TRANSCENDENT MONOTHEISM vs. PANTHEONS
To appreciate the confusion that occupies the minds of the "New Atheists," primarily those who hold in high regard the embarrassingly parochial views of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the late Daniel Dennet, it is necessary to recognize the very real difference between science and Scientism. It is also necessary to recognize their essential confusion by which, when it comes to Religion, they presume that "One size fits all." They hold it as dogma that "Religion" was invented to answer questions that are, in the modern world, answered by science, a view that is really a straw man argument called "God of the gaps." Therefore, they presume that religion no longer serves any purpose. They wrongly assert that the burden of proof falls on theism rather than atheism, as if a self-generated universe is somehow self-evident. They blame all of the wars in history on "Religion," as if the causes of war were not almost always, as is obvious and irrefutably self-evident, Territorial Conquest, or Power Struggles, or Economic Competition, or combinations thereof; that this is true even of so-called "holy wars." They assume that every Christian is a Fundamentalist who believes in Biblical Inerrancy with the most literalist interpretation. In fact, they appear to be mostly disgruntled former Fundamentalists themselves. Their rehearsed arguments tend only to apply to literalism, and with the erroneous assumption that the Bible is all one book; the result is that they implode and fall apart if they find themselves up against the actual Tradition of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church and the rules of spiritual reading as practiced by a good number of the Church Fathers. They have no understanding of the ancient world and of the sophistication of the Hebrew Scriptures with their varieties of literary genre, nor of the verified history of New Testament figures such as the Apostles, historical figures as confirmed by the second generation of Christian writers during the Roman persecution during the late first century and early second century. Finally, they have no education in the disciplines of History and Philosophy. As a result, almost every argument they make is, in philosophical terms, a Category Error.
So, let us take these problems one by one. In this first installment let us look at the difference between Transcendent Monotheism and the gods.
1. RELIGION: ONE SIZE FITS ALL (IN A PIG'S EYE)
I was recently asked to say how I define the word "religion." After years of experience with people who identify themselves as New Atheists, I offered a guarded answer.
"Before I reply, let me say that my definition is akin to the definition of 'life,' a word that covers an innumerable variety of species so diverse that it applies equally to a man and a microbe, about which it may be said that, other than being life, they have nothing in common. So, religion is rightly defined as beliefs and practices associated with a deity or deities. But the difference between, for example, the Aztec god of the sun, who would die without the sacrifices of enough human lives to feed on, and the omnipotent and eternal God whom Saint Paul said, 'Hath need of nothing,' is a difference so great that also they have nothing in common."
In 2008 I wrote an article entitled Dawkins' God that appeared in Touchstone Magazine. Below I draw from it.
If Richard Dawkins wants to refute what Christians believe, he should not declare his own belief in Divine Transcendence. Time magazine asked him and Francis Collins, a Christian who heads the Human Genome Project, what caused the universe to exist. The interviewer suggested that the answer could be God. “There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding,” Dawkins said. To this Collins responded, “That’s God.” Yes, said Dawkins,
but it could be any of a billion Gods . . . the chances of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small—at least the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case. . . . I don’t see the Olympian Gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there’s a God, it’s going to be a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.”
That last part is simply not true. Apparently Dawkins is not well versed in what he doesn’t believe. Saint Paul writes of “the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see” (1 Tim. 6:15–16). In the first of his Soliloquies, Saint Augustine writes of God as “incredibly grand.” The entire tradition of apophatic theology is about God who is beyond our understanding. God is spoken of in negatives, because we cannot know the Nature that is wholly other from every created nature, infinite, without beginning or end. So, what Dawkins claims to be “a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed,” is exactly what theologians have proposed for more than two millennia.
First of all, Dawkins has revealed, though he would never admit it, that he cannot really be an atheist, but at most an agnostic. Second, his one of a billion particular gods argument is a straw man argument. No matter how many gods have been worshiped in the many pantheons of history, the existence of a real omnipotent creator is objectively independent of something as limited as human imagination.
Although Dawkins means his estimation of the crucifixion of Christ as unworthy of divine grandeur to be a crushing criticism of Christianity, it is simply an echo of Paul’s words. “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Cor. 1:22–25).
Unworthy of divine grandeur indeed; that was the point of the cross. “God became human to make humans divine.” - Saint Athansius
Even if, as some archeological evidence seems to indicate, the name YHWH was once associated with a mere tribal god, we begin to see Henotheism (one all-powerful God who rules over the gods) in Exodus, especially in his judgment on the lesser gods of Mizraim (Egypt). But what becomes clear in the writings of the Prophets, beginning with the Book of Isaiah, is, at the very least, a growth of Henotheism into Monotheism, a greater revelation given to Israel. Before the time of the Second Temple period, it is obvious that Monotheism became the belief that it remains to this day. It is an essential difference in kind from the polytheisms that came before. No god of the pantheons was worshiped as existing before time. No mere god was credited with creating time. No god of any pantheon was believed to be the Creator and Sustainer of all things. No god of any pantheon was believed to be transcendent, and beyond all possible comprehension by created minds. Dawkins’ argument is a parochial and ridiculous Category Error.
The gods of the Pagan Roman Empire, the Greek pantheon renamed one by one, was not belief in an eternal and transcendent non-contingent Creator of all things. The gods of Mount Olympas were all contingent beings, children of parents who were also gods. They were supermen and superwomen, born into super families like The Incredibles, except that they were immune to dying. The pagans believed that their gods were born into the universe, and that it already existed before they were conceived. They required a home in which to be conceived and come to birth. But the One transcendent God that Christianity inherited from the fully developed monotheism of Israel has no beginning, did not come into an existing universe, but rather created and sustains the universe. So, there is a fundamental categorical difference between the gods and God. As you can see, that is a huge difference between two very different belief systems.
I related all of this to a follower of the New Atheism. But he failed to understand a word I had said. His reply was, "If you're one of those who believe that none of the other gods are real, that only the one you believe in is the real true god, let me tell you this: atheists are simply people who have no belief in that god any more than they do any of the other gods that aren't real. Okay? It no longer matters that theists still believe in one more god than all the others that also never existed."
Once again, it is a category error. So, I replied: "What you believe and what I believe are not what I was addressing. What I was addressing is the obvious fact that a belief system in created superbeings who are contingent, who were created themselves in time and space, and who came into existence at a point in time, and who depend on an origin and on the universe for their existence, is completely different in kind from a belief system about One Transcendent, non-contingent Creator and Sustainer of all that exists, Who has no origin in any other thing, Who is the First Cause of all, and Who created even time itself. Again, whether you believe in God or not is another subject entirely. But there is simply no argument that can be made against the self-evident fact that the two belief systems, Transcendent Monotheism and belief in gods, are completely different. History also confirms that this obvious categorical distinction is why Monotheism killed the gods centuries ago."
This brings us to another problem that must be taken together with the distinction between Transcendent Monotheism and mere pantheons.
2. THE "GOD OF THE GAPS" IS A STRAW MAN ARGUMENT.
In this first installment we must tackle these two category errors together. The "Any one of a billion gods" fallacy brings us directly into correcting not only a category error, but into correcting also a false historical narrative. The New Atheists insist that the only knowledge mankind needs is the kind that we obtain by science, by which they mean specifically empirical data. In future installments we will pay more attention to this error, but for now let us simply state that Scientism, the position I have just described, is not science. In fact, scientism, if adhered to strictly, makes the study of science impossible to do. Indeed, they seem not to notice the "Ph" in PhD, that is, Doctor of Philosophy. For indeed, many scientists have earned a PhD. There are other kinds of doctors in scientific fields, most obviously Medical Doctors (MD). But astrophysicists, for example, are each one a Doctor of Philosophy. The simple reality is that science is subordinate to philosophy. It is impossible to study science without first acknowledging the necessity and reality of Logic, a subdiscipline of Philosophy. Before we can study science, we must agree that the world and the universe make sense; that they are subject to physical laws undergirded by the laws of mathematics.
All of this will be given another look when we come to the subject of proving the existence of God; but for now, it is worth noting that modern science would never have been born but for belief in a created and ordered universe. I recognize that among the scientists in the academic world are many agnostics and self-proclaimed atheists (though they are not in the majority throughout the world), but the historical fact is that Transcendent Monotheism was necessary for modern science to have come into existence at all, and for it to have had a home in which to develop. Every Ivy League University was founded by an established Church, and it is neither an accident nor a coincidence that the early modern scientists, especially Galileo (despite his personality clash with the pope and some cardinals - and that is really all that it was), Johannes Kepler, Nicholas Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton, and others, believed that science was something we can learn because God made a logical and understandable universe. These facts are often overlooked or denied by New Atheists. Their version of history is a fiction story in which the Church hindered the growth of science. They believe in false historical narratives, such as the fictional account that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science, something Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson unfortunately stated on his remake of Cosmos (In fact, Bruno's execution was for heresy regarding the Mass - not something I defend; but let us get the story down accurately).
But the New Atheists, completely oblivious to history as they are, have a nice little fairytale that they hold as a dogmatic article of faith, even though they will never admit to having dogma or faith (but they do, obviously). In their storybook ancient man created gods, or more absurdly, created "Religion," to explain thunder. After many centuries of religious oppression, especially the "Dark Ages" - a term guaranteed to lower your GPA if used as a history major in a university - Science miraculously arrived on the scene, somehow, and gave us better explanations. Therefore, they insist, we no longer need Religion. Just where exactly this science began to be studied, and who funded it, and the venue in which it was nourished and grew, is completely irrelevant. But we no longer need the "God of the Gaps" in our knowledge about the Universe. We now have science to explain everything. Dr. Tyson very foolishly has said, "God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on." No wonder he is widely considered to be "The stupid person's idea of what a smart person is." Nobody has ever experienced a diminishing of faith because of learning newly discovered facts of science. That kind of recession is no part of human psychology at all.
The first thing they have failed to notice is that science has not explained everything. Any intelligent and educated person knows that every new discovery of science makes our knowledge appear exponentially to shrink. At the dawn of the twentieth century, many of the university graduates of that era had been taught that we can know all that there is to know. But today, after the work of Einstein and Hubble, and with everything we are still learning, wise scientists humbly appreciate the vastness of our ignorance. Every answer opens new questions. Both the micro and the macro world are filled with mysteries beyond what could have been imagined. So, the first answer to the great straw man argument is that today we have more gaps, not fewer gaps.
Nonetheless, as I pointed out to my atheist interlocutor, science has not killed the gods of the gaps, but rather Transcendent Monotheism killed them off long ago. Indeed, many of the gods were rulers of thunder, or air, or the sun, or the sea. They were limited deities like Thor in the Nordic pantheon, or Apollo in the Greek pantheon. But something happened in history that did away with such gods. The Monotheism of the people of Israel spread, mostly, due to Christianity. These limited gods who depended on an existing universe, who inherited immortality from their parents, who often exhibited moral failings and petty rivalry, were pushed aside by belief in the One Transcendent Creator and Sustainer of all things, the One with no beginning, contingent on nothing, creating by His infinite power and wisdom. If God, as opposed to the gods, was simply some product of human imagination to explain thunder, these New Atheists would not have any need to make any argument. Science has explained thunder thoroughly. And, even so, no intelligent person has ceased to believe in God because of it.
STAY TUNED
We are just getting started on this series.
