[D66] All quiet on the God front...

[R.O.]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/04/case-for-god-karen-armstrong

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ec/The_Case_for_God.jpg/220px-The_Case_for_God.jpg


  All quiet on the God front

Simon Blackburn discusses the argument that religious experience can't 
be discussed
Simon Blackburn

Published on Sat 4 Jul 2009 00.01 BST

This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get 
what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a 
history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that 
in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same 
thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation 
in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we 
find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, 
and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to 
create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would 
doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out 
of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and 
tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change 
may or may not be noticed by those around us.

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it 
once was in all the world's best traditions. However, there is a serpent 
in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the 
worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into 
a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion 
into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if 
you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you 
fail. This is Armstrong's principal target. With the scientific triumphs 
of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to 
become a theory - in particular the theory of the divine architect. This 
is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong 
writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of 
modern "militant" atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris 
have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to 
their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his 
or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which 
nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends 
silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as 
"God" have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of 
describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, 
contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of 
religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by 
language. Silence is its truest expression. The right kind of silence, 
of course, not that of the pothead or inebriate. The religious state is 
exactly that of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky": 
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know 
what they are." If Alice puts on a dog collar, she will be at one with 
the tradition.

Armstrong is not presenting a case for God in the sense most people in 
our idolatrous world would think of it. The ordinary man or woman in the 
pew or on the prayer mat probably thinks of God as a kind of large 
version of themselves with mysterious powers and a rather nasty temper. 
That is the vice of theory again, and as long as they think like that, 
ordinary folk are not truly religious, whatever they profess. By 
contrast, Armstrong promises that her kinds of practice will make us 
better, wiser, more forgiving, loving, courageous, selfless, hopeful and 
just. Who can be against that?

The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable 
improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding - only a 
kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond 
words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and 
truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art 
gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed 
myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored 
on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the 
improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more 
generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my 
beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on 
religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process 
stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being 
good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words. 
Her experience of "Jabberwocky" may have improved Alice.

Silence is just that. It is a kind of lowest common denominator of the 
human mind. The machine is idling. Which direction it then goes after a 
period of idling is a highly unpredictable matter. As David Hume put it, 
in human nature there is "some particle of the dove, mixed in with the 
wolf and the serpent". So we can expect that some directions will be 
better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or 
without the song and dance.

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