Mad Canada

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but most Canadians are mad.

You might object. Who am I to make such a judgement? Isn’t it more likely, if everyone else thinks differently, that I am the insane one? Orwell said, “Madness is a minority of one.” 

And this is indeed how modern psychiatry tends to frame it.

An example of the current madness: this is the ad populum fallacy. Reality is not determined by popular vote. We cannot vote to make the earth flat. 

I believe I have some perspective on this, from studying philosophy, comparative religions, and history, and from living abroad in diverse cultures: China, Korea, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, not to mention across Canada and in the US. I also married into a Pakistani family. 

Surely this allows me to see beyond the common consensus, and judge it.

Canadians are mostly mad.

To be fair, not just Canadians. Koreans are also mad. Americans are mad. Brits are mad. Japanese are mad. Filipinos are sane. Arabs are mostly sane, if you step away from mentioning Jews or Israel. 

What makes the difference? Wealth seems to be part of it: rich people go crazy. And we have always known this: large manor homes are always haunted. There are skeleton closets.

But that, I think, is not the key. Wealth drives you crazy because, as the Gospel warns, wealth drives you away from God. It turns your focus towards the world.

And belief in God, the necessary first premise, is required for sanity. 

In Filipino or in Arab culture, the existence of God is taken as a given.

In Canada, Korea, America, Britain, Japan, even when nominally acknowledged, God is mostly ignored. He seems at most an abstract concept.

You will object that in America there is a distinct and lively evangelical element. There is indeed; that is why there is hope for America. But even in America, this is a counterculture. In the Philippines or Saudi Arabia, monotheism is the mainstream.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles spend most of their time casting out demons. This is their initial mission. In the early church, exorcist was a common ecclesial rank. It was assumed that any pagan converts needed to be exorcised. The rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, the rest of Europe, and today across Africa, was due to its famed ability to cast out demons.

And the classical gods were demons, as the early Christians indeed identified them. Each was or represented an obsession that could possess the mind.

Broadly, what we now call mental illness.

Now that faith in Christianity is waning, the demons are returning.

God is not just the ground of being, but also the ground of reason; he is the necessary first premise from which anything else and everything else is deduced. This, I think, is evident in Descartes’ Meditations: our warrant that anything else is real is that God is real, and would not deceive us.

Pull that anchor, and we know nothing. We do not even know, contra Descartes, that we ourselves exist. Buddhism challenges this very premise.

This is why in Buddhist and Hindu Asia, without a strong tradition of ethical monotheism, everything is seen as illusion, a moving sea of dreams. Not just the physical universe, either; but chains of induction, systematic philosophy, do not form. Only gnomic aphorisms, bursts of insight.

And the rapid growth of insanity in the developed world is due to the collapse of faith in God. The demons are returning.

On a social level, to give an example of how we have come untethered—without the anchor of God, we no longer understand what human equality means.  Many—it seems most—now think it means people are the same, or even that they all deserve the same life outcomes. There is, for example, the feminist doctrine that men and women are the same and should perform all the same roles in equal proportions.

We can see this is obviously wrong, in athletics. Yet many deny it even here.

Human equality really means equal moral worth; equal worth in the eyes of God. And therefore equal treatment by the law. This is founded on Descartes’s reasoning: God exists; God is perfect goodness; God is just. It follows that God values us equally, in principle, judging us only on our own volitions. For this reason, for God’s sake, we must treat our neighbour as our equal.

Pull God from that equation, and it does not work. If we are not seeing it from God’s view, we are seeing it only from our own. Human worth, good and evil, is then based on our neighbour’s usefulness to us, or to the society as a whole.

One can immediately see how this has led to some of the worst mass murders and social upheavals of the last century and more; the worst cases of social madness.

Without the anchor of God, we similarly no longer understand freedom. Freedom is now just freedom to be selfish: self-indulgence, being able to do what we want, when we want.

Yet this is obviously wrong. The alcoholic wants to have another drink. Yet being an alcoholic is the opposite of freedom: it is enslavement to a want. 

So too with most other wants. There is a truth to the old joke, “everything I want to do is either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Most wants are addictions that, indulged too often, soon enslave us and do us harm.

True freedom is freedom to do what God wants. It is freedom of conscience: the freedom to do what our conscience tells us we ought to do.

Because we no longer understand this, social policy has become warped. It has actually been suppressing freedom of conscience, for the sake of feeding addictions.

Without the anchor of God, we cannot even agree on what is real. “Once people stop believing in God, they will believe anything.” Science is breaking down, along with public morality and civil discourse.

America, at least, now looks as though it might be regaining lucidity. I credit this to that evangelical remnant in the culture.

God in Everything

 

Ouroboros, the cosmic world-serpent 

Friend Xerxes seeks to embrace all the joys of life. He sees God in everything. Even he says, the rattlesnake coiled to strike. 

It sounds like a good, cheerful and magnanimous philosophy.

It is, however, not possible for a Christian to see God in everything. That is pantheism, or perhaps panentheism, not monotheism.

To worship everything would be a violation of the First (or Second, but who’s counting?)  Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” That is, you must not worship nature. God stands apart from anything in the physical universe, on land, or sea, or sky. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

One thinks also of this passage from 1Kings: 

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” 

There are evidently many things in nature God is not in. He is in the whispers, the inconspicuous or invisible, the mustard seed, the leaven. He is more present where the physical is more absent.

All of this is based on the Bible. Authoritative for Christians, but does pantheism perhaps make sense on its own merits? 

It does not. As the later philosophers of India have pointed out, if you assert “God is in all things,” the concept God simply loses all meaning; as there is nothing other than God against which to define it. You have said nothing but “the universe is the universe.” “Things are things.”

Moreover, Xerxes choice of the rattlesnake image is telling, in a Freudian sense. The serpent is the standard Christian image of evil. If you hold that God is in all things, he must also be in evil: not just in natural evil, like rattlesnakes, cancer viruses, aging, death, and pain in childbirth, but also in moral evil, in murder and rape and incest. And he is in the ugly and defective, in offal and pollution and decay. This cannot be, for God is by definition perfect: perfect good, perfect truth, and perfect beauty.

You have simply turned away from God.

Nature has fallen. The prince of "this world" is, after all, the Devil.

On the other hand, one’s daily life can and should be understood as a conversation with God. If one is alert, and prayerful, little miracles are happening all the time, as well as little corrective messages.

A Test for False Prophets

 

Simon Magus, who exorcised in Jesus's name.

Some years ago, friend Xerxes objected to George Bush Jr.’s supposed attitude, which he said was “anyone who is not with me is against me.” And this he said was starkly opposed to Jesus, who said instead “anyone who is not against me is with me.”

I corrected him then. Jesus actually said both. See Matthew 12: 30; Mark 9: 40.

Presumably in Xerxes mind, had he known this, he must think Jesus contradicted himself; or else the Gospels are inconsistent. One must be unreliable.

But both are true. There is such a thing as the fallacy of the false dilemma. But here we have a true dilemma, a situation in which there are only two choices. Either you are with Jesus, the Truth, or you are against it. There is no third option. Creation is a constant war between truth and falsehood, good and evil.

Bob Dylan makes the point in song: “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

Anyone who is committed to Truth, which is to say, necessarily, the one true God, is on the same team. Anyone who is not so committed is, consciously or not, worshipping and working for the Devil.

This point comes to mind from noticing several talks on YouTube by Rabbi Tovia Singer. His entire programme seems to be to debunk Christianity. I say those who try to debunk or discredit any monotheistic faith are really of the Devil’s party. Their agenda, even if not themselves conscious of it, is to drive others from faith in the Lord; they are doing the Devil’s work.

Does this mean there are no possible errors in the creed of this or that denomination? Of course not; this is categorically impossible. So long as they disagree on any point, and they do, one must be right, and one must be wrong. But in comparison to the fundamental issue, of being of the party of God, any such differences must be trivial. To focus on them is to turn away from God yourself, and to attempt to turn another away. You are of the Devil’s party, even without knowing it.

This applies to nominal Jewish rabbis like Singer; they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing. It applies to those many Protestant ministers whose chief interest seems to be in criticizing Catholicism rather than asserting their faith. They are attacking faith.  It applies to any who claim to be Christian, who scapegoat Islam as intrinsically evil. Although so ffar as I can see, the strongest criticism of Islam comes not from the fellow religious, but from secularists. It applies to any Muslims who claim that Christians or Jews are evil—the “Islamist” terrorists. They are not true Muslims; they are secularists. Like the psychiatrist who drove his car into a Christmas market in Germany: these people hate Islam as well, if they hate Christianity.

I note too the conclusion to the story of the rich man and Lazarus, told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:

“They [i.e., like the Jews] have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, [i.e., like Jesus] they will repent.’

 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

A good Jew is a good Christian. A good Christian is a good Jew. 

It is important to me that the post-Vatican II Catholic church has a good record of not criticizing other faiths. I went through the Catholic schools, and never heard a peep in criticism of any other denomination. 

I had a Jewish friend in grad school who refused to believe this. She assured me that, regardless of my actual experience, all Catholics are taught that the Jews murdered Christ.

Her supposedly Jewish teachers were in league with the Devil.

This is a good test, like the test for discerning the spirits. Does the teacher support and nurture faith, or does he spend his greater energy criticizing faith?

There are many false shepherds.

Influencers

 

Ramakrishna

I challenged a Chinese student to reflect on the influences on his thinking: whom did he trust? Whom did he accept as an authority?

It is a useful exercise in these times, when authorities seem untrustworthy. It is time to reestablish our bedrock.

So I propose to outline my own influences.

I cannot trust the government. I cannot trust the priests, bishops, cardinals, or even the pope. I cannot trust the legal system. I cannot trust the academy. I cannot trust “the science.” I cannot trust the professions. I cannot trust my doctor. I cannot trust artists.

But there are still the older authorities, who, although dead, can speak to us. There are the great minds of the past.

First is Plato’s concept of the ideal forms. I believe it is absolutely true, vitally important, and generally suppressed. As Blake said, the mind must enter this world as a garden fully planted. I do not trust Plato on politics. Politics and metaphysics take a different kind of thinking; a philosopher who is good on one seems inevitably bad on the other. 

On politics, I trust John Locke. I’d add John Stuart Mill on freedom of speech, and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Everything good in government can be extrapolated from these.

But I think Locke’s ontology and epistemology is absurd.

George Orwell is also an influence in politics. Milton Friedman is an influence in economics.

Probably my main influence among philosophers is Descartes. I think his conclusions in the Meditations are the foundation of all possible knowledge, and definitive on the nature of the human soul. I then accept Berkeley’s resolution of Descartes’ “mind-body” conundrum: that is, how these categorically different spheres of being, mind and body, can interact. Simple: there is no body. I do not believe anyone can refute this. Blake: “the body is that portion of the soul perceptible to the five senses.”

William Blake has also been a profound influence on me. He was really my door into philosophy, and into monotheism. He is usually thought of as a poet, or if not that, an engraver. But he was a universal genius.

I believe Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God is irrefutable. But it is only one of many; I also find Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument irrefutable.

The Greek myths, Aesop’s fables, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and the fairy tales are authoritative on human psychology. Accept no substitutes.

Then there is the Bible. Even if you do not consider it the revealed word of God, you must accept it as all the vital information our ancestors gathered over the millennia, which they wanted to convey to us. If you are going against the Bible, you know you are wrong.

Confucius’s Analects are also authoritative. They have kept China in good order for millennia. Alarms bells should go off if you are clearly going against anything there.

I cannot point to any one other specific source in Eastern thought. I have learned much from Buddhism, and from Hinduism, but in the end it all pointed back to ethical monotheism. As Ramakrishna put it, “I want to taste sugar; I don’t want to BE sugar.”

The Theology of Superman

 

Friend Xerxes has rejected monotheism in his latest column, on the grounds of that old saw about God logically not being able to create a stone too heavy for him to lift. Therefore, the concept of God as omnipotent is incoherent.

“Can God do anything?” the boy asked.

“Yes, dear,” said his mother.

“And God can make anything?”

“Yes, dear. That’s why we call him Creator.”

The boy asked, “So could God make a rock so big that even he can’t lift it?”

This is the “irresistible force meets immovable object” paradox. I remember it being the premise of a Superman comic as a child. Superman supposedly being both. It appears in China already in the 3rd century BC. 

Is it a problem for monotheism? No; there are two ancient responses.

It is a logical contradiction to posit that there can exist at the same time both an irresistible force and an immovable object. It is definitionally impossible. And the Christian response is that God is subject to logic, because logic is his own essence—the Logos. God cannot create a square circle, or a female male, or a married bachelor. So he cannot create both an irresistible force and an immovable object, existing at the same time. This is not a limit to his omnipotence, because if you abandon logic, “omnipotence” itself has no meaning.

If, on the other hand, you accept that God is not subject to logic, the problem or paradox still disappears. Then he could create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and lift it. This is only impossible if you accept the need to conform to logic, to Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.

It is actually an argument for monotheism: if there cannot be both an immovable object and an irresistible  force, there can be only one God, one entity who is both immovable and irresistible.

The Christian belief, that God creates, abides in, and follows laws, gives birth in turn to science. Science is based on the premise that there is no such thing as chance, randomness, or coincidence. Everything has an explanation if we study it closely. As Einstein crudely put it, “God does not throw dice.” God creates and follows laws.

Xerxes then, predictably, raises the problem of evil: if there is a God, and God is good, why is there evil in this world?

And this question too is older than monotheism itself. With or without a God, why is there evil in the world?

The point is, monotheism provides an answer.

To begin with, how do you define evil? How do you know that a thing is evil?

Xerxes’s example is “a logging truck … crushing your daughter’s car.”

This is evil if you define evil as something you do not want. This is obviously a thing you do not want, and something your daughter did not want. 

But does that demonstrate that it is evil? Consider a small child wanting another chocolate before supper. Is it evil that his parents refuse it?

No; to simply define “good” as “getting what we want” is puerile. It also does not work if, say, what we want is something someone else has. Good instead means something like “justice” and what is best for all concerned.

Now, while we know that our daughter does not want to be hit b a logging truck and killed, do we know that it is best for her not to die?

We do not, because we do not know what comes after death. For all we know, death releases her from bonding into a much better life.

We also know we do not want suffering, either the physical pain she might experience in the crash, or our own loneliness at her sudden absence. But do we know that suffering is evil, in the sense of not being in our best interests?

The parent who refuses the child a chocolate makes him suffer. The parent who takes his child to the dentist makes him suffer.

What about the muscle strain and bruising you feel as you win the Grey Cup, or the intense soreness after? Seriously, would the win be as sweet if you had done it without any pain or effort? Is a film fun to watch if nothing bad or scary ever happens to the heroine throughout?

Suppose that ignorance is bliss, and beauty only comes with suffering. Would you rather have a frontal lobotomy and be ignorantly happy? To remain in a childlike or vegetative state? Or is it worthwhile to grow up into wisdom, responsibility, and creativity?

To be, with God, a co-creator?

To embrace logic, justice, and beauty?

Do Muslim and Christians Worship the Same God?

 

I am usually in awe of William Lane Craig as a philosopher. But in his claim that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God, I think he is off the mark. 

He argues that there is cause to accept the possibility that we worship the same God; but not sufficient warrant. It is possible, he says, that it is not the same God, and then he leaps to the conclusion that Yahweh and Allah are not the same God. 

Surely, at a minimum, he is actually giving no better justification for his own claim than for the claim that they are the same. It is possible; that does not make it necessary.

But it is not even possible. We are actually obliged to accept that it is the same God. 

Craig offers two analogies: first, we see a man treating a woman well, and observe that her husband is kind to her. But as it turns out, that man is not her husband, and her actual husband abuses her. In this case, if we say her husband treats her will, and another insists her husband abuses her, we are not talking about the same person.

His second example is the Immaculate Conception: Protestants commonly assume this Catholic doctrine refers to the birth of Christ. But to Catholics, it refers to the conception of the Virgin Mary. Accordingly, the two are not speaking of the same thing. Mistaken identity.

But these analogies, or any mistaken identity problem, depend on there being more than one existing item or person it is possible to be referring to: more than one man man in the world, and more than one conception. Therefore, confusion is possible.

By definition, there is only one God in the universe; and both Christians and Muslims aver it. Accordingly, it is impossible to accuse either of a care of mistaken identity, that they are thinking of another God.  By definition, Muslims and Christians simply must be worshipping the same God, whether or not they have different conceptions of Him. To disagree, Craig must first declare himself a polytheist.

If Muslims and Christians do differ in their concept of God, it is probably not very useful to argue about it. God is in his essence beyond human conception. Some things may be necessarily true, for example, by definition; but beyond such points it is unreasonable to insist that your own conception is the right one.

To demonstrate that they are different Gods, Craig points out that the Muslim God is hostile to non-Muslims, while the Christian God loves everyone, “unconditionally.”

Problem: Does the Hebrew God of the Old Testament love the Canaanites and Philistines “unconditionally”? That’s far from clear. He does, after all, want them wiped out, men, women, children and cattle.

And does the God of the New Testament, really? The scribes and Pharisees? The “goats” thrown into the eternal flames?

The term “Muslim” properly means “obedient to God.” So God loves Muslims. This seems to me the same as the Christian teaching: God loves those who love him, but those who reject him are damned.   Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, turning from God, is the unforgivable sin.

It is an odd partisan blindness on Dr. Craig’s part.

The Evil God

 

Friend Xerxes has revealed himself to be a pantheist; or, more precisely, a panentheist. That is, the created universe is divine and a part of God himself. 

I pointed out to him that this leaves us with a God who is evil; or, put another way, with evil as divine.

To which he responded that “evil is a concept invented by humans.”

This does not address the problem: God is still evil. The more so since Xerxes holds that man, creator of the concept, is divine. So I assume he really means to say that evil is an arbitrary concept with no real content.

This is a common idea nowadays. This is “cultural relativism”; this is constructivism; this is postmodernism.

Kant demonstrated, though the categorical imperative, that the moral good was unconditional and absolute. The Bible shows creation itself, from beginning to end, as a struggle of good against evil. And if you accept the “morality is relative” claim, you are implicitly accepting that Hitler or Charles Manson did nothing wrong, that we only persecuted them for holding different opinions.

The Christian believes that all men have a conscience, an internal compass that tells right from wrong. This is reinforced by the often-noted fact that all major religions contain, somewhere in their scriptures, a near-identical phrase: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Friend Seiko suggests that Buddhism does not concern itself with morals. Yet Buddhism too has its five precepts, binding on all men, which correlate well with the Ten Commandments. In the legend of the historical Buddha, his ultimate enemy, Mara, is a figure of personified evil. Making the struggle of good and evil as central to Buddhism as to Judaism or Christianity.

There is an obvious reason why so many want to deny the moral good, despite it being so universal and so certain.

It is because they are conscious of having done wrong. They do not WANT there to be a good and evil.

This is, perhaps, the sin Jesus called the one unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit. One cannot be forgiven if one refuses to admit one has sinned.

Jordan Peterson: Lost in a World He Never Made

 

I find Jordan Peterson’s thinking hard to follow. Should I make the effort to figure out what he is trying to say? Is it liable to be anything of substance, or will I be wasting a great deal of time?

The odds are I will be wasting my time. Being able to think clearly and being able to express yourself clearly are almost the same thing.

But I took the time to try to untangle his thinking in this brief interview with Andrew Klavan. Klavan is trying to pin Peterson down on whether he believes in God.

In the talk, I do not think Peterson is trying to be deliberately obscure. Many academics are; enough double-talk and people do not realize you are talking nonsense. Peterson is not like this. Utter sincerity seems to be his dominant trait. It is what is so attractive about him. It is why, I think, he has become so popular and famous; nobody is used to hearing an academic speak so honestly. 

His problem is that, as a social scientist, he does not have the mental tools to handle metaphysical questions, like the existence and nature of God. He almost seems to understand this himself.

“Does God exist? How would I know? I can’t know, and neither can anyone else.”

In fact, the existence of God is knowable in a dozen ways. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says 

“Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of ‘converging and convincing arguments,’ which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.”

That is, there are various philosophical proofs for the existence of God. Peterson’s problem is that there are no, and can be no, scientific proofs for the existence of God—and the only thing he understands is science. There can be no scientific proofs of the existence of God, because science deals only with physical objects, and God is not a physical object.

As though to explain the impossibility, almost as if he understand the problem, Peterson goes on to speak of the objective and the subjective. 

“I don’t understand the relationship between the objective and the subjective. I don’t understand consciousness. From the objective perspective, it’s nothing.”

Because he speaks from a scientific perspective, Peterson is confusing “objective,” “physical,” and “real”; he is assuming they all mean the same thing. Science cannot tell them apart.

The objective is that which exists independently of our experience of it. It abides when we are not witnessing it. For example, the physical world does not cease to exist when we close our eyes.

The physical is what we perceive with our senses: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing.

The real is not “what exists,” although it seems to mean that. Everything conceivable necessarily exists--as a concept, as a perception. We say something is “real” when it exists in the same category of existence we think it does. If we think it exists as a physical object, but it exists only as a concept, it is “unreal.” But on the other hand, we do not call happiness “unreal” because it does not exist as a physical object.

Peterson: 

“Religious experience is subjective, but it is a human universal. It is transpersonal, but it is subjective. We don’t have a category for the transpersonal subjective.”

It is science that does not have a category for the “transpersonal subjective.” But Peterson is wrong on his terminology. God is not subjective—he is objective. He exists when we are not thinking of him. “Transpersonal” means “objective.” By “subjective,” Peterson really means “non-physical.” 

God exists in the non-physical, i.e., spiritual, objective realm. As does heaven, hell, and the angels and saints. As does love, sin, morality, other consciousnesses, and most of what is important in life.

And Peterson, as a social scientist, cannot account for any of it. He is trapped in the world of inanimate things.

So, by extension, is psychology, and social sciences, in general.

All Religions Are One; or at Least 1.5

Blake, The Ancient of Days

Atheists like Christopher Hitchens like to say that theists are inconsistent, for they reject the existence of all gods but one. They are only inconsistent in their atheism. Why Yahweh and not Zeus, Allah, Krishna, or Nanabush? Similarly, there are various religions with incompatible claims. How, other than some accident of birth, do you come to choose one faith over another? Can it be fair that everyone not of your faith is damned, only for this accident of birth?

This seems to be fair, if the various religions are incompatible in their claims. I have never really thought they are.

Let’s start with Zeus and Yahweh and Nanabush.

It is simply wrong to say that Christianity denies the existence of Zeus and the pagan gods.

Paul neatly explained Christianity in a Greek pagan context on the Areopagus:

Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus, and said, "You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I announce to you."

This unknown god was not, in the pagan mind, just one more god. A “great high God” seems to be recognized in all polytheistic systems: in Korean shamanism, he is called Chilsong. In Hinduism, Brahman. The North American Indians claim they always knew of a “Great Spirit.” They never deny his existence; they simply stress his utter transcendence. As a result, for practical purposes, we are left dealing with a troupe of lesser gods like Zeus. These lesser gods are not really venerated by the pagans: they are appeased with sacrifices to keep them in a good mood.

Or else, as in Hinduism, they are expressions of aspects of the great high God. We see the same concept in Judaism: the sephirot.

Nor does Christianity deny these lesser gods. They are simply not the great high God—agreeing here with the pagans. They are intermediate beings, more powerful than men, immortal, but amoral. They are daemons, beings of pure spirit. They are simply no longer to be worshipped, for they, unlike Yahweh, have no power to save.

Now, as to Christians and Muslims worshipping different gods: this is nonsensical. As monotheists, both assert there can be only one supreme being; this is also necessarily so as a matter of logic. It does not mean anything that they use different names for this entity; and, in fact, they do not use different names. A Lebanese Christian prays to Allah. It is the Arabic word for God, related to “Elohim” or “El,” the Hebrew Biblical terms.

Christianity in conflict with Judaism? This would be heresy in Christian terms. Yahweh made a covenant with the Jews. Can a Christian believe that God would not keep his word? So long as a single Jew stays faithful to that covenant, it is still in force.

Buddhism is often claimed to be the odd one out, atheist, and incompatible with any of the other main religions. This is an illusion. Buddhism is simply not concerned with metaphysics. It is a psychology, not a philosophy; and is actually compatible with all religious for this reason.

What, you will say, about reincarnation? Reincarnation is a basic premise of Hinduism and Buddhism, and is rejected by Christianity.

I would argue that it should not be rejected by Christianity; because it solves two vital theological puzzles. First, what happens to the souls of unbaptized children? What happens to all the aborted children?

If life on earth means anything, if it is, as Keats has said, the vale of soulmaking, these children have not merited heaven. If dying without having sinned were enough, God is unjust to have created the world, instead of having us all born into heaven. At the same time, it seems unfair that these immortal souls have never had a chance at it. And, in the case of aborted children, because of another’s sin.

That cannot work, and, as a Church commission has recently ruled, Limbo is not an acceptable answer.

The obvious answer is that children who die before baptism are reincarnated. They get a second shot. It seems almost necessarily so.

And if so, it might as well also be true that some others might merit, and get, a second shot. For example, what if you were born in China, or India, and never heard the Gospel? Then you cannot be faulted. So, a second shot, or a third, or a fourth, if necessary, until a lifetime in which you fully encounter the Christian message, and become baptized. Then the Christian rules kick in.

Accordingly, reincarnation could be absolutely true for Hindus or Buddhists, and not for Christians.

It all amounts to less than perfect consensus; but at least as much consensus as you find in science or philosophy.

The Atheism Delusion

All my life, people have asked “Do you believe in God?” as though it were a meaningful question. I have never felt it was. It seems to me like a dodge to avoid the real question. It seems to me that, to any sincere and thoughtful person, the existence of God is self-evident.

My friends Xerxes or Xanthippe say they do not believe in God. But then they scoff at Him as “an old man with a long white beard living in the clouds.” Obviously, this is not God. Theirs is a perfect straw man argument.

Richard Dawkins argues that everyone is an atheist about all gods but one: Christians do not believe in Zeus or Baal. But by definition, there can be only one God, and it cannot matter what name you give Him, either Zeus or Jesus or Allah. So by Dawkins’ logic, to be a theist one must be an atheist; Aristotle would choke on his retsina. Nor do Christians deny the existence of Zeus or Baal, or any particular pagan god. They only deny that they are God; and the pagans who worshipped Zeus or Baal would agree. They are not God, by definition, because there are many pagan gods. None are claimed to be omnipotent, or omniscient, or all-good. They are simply supernatural beings. Dawkins is intentionally or unintentionally confusing apples and rutabagas.

Aha, you may object; but the pagans did not believe in God, did they? They believed only in gods; they were atheists in the proper sense.

I think they were atheists only in the modern sense: that they were trying to avoid the issue. We do not have sufficient evidence to say much about the original beliefs of hunter-gatherer societies, but when we look at ancient Rome, Greece, China, or India, we see that they did believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good power. The Greeks called it Dike, “Justice.” Even the Gods could not avoid it. Plato and Aristotle were philosophical monotheists. In India, they called it karma, even apart from Brahman, possibly a later concept. In China, “tian,” “heaven.” They simply did not personify it and make it the sole focus of legitimate worship.

Another “atheist” argument is that there is no physical evidence of God. This seems perfectly disingenuous, since God is spirit and prior to matter, which He created; He is not physical by definition. You could just as plausibly argue that there is no physical evidence of consciousness. But just try running the statement “I am not conscious” by Descartes. Conversely, instead of arguing that there is no physical evidence of God, you could argue that everything physical is proof of God, in the same sense that hearing a nightingale’s song and seeing a nightingale’s plumage is evidence there is a nightingale in the woods.

It seems to me people are not arguing here in good faith. It is not that anyone really does not believe in the existence of God. It is more a case of whistling past the graveyard; we all want plausible deniability.

The real question is “Do you believe in evil?” Or you could phrase it as “do you believe in karma?” Or, “do you believe in justice?”

This is what everyone is really trying to avoid; avoid by not even asking the question. We do not want to believe in justice, in right and wrong, because and to the extent that we are aware ourselves of having done evil. We want to avoid admitting it.

We are in the position of Adam and Eve, who, hearing Yahweh approach, absurdly tried to hide in the bushes. Yeah, that ought to work, with an omniscient being.

Another reason why “do you believe in God” is the wrong question, is that it is perfectly common for people to profess to believe in God, yet deny the existence of evil or justice. They will readily say they believe in God; but will they speak of the Devil? This really means they do not accept God at all; they are just mouthing the word in hopes this will serve as cover. Like Adam and Eve with their fig leaves.

They will profess, for example, that the only thing that matters is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. They will say salvation is by faith alone. If you simply say you believe in God, you need not worry about your actions. They will say God loves us all, there is no Hell, or nobody in Hell, and we will all get into Heaven. We are all saints. They will say the only sin is in pointing out a sin.

How common an attitude is that in the Christian world?

Almost the dominant attitude, surely.

As it is in the Muslim world, for that matter.

It seems from this that Hell indeed will not lack occupants. To sin is human; to deny God, to deny the possibility of sin, is diabolical.

God Is

Michelangelo's God the Father.

This point is not really open to debate. Leaving aside direct experience (and why should we?), there are at least a half-dozen sound philosophical proofs for God's existence; some enumerate several dozen. Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal, the Kalam Cosmological argument; go have a look. It may be possible to remain unconvinced by all of them, but cumulatively, they mean that God's existence is a good deal more certain than any other item of human knowledge. Nobody seems to loudly doubt the existence of the material world, or of other people, or of the truths of science, or of himself. Why God?

Some complain, of Descartes's proof, that it leaves us with a supposed “mind-body” problem. Personally, I have never seen why positing the existence of two distinct types of thing is a problem. But never mind. If so, Berkeley resolved it neatly—by rejecting the existence of the body.

God as cosmic architect, "arch-builder." French, 13th century.

Some assert that Hume exploded all such proofs, by denying the very relationship of cause to effect. I think his argument is tautological. But if you accept Hume, this deals proofs of God only a glancing blow; on the other hand, it entirely invalidates science.

Some assert that Hume exploded the use of miracles as proof, by arguing that miracles are so intrinsically unlikely we must dismiss all such accounts. But no philosopher relies on miracles as their proof of God. And Hume's argument here is also tautological: if we dismiss all claims of miracle as improbable, how do we establish how probable they actually are?

Richard Dawkins asserts, at this point, “Which God?” as if this is a real problem. No, it is a nonsensical question. God is by definition the Supreme Being. There can be only one, and the name one uses is conceptually irrelevant. Monotheists necessarily do not believe it is possible to worship different Gods. Nor, for that matter, do polytheists—the Romans uncontroversially identified their Jupiter with the Greek Zeus and the Carthaginian Baal, their Mercury with the Greek Hermes and the German Wotan, and so on and on. There is a limited, universally recognized, pantheon. Only atheists are apparently confused by this.

Hittite "weather god," i.e., Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, or Thor. All the same guy.

So, there is a God. And the fact of there being a God is an overwhelming fact. It changes everything. If there is a God, nothing is random, nothing is chance, nothing is secret, and nothing is too improbable to have happened. If there is a God, nothing else matters, but understanding him and his will for us. It is surpassingly odd that we are not all hard at work at this.