then the social and ecological crisis that is upon us will end is risible. The global heat machine that goes by the name of industrial capitalism is not in the service of ‘invisible, non-existent gods,’ but the ‘invisible hand’ of a very existent capital system. Anyone who thinks that religion is the source of our misfortune and that a combination of science- and nature-worship (scientism and primitivism as two sides of the same bourgeois decadence) must have missed the last couple of centuries. These are outmoded delusions, the Enlightenment myth reinvisaged for the age of ecocide. This mentality is not merely deluded, it is dangerous. Because it peddles as a solution the very delusion that lies at the source of the problem: the myth that science and technology – allied to (capitalist) industry will suffice to build Heaven on Earth. He writes:
We need to stop quibbling about whose invisible god is better and focus upon rational solutions to observed decline in the physical reality surrounding and nurturing us, which is collapsing and dying.
Who, exactly, is ‘quibbling?’ I have never quibbled with friends from other faiths. Arguments over religion show a lack of spirituality in the first place. I have total respect for and interest in the beliefs of others, my Muslim physio, Sikh chemist, Protestant friends, and I have a particular liking for Judaism. I’m not quibbling. The only time I have exchanged angry words is with atheists who are utterly incapable of accepting that people are unpersuaded by their narrow and partial understanding of reason. Barry asks for us to stop quibbling over the relative merits of ‘invisible’ gods, because we have to focus on ‘rational solutions’ to planetary crisis, but he is the one who says this: ‘Those who don’t believe superstitious god myths have every right to speak up – at least as much as those promoting a plethora of god myths.’ The idea that a crisis largely engineered by the rationalization and instrumentalization of the world will be resolved by ‘rational solutions’ conceived in modernist image is a delusion. The idea that there is a conflict between science and religion is a peculiarly modern prejudice. Before the late nineteenth century science and religion proceeded hand in hand, and many of the greatest scientists and philosophers were deeply religious. The idea that this conflict pans out as one between superstition and reason is also crude and outdated. Far from being antithetical, religion and science are complementary, employing different ways and means for a better understanding of life, the world, and humanity’s place in the grand scheme of things. That seems eminently reasonable to me. Reason comes with an ethical component, after all.
I make a fuss of these views not because they command any intellectual weight but because they summarize quite a dominant position in the contemporary world. I would say that the dominant position is one of apatheism and indifference, except that you will find that whenever you start to argue for an authoritative moral framework, you will be quickly met with the objection that individuals have a right to choose the good as they see fit. There’s the problem. Morality has become a marketplace that functions the same way as the economic market. You pay your money, make your choices, and take your chances. Such a world can be presented as liberatory, overcoming the repressive implications of moral codes and laws and government dictates based on the divine right of kings. The problem is that the great beasts of the feudal order have been slain and replaced by even greater capitalist beasts, and these ride roughshod over the world, with no check upon them. Addressing the climate crisis will require collective constraint through government, law and new social forms. This cannot be done with a liberal morality that denies the notion of a substantive good. There is no one good, not even that of planetary health. Planetary health is a good idea, but it is one that individuals must be persuaded to choose. The problem is that, within such a morality, individuals are also free to refuse compliance, remain unpersuaded, or bail out. Liberalism is based on ‘conflict pluralism.’ It is agnostic on the substantive good. Instead of the one overarching good, there is a pluralism of competing goods. There is no ‘God,’ and many celebrate the fact as a liberation. But there is no ‘Nature’ either, for the very same reason. To state that we should stop quibbling over God is the same as saying we should stop quibbling over ‘Nature.’ The moral terrain of liberal modernity is precisely about such ‘quibbling.’ You can argue that preserving the health of the planetary ecology is a moral imperative. The point is that without a referent, there can be no such imperative. That is precisely what has been lost. The same arguments, impeccably rational, which brought ‘the death of God’ brought the death of Nature too.
Those indulging an anti-religious sentiment argue as if we were still living in the Age of Faith. We are not. That age ended a long time ago. If anything is responsible for the crisis of the modern world, it isn’t religion. In fact, a strong case can be made that it is the loss of religion and the faith and hope that comes with a belief in God that is part of the modern predicament. With a wealth of science and technology, human beings are mired in a crisis of their own making and lack the collective nous to stand together and come out of it.
We live in an age of science, reason, technology, industry, progress, capitalism … It’s an age of total war, genocide and ecocide too. This modern world put an end to God and religion a long time ago. People continue to hold on to God and religion. And so they serve as targets for those looking for scapegoats for a badly misfiring technics. Arguments over God have nothing to do with the contemporary crisis. Eco-catastrophe is very much a modern crisis and is to be located in an alienated system of production (note, not in science, technology, reason, and industry but in the forms within which they come to be encased and expressed). I am waiting for those who talk big in the criticisms they direct against God and religion to do likewise with respect to the real powers which govern the social world – capital, commerce, finance. And act big. Engage in politics and political struggle. Until they are prepared to that, this is a story of self-made rational man as the author of his own undoing. Eco-catastrophe is very much the product of the men as gods delusion advocated in these articles by Dr Glen Barry.
‘All we have and need is each other, kindred species, ecosystems, and the biosphere.’ How very benign. You will find that it is not so easy for human beings to get along with each other by just pointing to and worshipping nature.
God Pollution: Nature Is My Religion, Earth Is My Temple
The above is most revealing. The dismissive contempt of religion as not merely non-rational but irrational and superstitious indicates that it is not to form any part of a ‘rational solution’ to our problems. But note what Barry does say: ‘Nature is my religion.’ Many agree with him. It’s a strange religion, though, in that it combines a commitment to the intellectual austerity of scientific fact and logic and the mush of Mother Nature worship. What strikes me most about the argument presented here, and repeated in similar vein elsewhere, is its deep hopelessness. Instead of a joyous humanism, there is a bleak misanthropic pessimism. I find that striking, and I find it a lot among those most vocal about their atheism (I don’t notice it among atheists who get on with doing what atheism should be about – the affirmation of life. I totally respect that view, and don’t see it as too dissimilar from the insistence that we give constant prayerful thanks for all that God has given us).
The spectacle of atheist materialists mired in misery and despair when faced with the finitude of all things is what intrigues me. It is certainly right to protest the foreshortened ending of life. But it’s the existential howl at finitude, whether it comes sooner or later, that I find revealing. Because it is an expression of existential despair. The bleakness here is fairly typical of a certain deep ecological strand of environmental writing. The finitude of nature cannot have come as a surprise. The shock is the spectacle of things being brought to their end well before their time. Agreed. There is no question that this is an abomination of desolation, the abomination that desolate and depopulates. The source of this detestable act lies in specific relations of production. When I see little analysis of those social relations and even less of a practical commitment to creating the institutions and structures of a viable alternative social order I call fall.
99% of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. Extinction is built into the planetary DNA. One day the sun will explode and the universe will contract and life on Earth will be over. All gone. All memory of everything humans have done will be gone. Everything humans have quibbled over will be as nothing.
This is the part about the atheist case that genuinely puzzles me. Indifference and inconsequence is built into nature’s ‘plan.’ There’s living for the moment, of course, and enjoying what is within our natural reach. But there is no point and purpose beyond that, no lasting significance. And yet people are struggling as if something more than survival in a meaningless game of life is at stake. The view that there is only ‘nature’ and ‘she needs us’ does not constitute anything like an ethic. The implication is that the human species is only of significance insofar as it serves and sacrifices itself to nature. Force that choice, and humans will choose to sacrifice nature to their own ends. It will be a self-destruction, of course. And that is precisely where we are.
Against this, I opt for the view set out by the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book The Great Partnership. God needs us to share the Love. And that view is not as far away from the views of those without a belief in God. John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century liberal who never had a religion, writes: 'If Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man.' That, Sacks writes, is precisely what the rabbis had in mind when they spoke of human beings becoming 'God's partner in the work of creation.’ The rabbis believed that God left the world incomplete so that it would come to be completed by a humanity sharing in Creation. That, Sacks points out, is not heresy but mainstream belief in Judaism. In Reinventing the Sacred (2007), theoretical biologist and atheist Stuart Kauffman argues that human beings are co-creators in an endlessly creative universe. He declares this view to be ‘God enough.’ For reasons I give elsewhere, I don’t think it is quite enough. But it’s on the right lines and comes very close. There is, then, a ‘great partnership’ between God and humans. That is very different to seeing humans as just one species of many, of no especial significance, with a duty to serve nature and natural laws. Such a view is neither true to nature nor to human beings. That view is not the humanism it purports to be but an inhumanism. And the proof is to be seen in the tendencies to despair and misanthropy in such presentations. My argument is that a true humanism is one that is based on human beings coming to work in partnership with God. Jonathan Sacks writes well here:
Faith is a relationship in which we become God's partners in the work of love. The phrase sounds absurd. How can an omniscient, omnipotent God need a partner? There is, surely, nothing he cannot do on his own. But this is a left-brain question. The right-brain answer is that there is one thing God cannot do on his own, namely have a relationship. God on his own cannot live within the free human heart. Faith is a relationship of intersubjectivity, the meeting point of our subjectivity with the subjectivity, the inwardness, of God. God is the personal reality of otherness. Religion is the redemption of solitude.
Faith is not a form of 'knowing' in the sense in which that word is used in science and philosophy. It is, in the Bible, a mode of listening. The supreme expression of Jewish faith, usually translated as 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one' (Deuteronomy 6:4), really means 'Listen, O Israel'." Listening is an existential act of encounter, a way of hearing the person beneath the words, the music beneath the noise. Freud, who disliked religion and abandoned his Judaism, was nonetheless Jewish enough to invent, in psychoanalysis, the 'listening cure': listening as the healing of the soul.
Sacks, The Great Partnership 2011: 73-74
Hence the utter uselessness of ‘quibbling’ over God and religion. Such quibbling is not dialogic, but indicates a terrain in which everyone is talking over one another, or more likely shouting, and no-one is actually listening.
Religion is a practice, a community, a relationship, something that people do.
Rebecca Goldstein says something pertinent with respect to humanists who nag away on this question and get precisely nowhere, other than making themselves miserable and the rest of us so bored we can no longer feel our own teeth:
“Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.”
These are the very practices with the religious folk in my community do, and do the world over. They do so not to prove the existence of God, and they do so not to prove that goodness exists independently of God. My mother did all of these things. I never heard her ever argue about the existence or otherwise of God and I never heard her say that actions such as these were done to prove a point one way or the other. I note Goldstein’s implication that humanists are often concerned with proving a point in order to feel good about themselves. That’s the prideful self-worship that lies at the heart of the problem. Human beings have a natural tendency to curve inwards when they lose relation with something greater than they are. It is religious folk who turn up and put a shift in the community when it comes to helping those in need. Those are the facts for those who want facts. And it has nought to do with proving the rightness of an intellectual proposition. The belief in God and the communal and solidaristic practices which come with that belief are of a piece. The crude instrumentalism of an approach that says we ought to do this in order to prove that is precisely the mentality that is all wrong.
With respect to the naturalist argument, there is no point to the game of life other than staying in the game. The human species won’t be the first species to go to extinction. Some 99% of all species that have existed have gone extinct. Such is Nature’s way. Why the crying? Humans may well have been destructive, but they have been creative too. Hence the reference to ‘the Great Partnership’ above. We were charged from the first to use rather than misuse the gift of free will. Human beings are co-creators within Creation. Naturalists can say that we are co-creators within a ceaselessly creative universe as a field of immanentist potential that is forever unfolding. That was once very much my view, and still forms a substantial part of my view. The religious ethic teaches that this co-creation proceeds within God’s divine plan. That is now my view. God or Nature? What about God and Nature, as in Creator and Creation?
The problem is that humanity came to think itself clever enough and powerful enough as to be able to ditch that restrictive ethic and go it alone. We don’t need any ‘god myths’ that don’t identify we humans to be gods ourselves. That ‘men as gods’ is the biggest and most destructive myth of all and it very much lies behind a modern world hell-bent on destruction. Freeing themselves from moral limits within God in the first instance, humans have proceeded to free themselves from natural limits too. The destructive path of capitalist modernity is rooted in the revolt against both God and Nature. The principal agency of this severing of bonds to nature, community, and society has been capital. Capital is the new idol demanding human sacrifices. And so on we go to self-destruction.
Barry’s idea that governments and society are run by religion and not by forces and imperatives arising from money and power – both in terms of the direct pressure of the dominant classes and the systemic imperatives of the capital economy – is too laughable to be worthy of comment. I put it here to highlight the anti-religious bigotry. And lack of understanding. Note the presentation of the argument in terms of ‘truth, knowledge, logic, and wisdom,’ and then note the ignorance, the falsehood, and the complete absence of wisdom. The traditions that this character denigrates by caricature offer immense reserves of wisdom. But, of course, wisdom is the last thing the non-wise can see, let alone appreciate. Such ‘atheist ranters’ (I use this quote I found, on account of its links to the Ranters, who were the libertarians who made like difficult for Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers in the mid-seventeenth century) are in force in the contemporary world, which offers any number of forums where they may talk themselves into the belief that they are among the ranks of the clever through their constant referencing of reason, science, fact, and logic. To prove it, they deride religious believers as backward, stupid, and bigoted and prattle on about ‘invisible friends’ and ‘sky fairies,’ as though such things added anything of substance to the ‘argument.’ Such things are not what religious folk believe in and are not what religious commitment involves. Religious folk busy themselves with doing rather than ‘quibbling.’ But those for whom there is nothing beyond the tangible and observable will, of course, not see it. And in their lack of understanding, they resent that others have something they lack and turn on religion with a zeal, particularly organized religion. They cite a wealth of evidence that religions have been involved in a whole lot of human misery. They most certainly have. The statement that religion has been the cause of more trouble on earth than anything is frequently made. It is a reassuring belief that saves its exponents the trouble of actually engaging in real social analysis and political struggle. It is, after all, much easy to challenge an invisible sky fairy than it is to challenge corporate power and finance. The conclusion follows that if we should just abolish religion all the conflicts would disappear. The claim is that since religion is the source of all conflict, then conflict would end if the world came to put an end to religion. If I had a pound for every time I have heard that one … I would love to know how people propose to extirpate religion without extirpating human beings at the same time. I think one almighty conflict would be the likely consequence. It is that easy for human beings to provoke violent conflict, disturbing the peace of those quietly going about their affairs. Religion is one of many things human beings do. We are being asked to believe that without religion human beings would cease fighting over land, resources, politics, ideas, sport, sex, fashion, anything and everything. In making this point, I am met with the claim that the human species in general is wretched. I respond back by asking why, then, single out religion for critical treatment, particularly when the great religions have been concerned with guiding the flawed nature of human beings to a happy ending. That indicates the need for correction, contrition, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. The other part of the religious understanding is that human reprobation is not irredeemable. Significantly, those who take their stand on reason, truth, knowledge, and logic can only give us the hard facts of life with respect to a wretched human nature. If you think that truth, knowledge, and logic will alter that state then you are a fool. Human beings are meaning-seeking, symbol-making creatures. They are indeed the most rational of beings. Human beings will fight over symbols and murder for principles. The reference to the evil that human beings do, in all aspects of life, points to the human reprobation that is redeemed by the grace and love of God. Remove God and there is no redemption, only the reprobation, which leaves its mark all over social life. No wonder, then, that the irreligious zealots are so hopeless and miserable. They have nothing but an irredeemable nature and humanity for their incontrovertible facts of life.
Characters like these actually debase the atheist position, insofar as atheism concerns the affirmation of life without the need for extraneous invented principles. Their gross simplifications and caricatures suggest that they don’t actually have much faith at all in their position and know it to be uninspiring, so they spend most of their time droning their ignorant, bigoted persona into their keyboards, as if taking part in some rebel enlightenment. They just make me wonder why, if life and nature are so wonderful, and if all we have is kinship with each other and with other beings and bodies, they are possessed with such loathing and mired in such despair and misery. One could almost believe that it is a projection of self-loathing, itself the product of a self that, in abandoning God, has curved in on itself and found only the emptiness within.
I am struck by the bleak, hopeless, and misanthropic tone of such writing. And I am struck by the sheer quantity of it. In one sense, it is entirely predictable. Modern disenchanting science not only stripped the universe of value, purpose, design, and meaning – and certainly of any reason and intelligence associated with God – it turned the world over to technological manipulation in the service of human ends. Voices from within the world of modern science most certainly made the promise to create Heaven on Earth and turn the world into what Robert Boyle called the ‘Empire of Man.’ Boyle was far from alone in making that promise. Ironically, those who are the most virulent in denouncing religion for all that is wrong in the world still make this promise as the road to liberation, little realizing that the Hell on Earth we are now embroiled in is the fulfilment of their promise. This is the only way that the ‘men as gods’ delusion can end.
The response back to such negativity and despair is to affirm that “God is” through word and deed. This is to emphasize the reality of God through action and practice. What critics of religion still fail to grasp is that religion is not an intellectual proposition to be passively analysed, dissected and proven or otherwise; it is an ethos, a practice, a way of life. Religion is an ethic that draws individuals out of themselves and invites them to expand their being in relation to something greater than they are. In God, society, and the universe, human beings seek connection and meaning. The Love of God is an invitation to human beings to fall in love outwards. It should be no surprise that those cut off from that love should retreat within themselves, confining their heart within the prison of the ego and feeling it becoming colder and more bitter through estrangement and isolation. When such people do come to look outwards, they project a bile and self-loathing upon others and upon the world. It’s not just believers who are on the receiving end. Human beings in general are the target. And, sinners as we are, there is never a shortage as to why those casting the stones may righteously loathe fellow humans. The world, too. Not Nature, mind, as the new god myth. But politics, society, civilization, technology, anything and everything that human beings do is a plague and pox on the planet. Unless they form the new idols to worship and serve.
In taking a stand on the premise that ‘God is’ and living it in thought and action, the presence of God is felt. God is known in relationship. God will never be found in the conceptual prisons of the mind. The ‘rationalists’ are indeed right: there is no God there. You need to look elsewhere. And you need to look with many eyes, not just the one. Pope emeritus Benedict XVI writes: “In this way the sentence ‘God is’ ultimately turns into a truly joyous message, precisely because He is more than understanding, because He creates - and is - love.” This is the Love that grounds the Goodness of the Creation, lights the way, and invites the heart to follow. In affirming the reality of God, we come to see that that Goodness is real. It follows that those who deny this reality lack the light that enables them to see this Goodness in others and in the world. They live in darkness, and project its bleak ‘truth, knowledge, and logic’ on the world in the form of a misanthropy and despair. Of course they tell us that life and the universe is meaningless! Because that is precisely what their blinkered reason tells them. But if life is pointless and purposeless, then nothing can be more pointless and purposeless than the science, philosophy, and reason that says it is so.
Einstein’s view when asked whether he believed in God goes some way in explaining why Nature won’t cut it as an ethic with motivational power.
"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
Einstein to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, 24 April 1929
I don’t think this God/Nature cuts it as an ethic, precisely on account of its indifference to personal life. Nature is indifferent to human beings and their affairs, but human beings are not. Human will only relate to an entity that in some way speaks to their concerns, answers their questions, satisfies their soul.
C.S. Lewis writes:
“An ‘impersonal God’ – well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads – better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap – best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband – that is quite another matter.”
In ecological circles, anthropocentrism is a sin. The problem is that human beings do take an interest in human affairs and can never be indifferent to human concerns. The relation with a personal God is what will draw human beings out of themselves and into relation with others and with the world. That anthropocentric quality is needed in an ethic that inspires, motivates, and obligates, and it is this that belief in a personal God brings.
And herein lies a substantial part of the explanation for the existential crisis of the modern world. This crisis is a crisis of faith. It began as the challenge and overthrow of God and religion and proceeded with theological assumptions once attendant upon God coming to be attached to human industrial and technological powers. In terms of material quantities, the promises of progress have been more than fulfilled. Human beings are healthier and wealthier, better educated and longer-lived than in any previous civilization, and in greater numbers too. So why the bleak misanthropy then? This great success story is the cause for an obsessive preoccupation with overpopulation and overconsumption. Psychologists like Jung and Frankl, writers like Mumford, and theologians like Buber grasped the truth long ago when writing of modern men and women searching for soul and community in an age of purposeless materialism. No amount of material quantity can fill the huge, gaping hole where the soul once was. The machine gods have delivered on quantity but failed on quality.
To blame religion for this state of affairs is the ultimate in bad faith and denial. If you want redemption you will have to express contrition and identify and name sin for what it is. It is over one hundred and thirty years now since Nietzsche announced the “death of God”. In declaring this, he was really making public a truth that was implicit in the modern mechanistic worldview all along. Thomas Hobbes’ atomistic materialism, which saw the world as a purposeless circulation of power, had said some such thing. Hobbes saw the world as competitive to its core: one accumulates or gets accumulated. Hobbes looked at the world and did not see Goodness and Love. Instead he saw the ‘war of all against all,’ a bellum omnium contra omnes. Without a strong authority to keep order, life would be ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ Without God, ultimately, no such order is possible. Instead, we live in a civil society that is a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, an atomistic world in which each sees the other as a rival for scarce resources and seeks to use the other as a mere means to personal ends. It’s a world of power without end and without limit, and in the end such power eats up the world and finally consumes itself. The strong predate on the weak, the rich on the poor, and the end result of this zero-sum game is zero. An authority based on nothing more than power is no true authority at all. Where there is nothing to begin with, it doesn’t matter which sides in the power struggle prevail, since ultimately they have nothing to win in a world in which humans have been disinherited and disowned by their own powers.
In such a world there is no principle, only power and, in contrast to the equality of all with respect to principle, power is asymmetrical. Some are more powerful than others. Society reduces to a zero-sum game in which some gain at the expense of others. The losers have no redress: there is nothing and no-one to appeal to. Neither Truth nor Justice count for anything; they actually cease to exist. The ‘invisible, non-existent’ God is soon followed by a non-existent Truth and Justice. Power is its own argument and its own justification.
In this Hobbesian world of power struggle, competition, and predation, morality dissolves into the marketplace of personal choice. Human beings lose the moral compass by which to guide their common affairs. Life is experienced as directionless and desitinationless, driven mainly by the arbitrary power that prevails at any given moment. People feel their lives to be meaningless. Buffeted by events beyond their control, they see their situations as hopeless. They live under the sway of abstract, uncontrollable forces that threaten to bring all their good efforts and willing to naught. As individuals withdraw from the world and into themselves, hearts harden and, in the end the soul withers and dies.
We need to call back the soul to awaken the heart and respond to the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty of the world. Since ‘God is,’ those three transcendentals are. I am struck by the extent to which many protesting the state of the world proceed from its ugliness, that is, from the destruction wrought by human beings and civilization, rather than from beauty. They would claim that they do by pointing to Nature. But the striking thing about this Nature is the absence of human beings and human activities from its portrayal. Human beings seem not to be a legitimate part of Nature. Deep down, there seems to be a death-instinct at work which not merely anticipates, but even looks forward to the elimination of the human species from the Earth. Such a mentality has all the hallmarks of tiredness and exhaustion, the loss of hope and confidence that accompanies every fall of civilization.
I proceed from Beauty. Beauty is the supreme political category in that it lights the way to Truth and Goodness and invites the heart to follow. That invitation is to all of us. Beauty is the unifier in a world of division and separation. As one of the few things that disenchanted individuals respond to any more, beauty is a bastion of evangelisation. Beauty moves and inspires individuals, calls them out of themselves and motivates them to act. Beauty speaks to us and we respond. Present human beings with beauty, and they will heed the call to fall in love outwards. Through Beauty, human beings can be turned on to Truth and Goodness, and thereby turn their lives around in the process of turning the world the right way round. The three great transcendentals are all qualities of God and exist in interconnection: in accessing one, you will be drawn to the others in short order.
“Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty. And thus only God deserves unlimited love.”
Peter Kreeft
“God who is goodness and truth is also beauty. It is this innate human and divine longing, found in the company of goodness and truth, that is able to recognize and leap up at beauty and rejoice and know that all is beautiful, that there is not one speck of beauty under the sun that does mirror back the beauty of God.”
Roberta Bondi
Plato made Beauty the supreme political category for the way that it lit the path to Truth and Goodness and invited the heart to follow.
“Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.”
James Mark Baldwin
The painter Matisse was asked whether he believed in God. “Only when I’m painting,” he replied. I wouldn’t reduce religion to a practice, discarding the theology, doctrine, ritual, still less the experience and example which has developed and enriched the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. But there is an element of truth in Matisse’s response, hence the impossibility of resolving anything concerning the truth or otherwise of religion in intellectual debate and scientific analysis. Johan Huizinga expressed the point this way: “You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” We can argue over abstractions until kingdom come. Divorced from the social practices, modes of conduct and character, and communities of praxis that give forms their life, such abstractions are the playthings of ‘intellectuals,’ that is, of those locked up in the conceptual prison when it comes to ordering the world. The truth is that science, religion, and philosophy are not competing modes of explanation, they are complementary disciplines by which human beings seek to understand the world. But that world is always something apart from those disciplines. We point our fingers at the sun, the moon, and the stars, we ponder our place in the scheme of things, and make our best guesses. Those who play the game of setting one discipline off against the other are at a very low level of understanding, wasting their own time with chimeras. In effect, they are fighting a war of shadows.
“God is not the symbol of goodness, goodness is the symbol of God.”
G.K. Chesterton
Religious truth is the kind of thing that disappears as soon as one asks for a definition of it. Note the constant dismissal of God as a ‘sky fairy’ and religion as a ‘fairy tale,’ note the contemptuous references to ‘god myths.’ Such views are blinkered.
The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.
J.R.R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936), p. 14
That point applies to religion and the truth of religious experience. It can only be very inadequately intellectualized and rationalized. The essential quality gets lost in translation, or becomes distorted in presentation. And it is this sepulchre, which has the form but not quite the living content, that is the object of analysis. Of course you won’t find religious truth this way, because that truth is lived.
Note the ‘scientism’ that lies behind such dismissals, the extension of scientific reason into domains where it has no business to be and nothing constructive to add or to say. Such a view is based on the nation that science and religion are enemies, whereas in truth they are different methods of looking at different aspects of reality. The issue, here, is one of encroachment. If facts are not to be altered as a result of belief, so science has nothing to say on questions of meaning, value, and significance, for the simple reason that these are not scientific questions. Such critics have no idea what true myth is and don’t care. They have divorced Logos and Mythos, elevated the former and discarded the latter. The result is a distorted understanding of the world, because the missing Mythos is also the missing Logos. In losing access to the one, we lose the true character of the latter as a result of skewing the relationship.
Wittgenstein, responding to an imaginary interlocutor, comments:
"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is false and what is true?" – It is what human beings say that is false and true; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 241
In the normal run of affairs, human beings do not detach themselves from their activities so as to analyse them, ensure they conform to some abstract reason, and offer justifications. To ask for good reasons for everything human beings say or do is a recipe for paralysis and fall. I would compare it to walking downstairs by way of direction of the conscious mind, thinking every step of the way. At some point, the body stalls, gets confused, slows, and stumbles. Our activities are embedded in a form of life that serves as an unconscious background.
It takes faith and courage to live into an uncertain future, not least when you are seeking to change the world for the better. ‘Let’s be honest and courageous enough to face the truth that only our own thoughts, emotions, and beliefs blocked that flow of God’s goodness into our life.’
The misanthropic Earth-worshipping decadence that some have fallen into fails to see that the same disenchanting science which brought the ‘death of God’ also brought the death of Nature as animate and purposive. They seem to think that they can reinstate the God of physical Creation without the need for the God of Love, the personal God of relationships, relationships to others and to the world. You will find God in relationship. Lose that relationship and you will lose God. The modern world is characterized by severance from the bonds and ties of identity, community, belonging, and meaning. No wonder individuals lose sight of God. They have lost relation and therefore conclude that God doesn’t exist.
God exists, God is now, God is near. We live under the divine aspect of eternity. The affirmation of the eternal nowness of God is vitally important in encouraging and enabling us to withstand the trials and tribulations of living and inspire us to carry on on our pilgrim journey on Earth. We journey forwards in transcendent hope in full knowledge of our connection to the source and end of all things. To affirm the eternal presence of God is to participate in an awesome reality. This invitation into a world of Truth and Goodness contrasts markedly with the view of disenchanting science that the universe is objectively valueless and meaningless. It should come as no surprise, since this is the dominant narrative of the modern world, that human beings should come to see their existence as worthless, directionless, and destinationless. The disenchantment of the world invites misanthropy. The death of the human subject soon follows the death of God. The culture that such a narrative breeds is first a lust for power, then a despair. Human beings discard God and go it alone, only to find that in their victory they are merely the dispirited masters of nowhere. And then those who despair may react violently in expressing the misery of their powerlessness and hopelessness. Mass shootings, violence, anger, protest, shouting, all of it suggests the cry of despair to me.
The root of this despair is the belief that God does not exist. In affirming that God exists, life becomes a prayerful of giving of thanks for all that exists. In denying that God exists, life becomes onerous and miserable. God is ‘invisible, non-existent,’ claims Dr Glen Barry. What does exist and is all too visible is war, torture, crime, violence, aggression, exploitation, pollution, murder, guns, knives, greed, gluttony, sloth, rape, cruelty – all over the world. So much for the 'we need each other' ethic and kinship. We see here why a Godless humanism collapses in on itself. I’ve noticed that the people I characterized as misanthropic Nature-worshipping decadents are big on the ecological sins of human beings. The problem is that there is no redemption in Nature. You learn the laws and ways of Nature and work within limits, or you are eliminated. Survival is the name of the game, not salvation. Theological concepts are meaningless in such naturalist terms. But they are vitally meaningful in human terms. Cultivating the virtues is about living in right relation. The virtue ethic I espouse advocates material sufficiency and virtuous action within right relationships in accordance with God’s divine plan of Justice. If you think that a tad sulphurous, then consider that it offers a path to redemption for all us sinners. And consider, too, that that was the view of E.F. Schumacher, a man highly respected in environmentalist circles. Schumacher is celebrated for his work on appropriate technology and eco-design. His call for metaphysical reconstruction on the lines adumbrated above is much less well known. Schumacher taught that unless the work of ecological restoration is set within true ends, it will fail to develop the right character traits and fail to motivate right actions. It would succumb to the blinkered pragmatism of prevailing technics.
Without the Love, Light, and Life of the Everlasting Gospel, human beings fall into the inertia of the heart. The depths of the depravity into which human beings can fall is no mystery whatsoever to those with a religious background. Only those who begin from a prideful and idealized notion of human reason and power can be mystified by the sins that human beings can and do commit. Christianity proceeds from the humility of Christ on the cross and thereby affirms a very different and much less arrogant form of power. Note the contemptuous words spoken of Jesus Christ in the article I opened this piece with: dismissing the words of ‘mythical ancient carpenters.’ No doubt the same contempt would be expressed of Christ on the cross. Critics claim to be armed with truth, knowledge, logic and, note, wisdom. I see only an overweening arrogance. And cowardice. These are not the first times in which human beings have been tested, and far from the worst, too. If the scale of the problems before us are great, then so too are the tools at our disposal for their solution. What is lacking is character and confidence, hope and inspiration. What is lacking is point and purpose. There is none in Nature other than survival. Survival is not enough. It is not a motivational goal. If life is as bad as deep green environmentalists say it is, then the case for survival is entirely lacking in motivational content. Human beings want redemption; they want salvation.
The realization that the world we have created is somewhat less than ideal, and that human beings are somewhat less than rational and logical, has come as a shock to those who have dreamed of building Eden by science, technology, and industry. Christians have always understood that we live in a fallen world and are working with a fallen human nature. They express outrage, give vent to their anti-religious bigotry, and indulge their taste for misanthropy. It’s a cul-de-sac, a decadence born of despair in estrangement from the source of Truth and Goodness. The principal challenge that the Christian ethic teaches is that of how to live well and appreciate the redemptive possibilities open to us in a fallen world. The task is to establish the happy habitus which allows us to know, learn, acquire, and exercise the virtues. This is to establish communities of practice, faith, virtue, and character.
Christ invites us to see the Good and to live the Good. The world that the moderns have created in the image of disenchantment obscures this Truth and Goodness and works against our recognition of these qualities. We are challenged to countermand the invitations into sinfulness and live a life of virtue in imitation of Christ.
Christians are enjoined to respond to God’s invitation to participate in the divine plan for Justice and recognize the Truth and Goodness of the world in thought and deed. There is a duty to spread the knowledge that we live in a meaningful, purposeful universe and that our lives came from somewhere and are going somewhere. Our lives have direction and have a destination once we come to participate in God’s goodness.
My work in Spiritual Ecology