© Randy Heffner
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Here's a riff on an old expression: If I claim to make a speech in the middle of a forest with no one else around, is it really a speech? At dictionary.com (i.e., Random House), there's this:
So yes. I uttered it, I declared it, it was speech. Only the question isn't, "Is it speech?" I'm asking, "Is it a speech?" Back to the definition:
So it wasn't. There was no audience. But then, what if I recorded it on video and put it online? Does that count as being before an audience? What does "before" mean? I could keep going, but I'll spare you. The words and the meanings fight with each other. I had something to say in that lonely forest, and I said it.
Assumptions and definitions matter
To evaluate my speech claim, we must be clear on definitions. But nearly every day, I find the meanings of critical words to be left to readers' imaginations. More dangerously, I find the same for critical assumptions behind a claim. Whether the vagueness is intentional or careless, the result is the same. Operating on vague assumptions and ill-defined terms, authors draw conclusions and make pronouncements that seem to, but don't really, say something profound.Operating on vague assumptions and ill-defined terms, authors draw conclusions and make pronouncements that seem to, but don't really, say something profound. I find this in the above passage from Hitchens.
But let me digress to give due credit. In the book, God is not Great, Hitchens makes important observations that need remembrance. For example:
- "In Belfast, I have seen whole streets burned out by sectarian warfare between different sects of Christianity." (p. 18)
- In reaction to the 9/11 attacks, certain evangelists "announced that the immolation of their fellow creatures was a divine judgment on a secular society that tolerated homosexuality and abortion." (p. 32)
- "…the Confederacy adopted the Latin motto 'Deo Vindice' or, in effect, 'God is on our side.'" (p. 178)
- Many Christians were complicit in the Rwandan genocide. (ch. 13)
- Many Christians were complicit with Nazi Germany. (ch. 19)
For such, the whole world should weep and all Christians should examine their own hearts for complicity, deepening their vigilance in protecting the reality of their love, the integrity of their theology, and the justness of their convictions and actions.
A definition of G[g]od
Along with the Hitchens quote above, it's useful to consider this passage from Sam Harris, published shortly after hurricane Katrina.
In their logic against the existence of God, these quotes depend on a definition of God (or "god" as Hitchens renders the word) that has specific implications embedded in it. I'll approximate it like this:
- God is a transcendent, spiritual being who loves everyone, knows everything, and can do anything.
- Because of God's love and compassion, God desires for everyone to have a pain-free life (at least in regard to blindness and hurricanes).
- Because God desires this, God will use whatever means available to effect pain-free lives, and especially so if people pray.
- Because God knows everything, God knows when people will experience pain.
- Because God can do anything, God has the means to prevent pain and thus will always do so.
This is the god they advocate against, weighing single instances of blindness and hurricanes against the "always" in their implicit definitions. And, since it's patently clear that blindness, hurricanes, and other pains exist, it's trivial to conclude, as Harris and Hitchens do, that God, by this or any similar definition, does not exist.It's trivial to conclude, as Harris and Hitchens do, that God, by this or any similar definition, does not exist.
I, for one, confidently believe that no such God exists.
I'll take it one further. Given this definition, not only is it good philosophy to conclude against god, it's good science. Even though the being posited by the definition would exist in a metaphysical realm, where our physical sciences are fatally impotent, the word "always" brings the definition into the realm of specific, observable, falsifiable effects in the physical world. A single counterexample disproves the god hypothesis. Paraphrasing a Russian proverb, "One word of pain shall outweigh the whole God."3 I might as well say, "Atheists don't exist" — the Hitchens counterexample proves me wrong, no other evidence required.
Art, legalism, and our better selves
Harris and Hitchens, of course, have much more to say about g[G]od, which I may pick up on in the future. For now, I wish to continue with this bit, which follows a couple of pages later in Hitchens:
Hitchens here establishes common ground with Theists: wonder and mystery and awe. The Atheist's response to these movements of the soul, as well as to the soul's ethical promptings, is art, artists, and their creations. Hitchens places these in direct opposition to Theists' holy books. We have this, they have that. Subtler but more significant is Hitchens' implied difference between Atheists' relationships
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with art and Theists' relationships with holy books. For Atheists, artistic engagement with artistic artifacts, not legalism, is the path toward understanding our vague sense of wonder and awe and becoming our better selves. By contrast, and bringing in his above word "servile" and the general tone of the book, it seems his view is that, for Theists, the path demanded by God is legalistic engagement with legal documents — all awe is due strictly to God, to whom Theists must offer servile praise, searching in God's book for rigid and impossible laws they must obey. If I'm wrong in this reading, I'd be happy for a counter-passage in Hitchens to consider.
For Hitchens, the notion of God means rigid legalism, and art is something other and foreign to that. I agree with Hitchens that art and legalism don't make good bedfellows. And, if indeed he thought of the Bible as non-artistic, rigid, legalistic, and colorless, Hitchens may be forgiven this. In my experience, many Christians also treat the Bible this way. Even when it is directly artistic, as with its poetry, the text is often splayed out on a stainless steel table and dissected with scientistic tools from one's favored school of theology.
Hitchens is on to something in his idea that art is the useful response to our sense of mystery and awe and wonder and that it's a path to our better selves.Hitchens is on to something in his idea that art is the useful response to our sense of mystery and awe and wonder and that it's a path to our better selves. At its best, art is a window through which we may see and understand what we couldn't before. Bringing us through new experiences in new places with new perspectives, art offers new eyes for the heart of a matter. When we wrestle with beauty or ugliness embodied by art, desiring to see truth and goodness more clearly, we come out better people. Yet even as we gain deeper insight and stronger character, great art opens even more questions, revealing yet deeper mysteries and strengthening our humility. We learn, and we learn that there's yet more to learn. Great art fights rigid, legalistic interpretation. It resists reduction to a message or rule. It's like Flannery O'Connor once said about stories: "Every story is a unique statement — experience is the better word — and no abstract meaning can be drained off from it."5
What if God favors reality over appearance?
Let's do a metaphysical thought experiment. What if God exists, and God is bright enough to realize the same thing Hitchens did about art and mystery? What if God cares more deeply about people gradually becoming their better selves rather than legalistically acting like it? How would that God then enter the world? Would it be in a reductionist, simplistic, legalistic way, aimed only at behavior? What if that God so deeply understood art
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as the path to becoming, and so deeply cared about fostering life in human hearts, that "God's love" would enter the world only in ways that frustrate simplistic, scientistic methods — for both Theists and Atheists? Art doesn't traffic in certitude, so how would that God nudge people away from the human drive to "know for sure" toward the humility of continually seeking to unravel mystery and find life in their better selves?
Perhaps engaging with God would be an artistic endeavor and not rigidly definable. God might offer texts that are ambiguous, rich, confusing, varied, and arguable — like great art. Perhaps artistic texts are the only kind suitable to the intent of a God focused on the reality of heart rather than legalistic appearance. Such texts could speak only through mystery and could be truly understood only with literary, artistic eyes. Perhaps they would defy reduction to abstract meanings and immutable rules. Perhaps when read legalistically, they would only befuddle and confuse, even to the point of becoming arguments against the very God that gave them.
And, to thwart those who aren't really looking with the heart anyway, perhaps texts from this artistic God would allow an easy out both for those who promulgate legalistic certainty for God and for those who deny God's existence via definitions that are simplistic and trivially reductionistic.
Endnotes
1 Hitchens, Christopher. God is not Great. Twelve, 2009, p. 3.
2 There Is No God (And You Know It). Sam Harris, 6 Oct. 2005, samharris.org/there-is-no-god-and-you-know-it//. Accessed 17 Feb. 2020.
3 The original proverb is "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world." Alexandr Solzhenitsyn famously quoted this in his Nobel lecture. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn — Nobel Lecture. The Nobel Prize, 1970, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/lecture/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2020.
4 Hitchens. p. 5.
5 OConnor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999, p. 147.
by Randy Heffner
Randy lives at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and culture — reading, watching, walking, and sometimes creating in search of our better selves. Film and photography have a lot to do with it, but anyway, art. The tie is an anomaly.