Consider this an exercise in “disambiguation,” a handy Wiki-word. I want to sort some things out. You know how atheists often point out that if you are a Christian (or a Jew or a Muslim) you are, despite your avid faith, actually an atheist, at least in somebody’s book, since you don’t believe in their deities. Zeus? Pure bunk, you say. Odin? Hell, no. When it comes to these gods, you turn into Mencken or Ingersoll, though you may carry on a gooey “personal relationship” with your doe-eyed soul-lover Jesus. Vis-à-vis Baal, Dagon, Huitzilopochtli and the rest, you are a stink-eyed atheist, scoffing at the superstitious credulity of the brain-washed morons who might waste their time worshipping them.
Here, though this is not my main point, we also find the unspoken error of Pascal’s Wager. Pascal committed the classic bifurcation fallacy when he advised his readers to opt for belief in God because you couldn’t really lose. Suppose there is a God. Great! If you decide to believe in him, he’ll give you a tickertape parade from the Pearly Gates to your personal condo overlooking the fabled streets of gold. On the other hand, suppose there is no God and, despite your belief in him, you just slip into Nothingness when you die. You were wrong! Or were you? Well, not entirely wrong, because the religious premise provided courage, comfort, and a sense of meaning while you needed these things. While you were alive. If that’s the end of the game, what of it? You played well. Was the goal really ever the main thing? Wasn’t it really the process? Sure it was!
But suppose it’s all true and you took the risk of not believing it? I hope you’re wearing your flame-proof underwear! You’ll be needing it! Better to bet on God than not to—even if there is no God! Sounds good, perhaps, at least until you realize there is more than a single horse in the race! I hear Allah is not inclined to great tolerance when it comes to Jews and Christians! Better to go with Allah, then? It’s up to you, of course, but remember, the Christian God supposedly requires faith in the sacrificial death of his Son, and Muslims come up short there. And so on. No matter which religion you choose, you’re slated for somebody’s hell, aren’t you? No matter which god you believe in, you’re still an atheist toward all the others. That’s why the crowds rooting for Polycarp’s martyrdom were shouting, “Away with the atheist!” They didn’t think the Christian bishop was an atheist like Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins. They just meant Polycarp dared to deny the existence of the Roman gods. Likewise when Polycarp waved his arm at the audience saying, “Right back atcha!”
I think these distinctions are handy to keep in mind when it comes to rival God concepts. Some people readily confess they believe in God, but as soon as they define “God,” somebody else will say, “Oh no you don’t!” They aren’t accusing you of dishonesty but of something more like equivocation. The philosopher Spinoza is a case in point. Some of his contemporaries dismissed him as an atheist, while others called him “God-intoxicated.” That is, instead of seeing pink elephants, Spinoza saw God everywhere he looked, even when he looked at you or me, or at anyone who called him an atheist, for that matter. The odd thing is that both groups were right! They were right because they were basing their clashing opinions on very different notions of “God.” Spinoza was a Pantheist. He believed that there is nothing but God. If God is infinite, there can be nothing else existing because, if there were, why, then God would be limited ontologically. His existence would not be infinite, unlimited.
Sufi mystics thought the same thing. They applied the Muslim doctrine of monotheism in this way. Traditionally, Muslims think that to say, e.g., that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God is to “ascribe partners to God,” and that’ll land you in hell for sure. If you say “Allah has daughters” (as the Meccans believed), you are ascribing partners to God. If, say, you are but an indifferent Muslim, secretly offering obeisance to Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, you are ascribing partners (or rivals!) to Allah. Okay, said the Sufi mystics, but if you claim you even exist as distinct from Allah, aren’t you making yourself his partner? Hence the thing to do is to extinguish the delusion of being anything but the same as Allah. Kabbalistic Jews said the same, though in different terms.
Spinoza came to it by way of philosophical reasoning. He figured that everything is a result of something and thus a mode of something. Well, everything goes back to God and is therefore a mode of God. “God” understood in this way is not a person. That would render him finite. We cannot exactly “define” God, e.g., specify “his” (its?) attributes in the manner of traditional theology. God cannot be defined because that would be mapping out his limits. “Defined” equals “finite,” and that’s not a pun. God has no plans or goals and therefore does not act to attain them. Everything in this world is the ineluctable, logically necessary unfolding of the nature of God, which we, with our worm’s eye view, can never hope to comprehend.
Now is this what “we” mean by “God”? Those who do hold such Pantheistic convictions are not theists, believers in a mighty Being called God, Jehovah, or Allah. I don’t accept such Idealist metaphysics. As August Comte said, the eternal verities of Platonism just seem like “cloudy mythology.” Besides, as Fundamentalist apologist Francis A. Schaeffer used to say, there may be less to Pantheism than meets the eye: is the sum in any way greater than the collection of parts? Or doesn’t Pantheism reduce to what Schaeffer dubbed “paneverythingism”?
Is it meaningful to give the name “God” to the “principle of concrescence,” as in Process philosophy/theology? Is the “Whence” of existence rightly called “God,” as Herbert Braun suggested? Is the unlimited potentiality of evolving existence to be called “God”? One thing’s for sure: you can’t meaningfully call it “Jehovah” any more than you could call it Odin or Zeus.
Something happened along the path from mythology to theology. Philosophy is what happened. Educated believers, like Philo of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo, felt the need to explain God in categories borrowed from Greek metaphysics, as did Anselm and Aquinas centuries later, followed by various philosophical theologians today. In my view, this was a fatal, even though inevitable, misstep. Mythology, as Bultmann saw, is the language of expressing the Ineffable and Transcendent in this-worldly terms, “objectifying” the Transcendent. To say God lives “up there” is picture code for describing the divine as ontologically transcendent. Anselm already admitted that a God turned into a static abstraction cannot love, rage, or even act. Traditional God-language is analogical, Aquinas said. The biblical deity really, theologians said, stands for this sterile, static condition. Is that “God”? Kant decoded the plan of salvation, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, as symbols of the moral life process. Is that Christian?
Albrecht Ritschl, a great Liberal Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, famously said that “Jesus has the value of God for us.” In other words, he wasn’t exactly an incarnation of God because, as Bultmann remarked, that is “primitive mythology.” Ritschl was trying to salvage as much as he could of Christian faith (as was Bultmann years later). I think Ritschl’s is a helpful phrase in discussing our topic. All these models, concepts, what have you, are God-analogues or homologues. That is, they occupy at least roughly the same position in this or that religio-philosophical system as “God” (Jehovah, Allah, Zeus, Odin) did in ancient mythic religion. But they are most definitely not different names for the same thing.
We can see this more clearly when we compare Western with Eastern faiths. Nirguna Brahman, Brahman without qualities, is not equivalent to Jehovah or Zeus. Brahman is higher than a Jehovah-like deity. On a lower plane of knowledge/reality, the Brahman is refracted into an anthropomorphic god, Brahma the Creator. It is this Brahma that corresponds to the biblical God. The same must be said of the Buddhist Sunyata (the Void) or Tathata (Suchness) or Dharmakaya (the Truth Body). There are discrete deities, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas, who are like Christ and the heavenly Father, but the Void is more like the primal Godhead which the three Persons of the Christian Trinity share. But the snag is that Christian theology does not admit of some super-God manifest in three modes. To match the Hindu-Buddhist doctrine, Christianity would have to be Modalist, not Trinitarian. I read Meister Eckhart as teaching a “desert of the Godhead” above the God of the Bible, but, condemned for heresy, he was not your standard Christian theologian.
You could sum up the ruination of traditional theology with another saying of Pascal: “the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Amen, brother! But theologians continue to pretend they are the same.
Now what does any of this have to do with whether God exists? Obviously, you need to know what something is before you know if you want to deny it. And by now you can see what a complicated proposition we face. Let’s complicate things further, shall we? Paul Tillich said that “God” is a symbol for God, the God beyond God, Being-itself. And our “God” is whatever counts as our “ultimate concern.” That is what is most important to us, what we live for (if anything). That which concerns one ultimately may not actually be of ultimate importance, in which case our concern with it would count, in Tillich’s terms, as “idolatrous faith.” For example, a sports team or a political candidate. Important, maybe, but ultimately important? Either way, it has the value of God for you. The only real atheist, for Tillich, is the apathist, the one who commits himself to nothing, who merely feeds off of life like a tapeworm.
Suppose you are an atheist in the conventional sense, disdaining belief in the theistic God, but you live for great art, music, film. Hey, that’s okay, says Tillich, because Beauty is a facet of Being, of the Holy, and you are thus ultimately concerned with the Ultimate. The same if you are a scientist or a philosopher consumed by the search for Truth. Ditto for the crusader for the right, for Justice. To push it to the limit, I should day that Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the crusading atheist, was in the Tillichian sense, paradoxically, ultimately concerned with “God,” the God concept, which she saw as a dangerous delusion that must be defeated. Tillich wasn’t trying to baptize these self-confessed atheists as believers in spite of themselves. He was just defending them against unreasonable condemnation by the conventionally religious.
I dare say that, in view of the range of uses for “God,” upon which no one owns the copyright, “atheist” could include a similar variety of opinions. Are you saying you don’t believe in Zeus or Jehovah? Do you reject Idealistic metaphysics? Of course you might accept a Platonic view of morality or numbers but not a personal God. You might be a Pantheist who believes in an all-pervasive Divine and accordingly rejects a theistic God. All told, I use “atheist” to denote nothing more than disbelief in anthropomorphic or anthropopathic gods, specifically the one most of my American contemporaries believe in. With Spinozism or Process Theology, even with my beloved Tillich, I don’t even get that far, because I think it is misleading to call these metaphysical figments “God.” They may “have the value of God” for some, but not for me, and I’m satisfied to stop short and to say I just don’t accept metaphysical Idealism. But I wish people who say they believe in God but mean something like the Force in Star Wars would reconsider.
I have a suggestion. Ask yourself if the kind of thing you call “God” could be expressed just as well in other words: universal potentiality, an open future, the ground of creativity, the cosmic balance, whatever. If so, then stop calling it “God.” That way we can understand each other better.