Jump Cut: The Pursuit of Knowledge, God and Reality in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Clarke and Atheism

The more times I see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the stranger the movie gets. Arthur C Clarke said a couple of things about the film which illuminate what it is about, and a number of details in the film offer further clues. Other work he became interested in much later, also casts light on the real subject of the film.

Firstly, there is Clarke’s famous statement that Kubrick and Clarke had persuaded MGM to fund an enormously expensive religious movie (he actually meant a theological movie, but such a distinction might have been lost on the moguls of the time). His books are in fact often peppered with ideas which approach theological questions, yet he described himself as an atheist many times during his life. This apparent contradiction needs to be explored.

A good overview of the complexity of his views on both religion and theology can be found on the Wikipedia page on Clarke’s life:

Themes of religion and spirituality appear in much of Clarke's writing. He said: "Any path to knowledge is a path to God—or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use."^[105] [Mintowt-Czyz, Lech (19 March 2008). "Sir Arthur C. Clarke: The Times obituary". The Times. London. Retrieved 6 August 2008.]

And:

He described himself as "fascinated by the concept of God". J. B. S. Haldane, near the end of his life, suggested in a personal letter to Clarke that Clarke should receive a prize in theology for being one of the few people to write anything new on the subject, and went on to say that if Clarke's writings did not contain multiple contradictory theological views, he might have been a menace.^[106] [Clarke, Arthur C. (1999) [1991]. "Credo". Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!. First appearing in Living Philosophies, Clifton Fadiman, ed. (Doubleday). New York: St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 358–363. ISBN 978-0-312-26745-2. Retrieved 8 January 2010.]

I think Haldane was right about how dangerous some of his ideas were, and that he often contradicted himself on matters of theology outside the scope of science. The following illustrates how he occupied different intellectual spaces from early on in his life, and right up to the end:

 When he entered the Royal Air Force, Clarke insisted that his dog tags be marked "pantheist" rather than the default, Church of England,^[43] and in a 1991 essay entitled "Credo", described himself as a logical positivist from the age of ten.^[106] In 2000, Clarke told the Sri Lankan newspaper, The Island, "I don't believe in God or an afterlife, ^[107] and he identified himself as an atheist.^[108] He was honoured as a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism.^[109] He has also described himself as a "crypto-Buddhist", insisting that Buddhism is not a religion.^[110]

So he was characterising himself as a pantheist at the time he joined the Royal Air Force in WW2, but in 1991 he says in ‘Credo’ that he was a ‘logical positivist’ from the age of ten. Is this possible? It’s a contradiction, but I think it is possible that both characterisations are true. He was a mathematician and a scientist, which doesn’t preclude an interest in profound questions about the nature of the universe and reality, which are less amenable to purely rational answers. We will come back to the ‘crypto-Buddhism' later.

In saying that he was a pantheist in his early twenties, I think he was indicating that he was already making an equation between theology, the divine, and the nature of reality itself. Those of a mathematical bent sometimes do, since the mathematics of the physical world reveal something of how reality works behind the physical representation of it. But if you are going to investigate reality itself through mathematics, you need to stick close to the evidence. To that extent he was a logical positivist for the whole of his life.

So Clarke was interesting in theology and theological questions. But he clearly distinguished between those questions, and the principal territories occupied by modern religions:

A famous quotation of Clarke's is often cited: "One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. ^[110] He was quoted in Popular Science in 2004 as saying of religion: "Most malevolent and persistent of all mind viruses. We should get rid of it as quick as we can.” [Cherry, Matt (1999). "God, Science, and Delusion: A Chat With Arthur C. Clarke". Free Inquiry. 19 (2). Amherst, New York: Council for Secular Humanism. ISSN 0272-0701. Archived from the original on 3 April 2008. Retrieved 16 April2008.]

Yet Clarke was happy to engage in dialogue with those who were not locked into a view of religion which saw faith as its core. Alan Watts was one of those:

In a three-day "dialogue on man and his world" with Alan Watts, Clarke stated that he was biased against religion and said that he could not forgive religions for what he perceived as their inability to prevent atrocities and wars over time.^[112] Clarke, Arthur C.; Watts, Alan (January 1972). "At the Interface: Technology and Mysticism". Playboy. Vol. 19 no. 1. Chicago, Ill.: HMH Publishing. p. 94. ISSN 0032-1478. OCLC 3534353. ]

Alan Watts of course, was heavily influenced by Buddhism, which Clarke said was not a religion. That distinction is an important one. Buddhism is a way of approaching reality, which assumes that everything is (in some way) related to everything else, both in terms of representation, and In terms of causality.

Despite his atheism, themes of deism is a common feature within Clarke's work.^[[115] (20 March 2008). "For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 21 January 2020.]

Edward Rothstein understood the deeply rooted dichotomy in Clarke’s approach to understanding the nature of the universe. Buddhism of course famously managed to construct a theological understanding of reality which did not much require discussion of gods, which is one of its most attractive features. And in case anyone was in doubt about Clarke’s seriousness about that kind of atheism:

Clarke left written instructions for a funeral that stated: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral."^[116] "[Quotes of the Day". Time. 19 March 2008. Archived from the original on 24 March 2008. Retrieved 20 March 2008.] 

Crypto-Buddhism

Clarke spent more than half his life living in what is now Sri Lanka (he moved there in 1956). He appreciated the good diving opportunities available in the warm seas around the island, which represented the nearest experience to the weightlessness of space he was likely to experience in his lifetime. Sri Lanka  was also a relatively cheap place to live. Writers then as now found it difficult to make a decent living out of their writing, so moving there made practical sense.

Clarke’s closest friend was a Sri Lankan, who he met while he was studying in London in 1947.(Leslie Ekanayake).Their association lasted for the next thirty years, until the premature death of Ekanayake. So Clarke is likely to have had discussions about Buddhist ideas on the nature of reality long before he made the decision to move to Sri Lanka. His understanding that Buddhism was a way of engaging with the nature of reality which was, despite appearances, not a religion, may have been acquired from discussion with Ekanayake.

Clarke refer to his engagement with Buddhist thought as crypto-Buddhism because he read the body of ideas contained in Buddhist thought differently from others. He saw Buddhism as a way of attempting to understand reality in philosophical terms, which also allowed the possibility of exploring reality with mathematics and geometry.

Buddhism is a body of ideas which, like many religions in the east, embraces paradox, and the importance of what cannot be seen. What is on the surface, is not all that there is. Investigation of what is puzzling about reality is required in order to gain understanding, and ultimately, enlightenment. I was given a small statue of the Chinese goddess Mu when I was in my twenties, made from peachwood, which represented her as holding a lotus above her head. Mu represents the all, from which everything is made, and what is made is what floats on top of the waters. But though the lotus emerges into visibility, it is not itself the All. It is connected with it (the statue hold the lotus flower by the stem), but is just a representation of what lies unseen in the waters.

I’ve described some aspects of the Buddhist approach to what is hidden, and the Buddhist understanding of causal processes, elsewhere (‘The Enlightenment of David Hume’). For the early Buddhists (I’ve written about the scholarly issues around the antiquity of Buddhism in ‘The Age of the Buddha), the ideas that reality itself is hidden from us, and that how things are represented to us depends on causal relationships which are not necessarily obvious, clearly depended on a sophisticated philosophical model of the world. One of the reasons for the importance of scholars and priests in Buddhism is that thought and actions are required in order restore balance where balance has been disrupted. Everything is understood to be connected to everything else, and is understood to be a cause of something. Since we do not have direct and unmediated access to the invisible all, careful investigation of these issues by those who have a profound understanding of them is required.

So what were Clarke’s actual views of God and the nature of Reality itself? Clarke kept a journal during the writing and production of 2001, which gives us some clues [Clarke included some of this journal in his book ‘The Lost World’s of 2001’. The journal has been quoted elsewhere also]. At one point he records a discussion of Cantor’s theory of transfinite groups with Kubrick, without going into any detail, or giving a context for such a discussion. Transfinite groups gave Cantor a great deal of intellectual and psychological difficulty, because of the implications (that you can have infinities which are different sizes, but they are all infinite, for example. Which again implies that all things are connected with each other, and each thing shares the same identity).

It is likely that Clarke was expounding something of his mathematical view of the nature of God and of Reality to Kubrick. This was the way he understood that theology had to work, and both faith and belief had nothing to do with theology.

It is clear that he understood God and Reality to have some profound relationship to actual infinity (as opposed to an Aristotelian ‘potential’ infinity). Modern scholars (both mathematicians and theologians) ignore actual infinity on the grounds that (they think) it is impossible to work with the concept. This doesn’t mean it makes no sense to address the question of the actual infinite as Cantor did. Clarke had the actual infinite in his mind, since he referenced Cantor directly in his conversation with Kubrick, and didn’t just confine himself to the mathematics involved in the theory of transfinite groups. The nature of the world in which we have our existence bears some relationship to the actual infinite, rather than the hollowed out version of the infinite which is subject to mathematics and geometry in space and time.

The teaching machine which appears to the man-apes close to the beginning of the film was not the first choice of object to serve that purpose. But it is the object that Clarke and Kubrick settled on. The reasons for this choice are interesting on account of its dimensions, which are precisely outlined in the novel associated with the film (and elsewhere). It is a black oblong block, whose dimensions are one, four, and nine units. That is, one squared, two squared, and three squared. That is the beginning of an infinite series, which, if extended, would eventually reach infinity itself. There were discussions about what images would be displayed on the monolith to the man-apes, but Clarke and Kubrick decided not to show any of these, or even explicitly suggest (in the film) that the monolith was communicating with the man-apes. However the dimensions of the monolith, embodying the beginning of an infinite series suggest that the communication was emanating from the infinite itself.

Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite

The Stargate sequence in the film begins after David Bowman’s struggle with HAL (and his purely logical and algorithmic artificial intelligence, which results in HAL’s  murder of the crew who were still in hibernation), and once they are in Jupiter space. Jupiter is of course the king of the Gods (Clarke’s  book locates the Stargate near Saturn). During that sequence David Bowman’s space pod travels over an abstracted landscape: he is travelling somewhere, but it clearly isn’t in real space. At one point, seven double tetrahedrons appear, hanging above the landscape. Each of the tetrahedrons is filled with geometric lines which are in motion. Each of the tetrahedrons contains the same geometric patterns, which change in perfect synchrony. This image is very reminiscent of Leibniz’s description of the monads which he posited were the foundation of reality. All of the Leibnizian monads reflect each other, in both nature and in processes. All of them are derived from the principle monad, which is the foundation of Reality itself [Leibniz was a student of Chinese philosophy and oriental patterns of thought, as well as a polymath and logician].

Why are these images there in this part of the film? Douglas Trumbull, who was responsible for many of the special effects in the film, has said that the images in the double tetrahedra were built from reprojections of the moving slit-screen generated landscape below the tetrahedra. Which by itself doesn’t tell us very much, except perhaps that both the landscape and the monads were meant to be different representations of the same thing. One shows an abstracted representation of travel through space; the other shows mathematical and geometrical change which might not exist in space at all. This is likely to have emerged from suggestions from Clarke, but I am not aware that such conversation is recorded. But it can be understood as a product of Clarke’s self-declared Crypto-Buddhism.

These ideas may have their origin not via Leibniz, but directly through Hindu and Buddhist texts. One of the most relevant ideas is that of Indra’s Net.

Indra’s Net

Quoting Wikipedia once again, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net

"Indra's net" is an infinitely large net of cords owned by the Vedicdeva Indra, which hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the axis mundi of Buddhist and Hindu cosmology. In this metaphor, Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels.^[5]

In the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism, which follows the Avatamsaka Sutra, the image of "Indra's net" is used to describe the interconnectedness of the universe.^[5]  Francis H Cook describes Indra's net thus:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.^[6]

The Buddha in the Avatamsaka Sutra's 30th book states a similar idea:

If untold buddha-lands are reduced to atoms,

In one atom are untold lands,

And as in one,

So in each.

The atoms to which these buddha-lands are reduced in an instant are unspeakable,

And so are the atoms of continuous reduction moment to moment

Going on for untold eons;

These atoms contain lands unspeakably many,

And the atoms in these lands are even harder to tell of.^[7]

Book 30 of the sutra is named "The Incalculable" because it focuses on the idea of the infinitude of the universe and as Cleary notes, concludes that "the cosmos is unutterably infinite, and hence so is the total scope and detail of knowledge and activity of enlightenment."^[8] In another part of the sutra, the Buddhas' knowledge of all phenomena is referred to by this metaphor:

They [Buddhas] know all phenomena come from interdependent origination.

They know all world systems exhaustively. They know all the

different phenomena in all worlds, interrelated in Indra's net.^[9]

How old are these ideas? They are a lot older than Greek ideas about the infinite, and the idea reflected to us from the 1^st millennium BCE in Greece that Reality itself is necessarily One, which was a question which Plato mentioned as of key significance to our understanding of Reality.

It is worth noting that the section caption film refers to ‘Beyond the Infinite’, rather than just 'The Infinite'. This I think would have been a formulation by Clarke, given his understanding of Buddhist ideas. The infinite is incalculable and ineffable. We can say it is unbounded and without limit, and so on. But describing what it actually is, is another matter. The first translator of the works of Plato, Aristotle and  the Neoplatonists into English, Thomas Taylor, wrote about this question, and the Greek interest in it, at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though it remains a question which is not often (if ever) discussed in classes devoted to philosophy or classics.

The Three Million Year Jump Cut

It is possible to understand the film version of 2001 as a film with a broken back. Kubrick was in charge of the script for the film, and Clarke was writing the novelisation. They talked together and shared ideas of course, but Kubrick had a different idea of how the film should be. I’ve quoted evidence of Clarke’s philosophical interests. Kubrick did not share most of these, hence the fact that, in the course of production, Clarke talked with him about Cantor’s ideas, which he knew nothing about.

In the end, Clarke’s understanding of how the film should be was very different from Kubrick’s, so what we have as the final product is actually a collision between two quite different perspectives. Kubrick’s general view was that nation states (i.e., organised societies) had always behaved like gangsters. There was very little good to say about them. His earlier films bear this out: ‘Paths of Glory’, ‘Spartacus’, and ‘Dr Strangelove’. None of which paint a picture of a species which is keen to avoid war, destruction and casual killing. He still felt that while he was making 2001, and his later films (‘Clockwork Orange’, ‘Barry Lyndon’ ‘’Full Metal Jacket’) suggest he retained something of that world-view for most of the rest of his life. So the beginning of 2001 features the struggle for survival of a group of man-apes, eking out a precarious living in the dry African savannah millions of years ago, in the vicinity of a contested water hole. They eat vegetables and are prey to carnivores. Their prospects are not good.

Then one of the man-apes has the idea to use an animal bone as a tool, and by extension, a weapon. Everything changes. They have access to better nutrition, and gain hegemony over a competing group of man-apes by beating their leader to death, and as far as Kubrick is concerned, the future is set. The implication is that the idea was first suggested to the man-apes by the monolith.

Cue the jump cut to orbiting space weapons. The implication is that nothing of significance has changed over the intervening millions of years.

As if that is the human story. What does this do to the movie? It means there is no space available for anything which happened in between - culturally and intellectually. None of that is of any importance to this story. Clarke could not have included much about early human intellectual development in the west, but he could have included material from the east.

The consequence of inserting this jump cut is that, though the development of the human race is perhaps to be conceived as being  towards a grasp of infinite knowledge, and an engagement with Reality itself (Clarke’s understanding), there is no space in this film for reflection that this is an old idea, and that human beings were aspiring to this over many thousands of years, east and west. As I’ve indicated, there are residual clues in the film that a more sophisticated view was discussed in the early days of the production.

Instead, Kubrick peddles the rather lame idea that human evolution will take us to infinity, with the help of those unseen beings who first installed the monoliths in various parts of the solar system. Despite the fact that it seems in Kubrick’s view, the evolution of the human species just intensifies a meaningless struggle for survival. Bigger weapons, and ever more violence.The unseen beings were the ones who encouraged the use of tools and weapons, and now, at the end of the line, David Bowman has mysteriously reached infinity in any case, and is reborn as a divine being.

2001 is a deeply unsatisfactory film, when it is examined in detail. It makes it much harder to explain human cultural history, mainly because that cultural history is just swept away by Kubrick as of no importance, in one 25^th of a second. 

[Retitled September 21st, 2020]

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (IV)

How can we have polytheistic and monotheistic ideas apparently existing side by side, within the same cultural contexts? This seems to have been the case in ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and perhaps also in ancient Greece. Plato often referred to ‘ho theos’ (God), rather than ‘the gods’, yet the cultural context was polytheistic. This is a mystery if we are yoked to the idea of a cultural transition from polytheism to monotheism within historical time.  That the evidence from these cultures, does not, on the face of things, provide support for this idea, suggests strongly that this modern and simplistic model of ancient cultural development is deficient in explanatory power, and is more than likely plain false.

It is far from straightforward to disentangle the elements of this issue, so that we might come to a practical resolution as to what is actually going on.  It is however useful to discuss some of the issues which stand between us and an understanding.

One of these of course is our modern preconception of what it was possible to think before Jaspers ‘Axial Age’. The very concept of an axial age speaks of a desire to close off detailed study of thought before classical Greece.

Why would we want to close off the analysis of earlier patterns of thought? The answer is that we consider that such patterns are irretrievably irrational in nature, and offer no rational insights into patterns of thought in antiquity. They may be intelligible in terms of the language of mythology, and in terms of the logic of poetry, but their literature is essentially pre-rational, and so is best approached in terms of disordered, and even pathological thought.

Another is the idea that it is only with the capacity to engage in rational thought, is it possible to  contemplate abstractions such as ‘Being’ and the ‘Infinite’. Before the classical period, we conceive that man did not contemplate Being or the Infinite, at least in rational terms, whatever inchoate inklings they may have had.

One of the issues with the scholarship which addresses thought from time before the Greek contributions, is that it is generally assumed, rather than evidentially determined, that there is no transcendentalist aspect present in ancient religions. What is missing is not defined in the context of ancient thought however, because there is nothing to be defined. Transcendentalist patterns of thought belong to later - and western - intellectual traditions.

It does not however take much effort to show that this is a false assumption, and that the interpretation does not account for the range of evidence which is available. For example, the Assyrian god Ashur was understood in a number of ways, including simply as the local god of the city of Ashur – recognised as powerful because his city was powerful.  However Ashur was also defined as the totality of the other gods. In which case he could be understood in terms of a grand aggregation of the properties and attributes associated with the other Assyrian divinities. This idea has been entertained, in this simple form, also for Egyptian polytheism, using the term ‘cosmotheism’ to mark out this species of thought concerning the ‘pre-axial gods’. In other words, the definition of the supreme deity in the official pantheon of gods is a plain summation of everything associated with the divine pantheon.

This also is how Marduk appears to be presented in the Babylonian New Year Festival – Marduk is the principal god in the Babylonian pantheon, and a section of the liturgy of the festival assigns him fifty names. These names are the other gods: they are listed for recitation, and the main characteristics are described and their principal functions are defined. Together, these gods, their descriptions and their functions delineate all the proper characteristics of divine kingship. As the supreme god, Marduk is also the perfect model for kingship in the Babylonian state.

This is how the literary and ritual texts can be, and are, read by the majority of scholars interested in the subject of ancient divinity. The starting point is that there is no transcendentalist aspect to the ancient understanding of the divinities in the pantheons of Assyria, Babylonia, or Egypt. If there is something approximating to a transcendentalist conception of the supreme deity, we cannot fathom it – and in any case, it will not be a wholly rational conception which would stand up to scrutiny. The idea will necessarily be vague, inchoate and imprecise, and will have no significant range of function associated with it. Such a loosely defined transcendentalism will perhaps signify only an exaltation of the status of the god, in the same way that in ancient Greece, divine status could be accorded to human individuals, without it being understood that the individuals had actually become divine.

[This sequence of essays will continue, as and when, throughout 2019]

Man as the Image of God (A conversation with Johannes Richter)

From Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

This brings the episode of the golden calf into perspective. Are there any precursors to the idea of man as the image of God?

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

I guess that you are asking if there is a significant history of the idea of man as the image of God before Christianity, and the doctrine of the incarnation? Yes there is, and it is a very old idea. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was understood to be the Divine on earth – he could be understood to reflect many aspects of divinity – for example, when represented as the destroyer of Egypt’s enemies, he was depicted in the form of the God Montu, wielding a club. But he could be any of the other gods in the divine pantheon, according to circumstance. 

In Mesopotamia they had the same essential notion, that the king represented the perfect man, and was ‘the very image of the God’ (I quoted from some Assyrian letters which illustrate that this was the contemporary understanding – see 'Standing in the Place of Ea'). There are a number of parodies of this idea which appear in the Old Testament, as a consequence of the Hebrew exposure to Mesopotamian ideas while in exile in Babylon. I wrote about this in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.

This isn’t a way of thinking which was necessarily drawn from the east, though there are clear parallels. The Romans developed an imperial cult around their emperors from the end of the Republic onwards. Effectively the emperors were worshipped either as semi-divine, or as actually divine (sometimes hard to tell the difference). They could be elevated to divine status after death, even if no-one was sure of their actual status while alive.

[Quotation from 'Knowledge and Belief in Israel']

As discussed elsewhere in The Sacred History of Being, in Greece and Mesopotamia divine images functioned as a part of a complex system, a chain of images of Being, to enable intellectual access to the most difficult of all images which might be apprehended by man or god: the one true thing, which is the nature of reality itself, and the source of all knowledge.  

Over time, the polytheistic show was entirely removed in Israel. The monotheism which emerged in Israel was necessarily no longer about access to knowledge of the divine and its apprehension - a mental discipline - but about belief.  

Replying to @Rotorvator

Excellent. Do you unpack the last sentence somewhere? The idea that belief was merely mental assent is unfortunately common.

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

I’ve talked about this a lot, and in various places. I distinguish between belief (doxa, or opinion) and faith (pistis). Belief serves societal and political functions. Faith is not so much about what is believed, but is about the necessity that the due observances are conducted. In early Judaism for example, the scope for observance was gradually narrowed, to the point where only the priests in the temple in Jerusalem could perform ritual. Everybody else had to make do with a simple altar of earth. This was about political and social power. I talk about this in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, and there is a separate article on the blog called ‘Distinguishing Belief and Faith’.

If religion is about the acquisition of knowledge of divine things, but is subsequently transformed into a social and political construction which enforces what you are to believe, then that religion has ceased to serve its proper function. It has fallen away from both the importance of regular observance, and the very idea that such observance opens a connection with the divine, and reinforces the connection between man and the Divine.

Replying to @Rotorvator

PS where do you discuss it? [the ontological argument]

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

….  I spent fifty pages discussing the progress of the ontological argument [in The Sacred History of Being]. I think it is a dead thing now. Though in the way of things, it may take a hundred years for this critical demolition to be taken on board.

Replying to @Rotorvator

That's the weakness of arguments; they shuffle bits of information around as if it changes something. I was just curious whether you know the book (by David Bentley Hart) since it comprehensively tries to stake down the conceptual space the (classical) idea of God occupies.

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

I’m particularly interested in the contrast between conceptions of the Divine in antiquity, and conceptions from the middle ages onwards. They are quite different, and a lot of ideas have simply disappeared from later argument. I know what you mean when you refer to the classical idea of God, but I would refer to that ‘classical’ idea as ‘the standard ontological argument’. It is less than a thousand years old. Since I study classical philosophers from fifteen hundred years earlier than that, to refer to such an idea of God as ‘classical’ would just court confusion and misunderstanding.

Of course we don’t have clear formal argument about the Divine from the Classical or the Mesopotamian worlds. But close study of what they wrote does make it possible to figure out what they understood by the Divine. The ancient conception is far more subtle and sophisticated than the standard ontological argument. The modern world prefers a simpler idea of God.

The whole idea of constructing a form of argument which provides a rational basis for religious belief (which is how Alvin Plantinga views its function), is self-contradictory, and an absurdity.

Replying to @Rotorvator

Thanks. DBH gives an overview of scholastic theology and includes perspectives from quite a few other traditions. Tough reading but we'll worth the time.

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

Thanks for the pointer to DBH's book. 

***

Is Richard Dawkins a Closet Deist?

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Since the publication of The God Delusion in 2006, those of us who are interested in the history of ideas, both long and short, have got used to a more aggressive and even militant form of atheistic response to discussions of the concept of God, and the meaning of the Divine. Dawkins book is the main reason for this change.

‘The God Delusion’ is not a scholarly treatise on belief and disbelief concerning the existence or the reality of God, and the arguments for and against. Nor does it pretend to be. It is an old-fashioned piece of polemic writing, intended to serve an agenda which is already established. However, this has not stopped some of the readers of the book from imagining that it is in fact the last word on why every possible reason for entertaining the idea of God is delusory, and that anyone still discussing the subject of the Divine is an abject fool.

By writing this book, what Dawkins has done is to empower (in the jargon of the day) a large group of people who see any discussion of God as some sort of intellectual imposture. They see this for many possible reasons, including the fact that, perhaps most importantly, and in western religions in particular, the concept of God has been used to buttress temporal and political power, and many of the arguments which have been made in favour of the existence or the reality of God, over the past thousand years or so, do function as support for temporal ideologies. The disbelievers see such imposture as an offence against intelligence and common sense, and ‘The God Delusion’ contains the weaponry for combatting the deceit.

Dawkins is not a theologian. But this does not disqualify him from discussing the truth or falsehood of the existence of God, and the arguments which have been created in order to support what is known as ‘rational belief in God’.  I share Dawkins negative view of this unhappy concept, which gives space to credulous patterns of thought. However, Dawkins project would have been better served if he had produced a scholarly discussion of the subject first, before writing the polemic. By publishing only the polemic, he has himself created a space for credulous patterns of thought. Discussion of theological questions is now out of the seminary and the university, and is in the marketplace.

Some time ago, shortly after I published my first book, which discusses the long history of ideas about God and the Divine, I wrote a blog post with a misleading title ‘The Irrationality of Atheism’. The article was actually about the illogical and careless nature of western human thought concerning the Divine. In the ontological argument, as it developed from St. Anselm onwards, the question was almost always couched in terms of Gods existence, and whether or not the existence of God could be understood to serve another of God’s apparently necessary properties: ‘perfection’. I pointed out three things:

 Can God, in any meaningful sense, be said to exist, even if God can be said to have reality? We think of existence as a characteristic of being in space and time.

Secondly, that the ontological argument provides nothing which connects God with the matrix of space and time. This suggests the uncritical acceptance of space and time as something which exists apart from the Divine, and which is perhaps a fatal objection to the ontological argument.

Thirdly, if the nature of what God is includes the generation of the space and time in which we live and think, then intelligent atheism is impossible, since it would necessarily mean the complete denial of human experience.

What I was arguing was that modern atheism is actually dependent for its nature on the ontological argument, and the terms in which it is framed. Meaning that eight hundred years of argument about the nature and existence of God underpins the point of view of those who regard themselves as atheists.

Most of the time this article received little attention. At other times it did get a response – sometimes polite and intelligent, sometimes not. What struck me about the latter instances however, was how little the responders actually knew, as opposed to how much they imagined they knew, about theological questions. They’d read ‘The God Delusion’, and that was enough. The argument made sense to them, and they were as a consequence, militantly in favour in Dawkins point of view.

So much so that it was often clear that they were responding to the provocative title of the article, and had not read the article itself (far less any other article on the web site). There was no need for them to read the article, of course – they knew that, whatever was in it was nonsense, and that I must be confused, or just an attention seeker.

For many, modern atheism is now a belief system, like any other. Just dressed up as absolute unbelief. And Dawkins book is their sacred text. It makes sense. It is logical. It is the final word on the matter.

I found myself being accused of confusing theism and deism, which was a bit puzzling at first. But since the accusers have generally read Dawkins book and very little else, and therefore have no wide knowledge of the history of human thought, they necessarily take their cues from him. And Dawkins does spend a lot of time talking about both. We learn about Dawkins perspective from this, and so can gain an understanding of the limitations of his own argument.

I think of theism and deism as terms for patterns of thought which belong in the early modern period, and which are couched in the kind of discussions contemporary with that time, all the way up to the French revolution, and beyond. But earlier ideas about god can be understood in terms of theism (the word of course is Greek, as is its derivative atheism). But no-one in their right mind would try to equate the theism of Plato with the theism of the early modern period; they just aren’t the same. Plato’s ‘theism’ concerns a God who is wholly transcendent of physical existence, and transcends all sense experience. Theistic belief of later times implies no such thing.

The distinction Dawkins makes in ‘The God Delusion’ between theism and deism is a simple one. Theism is a pattern of belief which enshrines the idea that the Divine is responsive to man, and his rituals of worship and prayer. It is a pattern of belief dependent on the idea that God can act in the world.  By contrast, deism contemplates the idea that a creator God has existence, and necessarily created the world, but that he is not active in the physical world beyond that.

This is the kind of idea which Descartes employed in his description of reality. God was real, but existed in a sphere of his own, and so we could get on with the business of understanding the world in terms of mathematics and physics, without reference to God. The idea was also attractive to the generation of theologians and scholars who came after Newton, who saw the divine hand in the regular clockwork of the heavens, the motions of the planets, and approved of Newton’s use of mathematics to describe the regularity of the cosmos. Their very regularity could be argued to show that God created the physical and sensory world, but did not intervene once the cosmos was in order, and in motion.

In October 2008, Dawkins debated with the mathematician John Lennox at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The debate had the title ‘Has Science buried God?’, In the debate Dawkins made an interesting statement, which puts him on this theist-deist spectrum, at least in so far as he recognises that the laws of mathematics and physics have to have some origin. He said that, though he would not accept deism, it was possible to make the case for “a deistic god, a sort of god of the physicist…. Who devised the laws of physics, god the mathematician, god who put together the cosmos in the first place and then sat back and watched everything happen” *1. He had however no notion that a similar case could be made for a theistic god.

So, if Dawkins is not in fact a deist, where does he think the laws of mathematics and physics come from? What is the origin of the inverse square law, and the law of gravity? He clearly accepts mathematical order in physical reality, since you cannot understand or do science if you don’t.  So it seems as though Dawkins objections to deism are irrational, and that he is a deist masquerading as the high-priest of atheism.

***

1.    *1. Dawkins view of at least the possibility of a mathematically inclined god, who defined the rules, and set everything in motion, would have made perfect sense to the Stoics, including the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who understood the world principally in terms of the power of Necessity (anangke). The world was in motion according to a predetermined pattern, against which man’s powers were feeble in the extreme. We could change certain things here and there, but we had to accept the implacable force of Necessity. 

What is Sacred, and what is Profane?

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Questions which underpin the ancient world view:

The first question is the most profound of all, which is: why is there something rather than nothing?

How can the existence of the physical world be explained? It has patterns of behaviour (natural laws), but it is not clear where both the physical reality and its patterns of behaviour originate, and what sustains both.

A second question concerns the nature of the reality which underpins the reality of the physical world. Is it itself, or is its nature compromised by the emergence of a physical reality? This question is prompted by the idea that reality, in order to retain its essential nature, cannot be multiple, and cannot be subject to real change.

Following from this is the idea that reality must be beyond measure, beyond size, beyond existence in physical dimensions, be uniform in its nature, be complete, and also without limitation.

The implication of this view is that the physical reality which we experience represents a point of view of the transcendent reality. It is not real, but a representation or a medley of representations of what reality itself is.

It follows that all things, past present and future, are contained, as potencies, in the nature of reality itself. They are possible points of view. All things which have happened, and all things which may happen, are there.

It follows also, that, given this point of view, all knowledge of past present and future, all possible states of reality, are also present in reality itself.

This description of reality itself is a description of the plenum, which is something which contains all things. Not because it is a collection of things, but because it is, as it is, an undifferentiated whole.

This is the reality which was understood to underpin physical reality in the ancient world (at least by those of the sacerdotal class who had the leisure to discuss such questions).  It transcends everything physical, measurable, definable.

Ancient accounts of the creation of the physical world however suggest that the created world was in chaos at its beginning. What does this mean?

It means that, by whatever means the plenum gives rise to the physical world and its realities, by itself it cannot give rise to a rational creation. Its creations are not defined by anything approaching reason.

Ancient cosmogonies reflect this. The Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia has two distinct levels of divine beings. The first group is present during the initial creation, and the second group is responsible for the second and rational creation. The first group of gods are not gods after the pattern of the second group. The king of heaven does not have a name in Mesopotamia, or rather his name is his description (Anshar). It is two words joined together – ‘heaven’ and ‘king’. In the Mesopotamian context both heaven and the king were understood as representations or images of reality itself – representing some of the properties of the plenum.

In a sense therefore, the initial gods are simply gods which must be latent in the nature of reality itself, whether or not there is a rational creation underway. There must be a heaven, and there must be a king of it, if there is to be anything else. And somehow the first creation has to be destroyed, if there is to be a rational creation. The gods who are present during the first creation are there to serve the purpose of making it possible for there to be a rational creation.

It would be argued that we know these gods are real because we are now living in a rational creation. They also give rise to the gods who preside over the rational creation, and who have the power and authority to order the cosmos, and human society.

In the Enuma Elish, Marduk is the king of the gods, and his properties are described. Each aspect of Marduk has a name, as well as a description, and each of those names represents a god. So in effect, the description of Marduk is a collection of the divine powers of all the gods.

Each of the divine names of Marduk has a description, and each of these descriptions explains the particular form of rational and good order in the world, over which they and Marduk preside. So each of the gods can be understood as abstractions of aspects of the rational creation. They represent excellences in the world. Marduk represents the sum total of these.

This is the clue to grasping much of the ancient understanding what the divine is. Each described excellence resembles reality itself in terms of its properties. The excellence may serve social functions, as does a skill or specialism, but it should be performed for its own sake. The excellence is complete in itself, is whole, is at the apex of what is possible, and involves knowledge of the divine on account of its perfection. The performance of these excellences recalls the perfection and completeness of the plenum, and reinforces the presence of the divine in the world. 

Which brings us to another question asked in antiquity: can the divine be present on earth, within the world of physical reality? In terms of its representation, yes, since there are many things which share properties with the divine. The ideas of the limited, and that which is without limit, that which is perfect, whole and complete in itself; beauty, justice and good order, greatness, etc. The list can be extended. Hence the importance attributed to these properties in the ancient world.

But can the gods have existence and reality in the physical world, without compromising their essential nature? Evidently this was considered to be possible, though always a matter for some conjecture.

Why was it considered to be possible? This brings us to the most astonishing and subtle part of the ancient picture of reality. We need to return to the question of whether or not reality retains its nature on the creation of physical reality. It is easy for us to imagine that physical reality is here, with us, and the transcendent world of the plenum is somewhere over the horizon. But that would make the physical world a partial copy of the transcendent world, which would make reality more than itself. It would be multiple rather than single and simply itself. 

At this point, the human race made an enormous leap of understanding. Few would understand it fully and properly, but it stands behind the creation of civilisation and the great intellectual structures of the ancient world which we refer to as religions. The leap involved the recognition that, if reality was to retain its integrity and nature, then it could not stand behind a copy of itself. And if it could not stand behind a copy of itself, then there is no copy. If there is no copy, then the reality and the representation of it on earth are one and the same thing.

Many would have baulked at this idea. But the logic is impeccable. Further, there are several conclusions which can be – and were, drawn from this understanding.

The first is that all things on earth are representations of reality itself. We may not easily read them as such representations, but nevertheless, that is what they are.

Secondly, if all things are representations of reality itself, which is infinite, then all things in the physical world which have the properties of finitude, also are infinite.

Thirdly, the representation of space and time and difference is an illusion. These things are not real, but simply represent what is actually real in such a way.

Fourthly, if divinity is equated with the nature of reality itself, then all things are divine, whether in Heaven or on Earth.

The fifth conclusion is that since it is apparent that not everything on Earth is infinite as we encounter it, even if it possesses the property of infinity, along with reality itself, then everything on Earth has a double nature. It is both sacred and profane.

The sixth conclusion is that holiness, divinity and infinitude are properties which can be put on and taken off like a garment (the Sumerian concept of the Mes instantiates this idea).

The seventh conclusion is that we have no independent reality of our own, and that the world is the property and creation of the gods. Our perception of it is just that. We can understand it as a wholly secular phenomenon, or we can recognise and understand it as the property of the divine.

The eighth conclusion is that, in order to have good order in the physical world, we need to strive to become holy, acquire knowledge of divine things, and to do divine things, for divine things are possible on the Earth. This is the origin of the idea of sacralisation, which is the putting on the quality of divinity. 

Leibniz on the Existence of God

Leibniz wrote:

Although I am for innate ideas, and in particular for that of God, I do not think that the demonstration of the Cartesians drawn from the idea of God are perfect. I have shown fully elsewhere (in the ‘Actes de Leipsic,’ and in the ‘Memoires de Trevoux’) that what Descartes has borrowed from Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, is very beautiful and really very ingenious, but that there is still a gap therein to be filled. This celebrated archbishop, who was without doubt one of the most able men of his time, congratulates himself, not without reason, for having discovered a means of proving the existence of God a priori, by means of its own notion, without recurring to its effects. And this is very nearly the force of his argument: God is the greatest or (as Descartes says) the most perfect of beings, or rather a being of supreme grandeur and perfection, including all degrees thereof. That is the notion of God. See now how existence follows from this notion. To exist is something more than not to exist, or rather, existence adds a degree to grandeur and perfection, and as Descartes states it, existence is itself a perfection. Therefore this degree of grandeur and perfection, or rather this perfection which consists in existence, is in this supreme all-great, all-perfect being: for otherwise some degree would be wanting in it, contrary to its definition. Consequently this supreme being exists.

Again here the problem is the idea that ‘existence’ is a perfection. Later Kant would object that existence is necessarily a  property of anything which we might consider, and therefore the idea of ‘existence’ as a property of anything is irrelevant. However, much of what Liebniz has to say from this point on is interesting and relevant to the argument.

*** [my paragraph division]

The Scholastics, not excepting even their Doctor Angelicus,*[1] have misunderstood this argument, and have taken it as a paralogism;*[2] in which respect they were altogether wrong, and Descartes, who studied quite a long time the scholastic philosophy at the Jesuit College of La Fleche, had great reason for re-establishing it. It is not a paralogism, but it is an imperfect demonstration, which assumes something that must still be proved in order to render it mathematically evident;

*** [my paragraph division]

 That is, it is tacitly assumed that this idea of the all-great or all-perfect being is possible, and implies no contradiction. And it is already something that by this remark it is proved that, assuming that God is possible, he exists, which is the privilege of divinity alone. We have the right to presume the possibility of every being, and especially that of God, until some one proves the contrary. So that this metaphysical argument already gives a morally demonstrative conclusion, which declares that according to the present state of our knowledge we must judge that God exists, and act in conformity thereto. But it is to be desired, nevertheless, that clever men achieve the demonstration with the strictness of a mathematical proof, and I think I have elsewhere said something that may serve this end.

That the most perfect Being exists, according to Leibniz:

I call every simple quality which is positive and absolute, or expresses whatever it expresses without any limits, a perfection. But a quality of this sort, because it is simple, is therefore irresolvable or indefinable, for otherwise, either it will not be a simple quality but an aggregate of many, or, if it is one, it will be circumscribed by limits and so be known through negations of further progress contrary to the hypothesis, for a purely positive quality was assumed.

From these considerations it is not difficult to show that all perfections are compatible with each other or can exist in the same subject.

For let the proposition be of this kind:

A and B are incompatible

(for understanding by A and B two simple forms of this kind or perfections, and it is the same if more are assumed like them), it is evident that it cannot be demonstrated without the resolution of the terms A and B, of each or both; for otherwise their nature would not enter into the ratiocination and the incompatibility could be demonstrated as well from any others as from themselves. But now (by hypothesis) they are irresolvable. Therefore this proposition can not be demonstrated from these forms.

But it might certainly be demonstrated by these if it were true, because it is not true per se, for all propositions necessarily true are either demonstrable or known per se.

Therefore this proposition is not necessarily true.

It is granted, therefore, that either a subject of all perfections or the most perfect being can be known.

Whence it is evident that it also exists, since existence is contained in the number of the perfections. 

 Liebniz concludes by saying that he ‘showed this reasoning to D. Spinoza when I was in the Hague, who thought it solid; for when at first he opposed it, I put it in writing and read this paper before him.'

---

[1] I.e., Thomas Aquinas.

[2] A fallacious argument or illogical conclusion, especially one committed by mistake, or believed by the speaker to be logical.

The Irrationality of Atheism

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

The word atheism is constructed from the Greek word for God, ‘theos.’ God was spoken of by Plato as ‘ho theos,’ meaning ‘the god’. With the addition of the Greek privative particle, we have ‘atheos’, meaning ‘no god,’ or ‘godless.’

So, one might imagine that the derived term ‘atheism’ is a legitimate pair with ‘theism,’ the one indicated the idea of no god, and the other the idea of God. You can be inclined to one or the other according to your disposition, your culture, or your education. Both are apparently rational concepts, and both can be used in rational argument.

It is peculiar that Plato spoke of the creator of the world (though the actual work of the creation was done by the demiourgos, in order that there should not be too much of the divine about the world) as ‘the God’, which seems to imply a single divinity. The Greeks were polytheists, with a large pantheon of gods, and many stories about the gods’ lives and relationships. They paid divine honours to them at their birthplaces and their shrines, and sacrificed to them. So the idea of ’ho theos’ needs to be explained. I will return to this interesting question later in this post.

Atheism, in the sense of not believing in god or the gods, or giving the idea of them any credence, is an idea which is very old. The people who ransacked ancient tombs and holy places in antiquity, did not show reverence to those places, their contents, or the gods who were honoured by them.

It is easy to understand how the idea that the gods or divinity were not in any sense real might have come about. We do not see them, and we do not see them act. We do not hear them talk, or give advice. They are altogether invisible to mortal man. What we have are stories about them, places venerated as the place of their birth, and their holy sites. All of which could have been made up by the priests who honour them, and maintained the divine cults. Their images in wood, metal and stone were made by mortal craftsmen, after the pattern of the descriptions of the divine in poetry and myth. Many of these divine cults had become extremely rich over centuries of patronage by rich benefactors and many pious pilgrimages to their shrines. The show spoke of unimaginable wealth. But the gods themselves were nowhere to be seen.

So an intelligent individual might come to the conclusion that the pomp and circumstance of holy ritual and temple life, most of which took place behind closed doors, was a fiction devised by the priestly cults, in order to maintain their own wealth and power.

This is one side of the story – the part which it is easy for us to understand. The cults create stories and images around the idea of the gods, and gain power and prestige for themselves and their gods. The intelligent individual does not know anything of the mechanics or the purpose of the fiction. He simply has no reason to treat the divine as something real.

Some other intelligent individual, having been at one time a neophyte in one of the divine cults in the ancient world, will have known something of the details of the fiction. But as a disbeliever in the reality of the gods, it does not matter to him what there might be to understand. His mind is made up. The complexity of the myths and rituals mean nothing, and suggest nothing to him which he would benefit from knowing.

Of course, it is possible to object to the reality of the gods, while holding to the idea that a single god is real. This view might be arrived at by a form of logical argument, along the lines of: only God is real, everything else is illusory. This is the view that the author of the Book of Enoch took. In which case the apparent and iconoclastic atheism of the individual is actually the extreme expression of the idea that there can be only one God.

In this case, everything apart from the idea of a single god, apparently divorced from the whole of the physical creation, and the representation of other aspects of the divine through sculpture, ritual and cult, is illusory and false. The representations might be ascribed to the work of demons, who strive to distract us from our proper purpose, which is to pay due honour to the one god.

The point I’m making here is that we have to be clear about what is in the mind of those who appear to be atheists. There are those who think that there is no such thing as the divine, and that the very idea of the divine is a fictional presence in the world, created by those who are credulous, or who are cynically exploiting the credulity of the majority of mankind (or both). Most modern atheists are of this kind.

Those who did not understand the origin and function of the various divine cults in the ancient world, and rejected them, but who embraced the idea of a single god, were not atheists. They were simply against the plurality of the gods. They too could destroy temples, shrines and statues of the gods, but had the notion of a purer ‘cultus deorum’ in their heads.

We can describe these individuals as monolaters or monotheists, though they are not the same. The monolaters follow one god, however they arrived at the notion. Their single god does not need to have a philosophical aspect, by which its singleness is put beyond question. Monotheism however does imply the presence of a degree of philosophical debate around the uniqueness of god. In the Book of Malachi for example, Jehovah is presented as saying ‘I do not change’. So the Hebrew god is beyond a political and tribal conception.

Returning as I said, to the question of Plato’s term for God, ‘ho theos’, it is clear that his conception of God is purely philosophical, as we might expect. He is described by his master Socrates (himself accused of impiety towards the Gods) as having ‘no form, shape or colour’, and we know from other parts of Plato’s work that ‘ho theos’ has a nature which is beyond change. His nature is transcendent of all the categories of experience and understanding.

Plato is writing about a God who is in fact Reality itself, in that the properties and attributes of his god are identical with the properties and attributes of his understanding of transcendent reality. We cannot see it, measure it, and it has no presence in the secular world as itself. It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that this conception of Reality is equivalent to the conception of a nothingness, a void, and an absence. This conclusion would be foolish: I’ve written elsewhere of the notion of Reality as a plenum, as something which is undefined and unlimited, and which is beyond the conception of something which is absent. Absence implies presence, and transcendent Reality is beyond both absence and presence.

Atheism can mean many things, but ordinarily it means the lack of a belief in God. Or rather the lack of a belief that God has some form of existence, or the property of being something which is real, as opposed to a figment of the human imagination. But consider, if the definition of God is Reality itself, and not an entity which just occupies some part of the universe and has powers and properties attributed to it, then the atheist is in effect denying the reality of a transcendent reality, which lies behind all the phenomena of the universe, its laws, its properties, and its very existence.

Atheists do not deny the existence of the world, its laws and properties: they just argue that the concept of God is not required to accept the world, and to have an understanding of it. They are of course at a loss to explain how the world came to be, and why it should have come into existence. They have no explanation for physical existence of anything, and no explanation for the existence of spatial dimensions and the phenomenon of time. These are not important questions for atheists in general, since the important point for them is that they are not credulous people, and not people who put their faith in the fictions which are promoted by most formal and informal religions, particularly in the modern west.

But if God is Reality itself, then to deny the reality of God is effectively to deny the reality of the world and everything in it. In which case even the illusion of the physical world can never be properly accepted or explained. Atheism itself is therefore a form of privation, in which nothing can make sense beyond the casual acceptance of physical reality, and about which no great questions can or should be asked, and where even the laws of the universe are the way they are for no reason that might be understood.