Do You Believe in "God"?
Ross Douthat vs. Jerry Coyne
“Do you believe in God?” is the kind of question that makes me think to myself, “Depends on what you mean by do, you, believe, in, and God.” But that kind of semantic neck-rolling is probably just a way of avoiding the question.
On the other hand, theology is a word that can mean either the word of God, or the word spoken about God. One intonation means theology is the act of interpreting revelation. The other means it’s a kind of hearsay. The two may be different sides of the same coin, but one turns theology into a kind of dialogical response to the divine while the other sees it as a consolation for divine absence—like a conversation with one’s best friend after a first date. (Why is God not returning my texts?) Typically, theology means something like “God-focused discourse.” But why not flip it and define theology as the attempt to reflect on language itself as the medium in which God is encountered? That is, what if theology were “language-focused divination?”
Ross Douthat has a fun piece that argues disbelief is a kind of spell. It entertains the possibility that we start not by asking how we can have more faith, but how we might be skeptical about our skepticism. I’m sympathetic on many counts. I especially agree with Douthat that life is still quite weird, despite the institutional and cultural dominance of reason. Basically, I was persuaded by it, or rather, found myself agreeing with Douthat that consciousness is too amazing just to be a random fluke, emerging from nothing and returning to nothing.
I was less persuaded by Jerry Coyne’s rebuttal.
But it doesn’t matter. My meta-observation is how much people talk past each other on the topic of God. The word itself is so loaded. It’s not like the atheist and the believer both point to the same object and then agree or disagree as to its existence. Rather, it seems more often that the disagreement is about what needs to be explained and can be explained, the nature of explanation itself, and what we’re trying to do with words. Coyne’s objection to Douthat is largely pragmatic—what do we gain by giving a theistic account of our being here? Don’t we have more to lose? We could certainly play that game, but as soon as metaphysical questioning gets reduced to pragmatism, the jig is already up.
One “use” of transcendence, however conceived, is that it saves us from having to justify all of our endeavors in terms of utility. But to a utilitarian that just sounds like an excuse for quietism.
To the believer we can ask what kind of a God allows for both belief and disbelief? To the disbeliever we can ask: if God is just a phantom why do your arguments fail to persuade us to abandon it?
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