Those who are interested in the kind of amateur theological discussions I conduct here from time to time may care to read what follows; and those who aren't should look away now.
This post is a sequel to two earlier posts of mine tracing a meme roughly to the effect that belief in God doesn't necessarily involve the believer in a belief about the existence of anything, not even - would you believe it? - of a God. Stephen Clark, a professing Christian, now offers some reflections on the column of his colleague Michael McGhee, one of the writers whose opinions I had highlighted. By contrast with McGhee, Clark affirms, to begin with, that 'the question "whether God exists" is meaningful and important'. But anyone who is, like me, of a more or less literal turn of mind may be forgiven for being a little puzzled by what he immediately follows up with; because the account Clark gives of what it means to believe in God seems at first to dispense with God altogether. Not just with stage Gods, if I may so express it, of the kind he plainly disdains - 'an imagined Director of Megabig Incorporated' - but God under any notion at all, even some vaguely conceived Transcendence, behind or beneath or within, and in every case also beyond, the stuff of the more stuffish world we experience around us, a Something or a Someone that or who actually exists and has real effects in, or on, or through, the universe. Why do I say Clark seems to dispense with God altogether? I say it because he gives an account of religion, or at any rate of one religious tradition (the Abrahamic) according to which...
[T]o "believe in God"... is to believe in the possibility of Justice, of Freedom from oppression... Believing in God is believing that the orphan and the widow will be, must be vindicated. The first Abrahamic monotheists, like the first Christians, were in a real sense atheists: that is, they denied that the spirits evoked in most religious ceremonial deserved our worship, denied that kings and emperors were divine, and chose to remodel their personal and communal lives in the light of the demand for Justice. It was also important to acknowledge their own sins, their own walking aside from the Way...
.....
So Abrahamic monotheists and militant atheists have this much in common: we dream of truth and justice, and remodel our lives accordingly. When tyrants order the torture and killing of the innocent it is they who are condemned: their victims are their judges...
And so on. Clark ends, then, by saying that this is what Abrahamic monotheists and militant atheists have in common (and we must take him to mean here those militant atheists who pursue justice and freedom from oppression, since not all militant atheists do that). But he has begun by saying that these pursuits or purposes that they have in common are what 'to believe in God' is. In other words, believing in God is just like not believing in God provided that you believe in the possibility of justice and freedom from oppression. What believers and non-believers in God have in common is also given by Clark as 'what we mean by "religion"', so that one might as well say that the just and freedom-loving atheist is religious, and that the distinction between believers in God and non-believers lies in...?
Well, be puzzled no more. It turns out (in the final paragraph) that there is something which distinguishes the believers from the non-believers after all. This is, well, the belief that God does indeed exist. For only God can underwrite the attachment to justice. I let this claim pass on the present occasion, though I don't accept it. But what a rigmarole! To first define religion in a way that radically reduces its core, turns atheists into disguised people of faith and religion itself into a set of ethical and political commitments; and only later add belief in the existence of God as a necessary support for those commitments. Note also the logical fallacy of inferring an existence from a putative need. I might think that my future happiness depends on someone's securing for me a chauffeur-driven stretch limo and a supplementary barouche; but even if I do think it, I wouldn't let the hypothesis convince me that such a benefactor will eventually turn up.
