A Cautionary Tale

This morning Amazon, like the Hand of Providence, threw into my path a book by James A. Lindsay, Everybody Is Wrong About God (Pitchstone Publishing, 2015).  Everyone except for James A. Lindsay, I figured, and I was right.  According to the accompanying blurb the book is:

A call to action to address people's psychological and social motives for a belief in God, rather than debate the existence of God  With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided—and often dangerous—belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in "God," they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action. Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called "God."

I'm sympathetic with Lindsay's approach here.  I've benefited from reading the literature debating the existence of gods, but I was already an atheist when I began reading it.  I became an atheist quite young, at around the age of ten.  I was fascinated by Greek and Biblical mythology, and one day my father told me that I should know that some people don't believe in God.  "Why not?" I asked. "Well," he replied, "they don't feel any need to."  I took my time absorbing this information, and I don't know exactly when I realized that I was one of those people, but I did.  After all, I didn't have much of an idea of what God was before; he was sort of like Santa Claus, of whose existence I'd been disabused some years earlier, or the Greek gods.  Learning what it meant to be an atheist took a lot more time and thought.  I'm still learning, but debating whether gods exist doesn't interest me any more than debating whether homosexuality is okay.

The trouble with Lindsay's stance is that it cuts both ways; we atheists, when we say we don't believe in "God," are really telling theists that we have certain psychological and social needs that we don't know how to meet.  Everyone does.  Human beings aren't rational creatures at heart; we can learn to use reason, but our needs and drives are pre- or sub-rational.  Does Lindsay realize that he's echoing, almost parodying, a popular Christian missionary line here?  I don't think so.  But it's also reminiscent of Almost-New Atheist Sam Harris's conviction that people who criticize American foreign policy are "masochistic," and need to have our eyes opened to the healing light he brings, that we may have life more abundantly (and Muslims have it less).

And -- surprise, surprise -- I downloaded the Kindle sample of Everybody Is Wrong About God, and found that Harris is for Lindsay one of "the most prominent atheist writers of the beginning of this century, among them Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, the late Victor Stenger, and Jerry Coyne."  "Prominent" seems to be damning this pan-atheon with faint praise, I must admit, but Lindsay thinks that they have definitively brought theism low.  He says he will work with a "clarified position on the term atheism, one that speaks back to the meaning originally put forward" by Harris et al.  This is also odd: did they -- does Lindsay -- believe that there was no atheism before the twenty-first century?  From what I've read of their work, which I admit isn't enough, they were just following in the footsteps of much smarter writers.  David Hume, for one.  And far from what you might call post-theists, which is what Lindsay seems to be aiming for, they are very noisily anti-theist.

Lindsay also says that "we need to understand myth.  Myth doesn't just mean a misinterpretation of a phenomenon."  (Actually, it doesn't mean that at all.  I'll return to that point shortly.)

At the core of myth is a blend of misinterpretation, obscuring ignorance, and yet clear apprehension, but what is most relevant about mythology is none of these.  True, myths are built out of ignorance, often due in part to the complexity of the subject matter at their cores, and, true, myths are a kind of misinterpretation of that subject matter.  On the other hand, and importantly, also true is that myths encapsulate some degree of understanding of what they represent -- otherwise they'd be far less compelling than they are.  What is most relevant about myths, however, is exactly what makes them most compelling: myths are culturally relevant narratives that simplify complex or unclear phenomena and that speak to people at the level of their psychological needs.  Narratives of this kind, though, are exactly what religions provide for people, and it is therefore precisely this observation that illustrates why God, at the center of so many religious beliefs, is a mythological construct.

This isn't far from the view of a theistic apologist like Karen Armstrong.  The main difference is that Armstrong allows more understanding and knowledge to mythology.  But they're both wrong.  There's a lot of scholarly debate about just what myth is, and at best Lindsay is addressing only a subset of the material.  It's not even sure how much the ancients believed their myths.  Some scholars argue that at least some myths encode not ignorance, but knowledge about the world, perhaps to keep it esoteric.  But it ill becomes Lindsay to dismiss ignorance, since everyone is ignorant of more than they know, including Lindsay.  Indeed, "ignorance" and "superstition" are both religious concepts.  Especially going by the mythos of Modern Science, everyone today is an ignorant savage compared to those who will follow us in centuries to come.  He has, as far as I can tell from what I've read of the book so far, a rather backward conception of religion, as a bunch of silly stories invented to keep the rabble happy and controlled.  It appears that he hopes to fill the shoes of the elites who developed religion for that purpose in the first place.

Take the last sentence I quoted, which has the form of a logical conclusion but isn't one.  First, mythology is only part of any religion, and it's likely that ritual predates mythology.  People create narratives for their own sake, and only rationalize them afterward.  Mythology is a part of epics like the Gilgamesh cycle, the Homeric epics, and the Torah, but only part; and I wouldn't care to pontificate as to their purposes.  In Greek drama, which originated as part of religious festivals, the gods are used as part of the stories, just like the human characters, who are also mythological though not divine.  Myth is part of the backdrop of any human society.

Second, because human beings think narratively, mythic narratives aren't specific to religion.  It's a cliche that nations have their own mythologies, and the United States is no exception: Columbus, who defied superstitious belief in a flat earth to discover America; the Pilgrim Fathers, who fled persecution to build a haven for religious freedom in the New World; the Founding Fathers, who in their wisdom created a new nation devoted to freedom for all men; and so on.  (I know that these are ahistorical; that's the point.)  So does science, not just with heroic tales about the Patriarchs -- all male, naturally -- who defied superstition to bring Man the light of knowledge, of Galileo muttering "It still moves" after being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, Thomas Huxley totally destroying Bishop Samuel Wilberforce over Evolution in 1860, of Watson and Crick cracking the DNA code by themselves, down to bold cowboy geeks inventing the computer in their garages without a penny of government money -- but with a mythology of the Scientific Method, which bears little or no resemblance to what scientists actually do.  But scientists believe in it, because it speaks to their psychological needs.  The myth of evolution as a linear ascent from lower to higher, dumber to smarter, is also popular among those with Faith in Science.  You might be able to get rid of religion, narrowly and tendentiously defined, but mythology won't be eliminated easily, if at all.

Unwittingly supporting my position, Lindsay declares a little later, "We saw the idea of racism collapse long before the culture started really catching on, a process lamentably still continuing today." This, lamentably, isn't true.  The idea of the oneness of humanity is actually much older and is found in some universalizing religions, but in the late 1800s the "idea of racism" moved from "the culture" to science, where it's comfortably entrenched to this day, along with the "idea of sexism."  Lindsay has degrees in physics and mathematics, but he doesn't know much about history.

If the price of Everybody Is Wrong About God is marked down, I might try reading the whole thing, but so far it isn't promising.  As numerous people have said, including me: the trouble isn't that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

Among the Believers

While I'm on the subject of religion, I should mention Richard Seymour's new book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (Verso, 2012).  It's a good read, well-researched, with some material from Seymour's own interviews with some of Hitchens's friends and colleagues, and it gives its subject credit for his virtues while mercilessly dissecting his faults.

I've noticed before that Seymour seems to take a softer line on religion than I do.  From Unhitched I suspect that we're closer to agreement than I thought, but we still disagree on a lot of details.  First he shows a few of Hitchens's factual errors from his anti-religion polemic God Is Not Great.  I'd already seen Terry Eagleton sneering at Hitchens's distaste for Jesus' teaching against wealth and good bourgeois concern for the future; from reading Seymour I see that it's a survival from Hitchens's own bourgeois upbringing.  But I'd noticed that Eagleton is unreliable about religion himself.  Seymour is better, but he still has something to learn.

He mentions that "Hitchens complained that religions have historically staunchly resisted the translation of their texts -- the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran -- into the language of the common people.  He remonstrated that this demonstrates a desire on the part of arbiters of faith to keep the people in ignorance.  Again, even with a will to believe the worst of religion, this claim is impossible to sustain" (63).

I haven't yet read God Is Not Great, so this stupidity on Hitchens's part entertained me.  Could he really have been that ignorant?  In the first place, those "texts" were originally written in the vernacular.  The Vulgate, the Latin version that was adopted as official by the Roman Catholic Church, put the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek original into the vernacular of the Roman Empire.  But I also noticed something odd in that list of holy texts -- "the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran."  Was it Hitchens's, or Seymour's list?  The Talmud, though very important in post-biblical Judaism, doesn't have quite the same status as the Bible.  But "the Bible" is shared by Christianity and Judaism; it sounds to me as though someone was trying to name a specifically Jewish text, whether it was "Scripture" or not, but wasn't informed enough to get it right.  Let him who is without sin ...

Seymour then quotes William Hamblin, a professor of history at Brigham Young University (!):

In reality the translation of religious texts has been a major cultural phenomenon in ancient and medieval times and has steadily increased through the present.  The Bible, of course, is the most translated book in the history of the world ... The Bible was also the most widely translated book in the ancient world ... The earliest translation of the Qur'an appeared within a couple of centuries of Muhammad's death.  By the tenth century there were extensive commentaries on the Qur'an in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish -- the three great cultural languages of medieval Islamic civilization.  These included a word-for-word grammatical analysis of the Arabic text, thereby providing translations.  In the Middle Ages there were numerous interlinear translations of the Qur'an.  In addition, the Qur'an was translated by non-Muslims, largely for polemical purposes ... [63].

This has the tone of an infomercial more than information, and there are problems with it.  A commentary, even word-for-word, isn't a translation.  Interlinear translations can be read, but they're probably not used in worship; they're meant for study, and like commentaries they are more likely to be used by professional students than ordinary laypeople.  A good commentary, simply by detailing the manifold interpretations possible, will probably annoy most laypeople, who want to believe that the meaning of a text is accessible to honest common sense.  (Similar difficulties attend the translation of the Hebrew Bible into modern languages: among Jews, translations weren't forbidden so much as discouraged in favor of studying the text in the original. That isn't a bad idea in any case. Seymour and Hamblin must be aware of the problems involved in translation of any text.)  I don't know as much about the history of Islam or the Quran as I do about Christianity, but I'm suspicious of Hamblin's polemic here.  He's comparing apples to oranges.  He goes on to decry Hitchens's complaint that

'devout men like Wycliffe, Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations' (p. 125) of the Bible into vernacular literature ... Far from being burned at the stake, John Wycliffe (1330-1384) died of natural causes while hearing Catholic mass in his parish church.  Miles Coverdale likewise, died unburned in 1568 at the age of eighty-one.  Of the three translators mentioned by Hitchens, only William Tyndale ... was burned at the stake.  But Tyndale's execution in 1536 was as much for his opposition to Henry VIII's divorce -- entailing what was viewed as a treasonous rejection of the Succession Act -- as it was for his translation efforts [ibid].

This is disingenuous to the point of dishonesty.  Hitchens's turning Wycliffe and Coverdale into martyrs is inexcusable sloppiness, of course.  As I've often said, if we atheists are going to criticize believers, we have to be more scrupulous about telling the truth.  But Hamblin is guilty of distortion too.  True, neither Wycliffe nor Coverdale were martyred for their translations, but Wycliffe was declared a heretic on multiple grounds.  His body was exhumed and burned, and the Church attempted to destroy every copy of his translation they could find.  (Minor detail: he suffered a fatal stroke while saying mass, not hearing it.)

Coverdale produced his translation while in self-imposed exile from England, in Protestant Antwerp, and it circulated in England after Henry VIII had broken with Rome, so it was not produced under the auspices of the Vatican.  After a brief return to England, he went back into exile on the continent, due to religious controversy at home.  As for Tyndale, Hamblin's trying to muddy the waters.  While his execution was overdetermined, he produced his translation in the face of ecclesiastical opposition, and he complained: "They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture."  The picture is more complicated than either Hitchens or Hamblin allow.  It may be difficult to disentangle all the reasons why these men got into trouble, because their determination to make the Bible available to laypeople in English went along with other heterodox beliefs, but it's clear that the Roman Catholic Church objected to the translation projects for their own sake.

Hamblin's attempt to blame Tyndale's execution on politics -- his refusal to condone Henry VIII's divorce -- is a popular diversionary tactic; it's often used to explain away Galileo's problems with the Church, for instance.  (He got in trouble because of his tactlessness with the Princes of the Church, not because he taught that the earth moved.)  It seems to assume that there is a pure, unworldly essence of religion that isn't weighed down by worldly concerns and conflicts.  If this is true, then it implies that real religion is useless as a guide to living in the real world, where political entanglements are inescapable; I don't think most believers really want to assert that.  But the burden in that case would be on religious leaders to stop getting bogged down in worldly politics, which isn't going to happen.  It also can be used to get rid of almost any criticism of religion, since whatever one doesn't like can be blamed on corrupt human beings, not the pure essence of faith.

A further example of literal-minded obtuseness is Hitchens's reading of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac.  Here, Hitchens thundered, there is no softening of the plain meaning of this frightful story, which is the Almighty's sanction of child murder.  The literalism is compounded by the absence of contextual awareness.  The ancient Israelite readers of this story, as well as their neighbors in pagan society, would have been accustomed to the idea of human sacrifice.  In its context the function of the story was precisely to outlaw the killing of humans [63].

Oh, dear: that word "literal" again.  I agree that the original function of the story was probably to abolish child sacrifice in Israel -- not "child murder," which was fine with Yahweh when the children were the children of idol worshipers, and certainly not "the killing of humans," which Yahweh not only didn't outlaw but demanded on numerous occasions.  But Seymour's historicist reading of the Akeda, the story of Abraham and Isaac, overlooks a few crucial points: it implies that Yahweh had previously demanded the sacrifice of Israelite children, but later changed his mind (as a deity is entitled to do).  Later in the Torah, Israelites are instructed to dedicate their first-born sons to Yahweh, and then to redeem them with a cash payment.  First-born livestock were not to be redeemed; presumably they were to be sacrificed.   When did he change his mind?  Not in the time of Abraham, or in the time of Moses.  Most scholars today think this part of Genesis was written after 1000 BCE and probably nearer to 600 BCE -- up to a thousand years after Abraham is supposed to have lived, and centuries after Moses.

There's also a story in Judges 11, which takes place long after Moses, in which a chieftain named Jephthah vows to sacrifice whoever or whatever first comes out the door to meet him, if Yahweh gives him success in battle.  Yahweh grants his wish, and Jephthah's daughter comes out to greet him.  (In context, this indicates that Yahweh selected his reward for Jephthah's victory and inspired the girl to present herself to her father.)  Jephthah weeps and wails, but carries out his promise after granting her two months to mourn her virginity.  Some modern theologians have argued that Jephthah didn't actually kill her, but dedicated her to perpetual virginity or solitary confinement. This apologetic reading hasn't been generally accepted.  I think that the story of Jephthah's daughter shows that the biblical writers weren't all on the same page, and that the ban on human sacrifice in Israel came later, even much later than Abraham or Moses.

It should also be remembered that Hitchens wasn't the first to disapprove fiercely of the story of Abraham and Isaac.  Medieval rabbis disputed about it; one fourteenth-century rabbi asked, "How could God command such a revolting thing?"  Seymour can hardly accuse them of foolish literalism: they took the story seriously.  Christian interpreters have wrestled with the story too.  One of the most famous is Soren Kierkegaard, who in 1843 devoted a book, Fear and Trembling, to the subject, exalting Abraham for his faith.  For believers, the import of the story is not as simple as Seymour would have you believe.  Hitchens's objections aren't entirely off-base either.  Anyone who doesn't question Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac isn't taking the story as seriously as Seymour thinks we should.

The Ocean or the Tiger?

I went to see Ang Lee's latest film Life of Pi today, because Samuel Delany had made some comments about it on Facebook.  Be warned that spoilers will follow.  If you haven't seen the movie yet and want to see it with a minimum of foreknowledge, stop reading now.  Of course many people who see it will have already read the novel it's based on, which I hadn't.  According to some of the comments on Delany's posts, the film stays pretty close to the book.  (Which means, thankfully, that I shouldn't have to read it myself.)

The movie presents itself as a story that "will make you believe in God." But, given the two stories that the plot hinges on, it seems to do the exact opposite--the story of the boy, the boat, and the tiger forming a precise allegory of the failure of all religions to promote humane behavior in the hidden story we are told, at the end, "actually happened" and that was so monstrously awful it had to be replaced with the hallucination we are given instead. They couldn't have come up with a better script promoting atheism if they had gotten Christopher Hitchens to write it. By the way, as a movie I rather enjoyed it--though I would have liked a film that at least tried to do what it set to, rather than the opposite, atheist that I am. But it seemed to have given up on that before it even got started.

I'd differ with Delany on something trivial but still, I believe, significant: the movie tells a story about a story that "will make you believe in God."  I presume that applies to the novel too.  I'm always skeptical about such stories,  The first such a one I encountered was Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, part of which consists of two characters telling each other how things happened, seemingly making up their reminiscences on the fly, and the reader is supposed to marvel at the instability and unknowability of reality that this represents.  Like Einstein or Heisenberg, or Schroedinger's Cat.

In Life of Pi, a young novelist beset by writer's block is told by the title character's uncle that Pi has a story to tell that will make the listener believe in God.  The novelist visits Pi, who obligingly tells his story, which makes up the bulk of the film: the only survivor of a shipwreck that killed his family (mother, father, older brother) and the entire crew of a Japanese freighter en route from Manila to Canada, the teenaged Pi found himself in a lifeboat with a survival kit and the company of a hyena, a rat, a zebra, an orangutang, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.  After a few days, the survivors are reduced to Pi and the tiger.

Pi's family had run a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and were shipping the animals to Canada for sale. During his childhood Pi had become fascinated by religion.  His family was nominally Hindu, but he came into contact with Roman Catholicism and Islam, and engaged in some simple if precocious questioning.  Convinced that animals had souls, Pi tried to make friends with the tiger; his father intervened before he lost an arm, and gave a young goat to the tiger, which killed it in front of Pi.  This convinced the boy that there was no meaning in the world, and he spent several years studying listlessly, finding meaning only later when his heterosexuality erupted in his late teens, just before the family emigrated.  It's hard for me to take the boy's disillusionment very seriously.  After all, carnivores and their prey are part of the Cycle of Life, God's Will and all that.  If the tiger had taken Pi's arm off, that would be God's will.  I'm always bemused by believers' self-serving selectivity about matters like this.

Trying to survive at sea, Pi reaches a modus vivendi with the tiger.  But he still struggles with the meaning of it all.  Occasionally in extremity he cries "I surrender!" to the god or gods he imagines in charge of his situation.  I found this perplexing, though of course it's a common reaction.  After all, if there's an omnipotent, omniscient being running your life, what does it care if you surrender or not?  What does it care if you issue ultimata or collapse in a crying heap?  If you survive, is this (as Pi seems to conclude) a sign that the gods were taking care of you?  If so, why did so many other people fail to survive?

Some commenters on Delany's post invoked the book of Job, which is not very helpful.  Like Pi, it's a fable: Yahweh and Satan bet on what will happen if the righteous and blessed Job loses the protection Yahweh has so far granted him.  Satan kills off Job's family, destroys his chattels, and afflicts him with boils.  Job denounces Yahweh's injustice in eloquent speeches, and his friends reprove him: You must have done something wrong, they tell him, or God wouldn't have done this to you.  (Notice that no one blames it on Satan, quite properly.)  In the end Yahweh speaks to Job from the whirlwind, challenging him to fisticuffs and asserting his power (but not his justice); Job crumbles and admits that he is a mere worm.  Yahweh growls at Job's friends, who he says have not spoken of him what is right, as Job has, and then restores Job's fortunes, and they all live happily after.  The end.

The difference in the story of Job is that there is no real question why Job suffered.  He didn't do anything wrong; God was just trying a little experiment.  He could as easily have gone on protecting Job.  And if Job, who was fabulously righteous, could be tormented so, there's no reason to blame the suffering of other people on their lesser righteousness.  Many interpreters have tried to get around the book's conclusions, but they've never convinced me; I follow the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whose interpretation in The Faith of a Heretic (Doubleday, 1961) still makes the most sense to me.

Pi was eventually washed up on a Mexican beach.  In the hospital he was questioned by Japanese insurance investigators who wanted to know why the ship went down; this question is never answered, since Pi couldn't have known why.  The investigators questioned the truth of his tale, so he invented a new one in which his mother, one sailor, and the French cook survived with him, but the cook killed the sailor and Pi's mother and then, guilty for his crime, let Pi kill him in turn.  The impression is given that the investigators accepted this grimmer, grittier version, but their report (which Pi produces and shows to the novelist) concluded that Pi made history by crossing the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a Bengal tiger for company.

Like Delany, I can't understand how anyone could find support for belief in gods in either story.  Life of Pi has a New-Agey, culture-of-therapy smugness about it that nearly drove me from my seat a couple of times.  Quite typically, it doesn't go very far in the edifying explanations it considers.  Again, possible spoiler:  Pi happened to survive the sinking of the ship because he was delighted by the storm and went above to watch it; his family drowned in their cabin.  Maybe his suffering in the lifeboat was God's retribution for his having escaped God's will, which was that he should have died with his family?  Why even suppose that the gods are on the side of human beings?  The humility that the faithful proudly claim to possess and practice tends to fall by the wayside when they consider their place in the universe.  Which is no doubt very comforting, but doesn't strike me as very profound.  I don't object to "spirituality" in films or other art; I just hope for something better than the usual pompous cliches, which is all that Life of Pi offers.  The photography and special effects are pretty, but I have this thing about substance too.

Coming Up Snake Eyes

I'm currently rereading two books: Fred L. Pincus's Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth (Boulder: Rienner, 2003), and Mary Midgley's Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (Routledge, 1992). Midgley is an interesting character, and though I have some disagreements with her she's one of my favorite living philosophers. She has the distinction, minor though significant, of having hurt Richard Dawkins's feelings in what Dawkins called a "highly intemperate and vicious paper", and I'd love her if she'd never done anything but goad that pot into calling the kettle black. Besides that, and more important, I've learned a lot from her, and I hope I'll be as lucid at 90 as she is.

Anyway. On page 14 of Science as Salvation Midgley quoted C. S. Lewis (from Christian Reflections, page 89):

We find that matter always obeys the same laws which our logic obeys ... No one can suppose that this can be due to a happy coincidence. A great many people think that it is due to the fact that Nature produces the mind. But on the assumption that Nature is herself mindless, this provides no explanation. To be the result of a series of mindless events is one thing; to be a kind of plan or true account of the laws according to which these mindless events happen is quite another ...

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

I think Lewis has it backwards here: why not say that logic obeys the same laws matter does?  Lewis seems to be falling prey to the Shabby Friar fallacy, where one marvels that the Lord has so arranged things that rivers flow past the larger towns.  He also conveniently ignores traditional Christian polemic against logic, "the Devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore" as Martin Luther called it.

Earlier, on page 12, Midgley had repeated a famous anecdote about Albert Einstein's resistance to the indeterminacy of quantum theory:

Disturbed by the implication of real disorder in Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics, Einstein said, 'God does not play dice'. Bohr replied, 'Einstein, stop telling God what to do.'

Midgley says that those who tell this story "seldom offer a carefully secular paraphrase to show just what [Bohr] had established, nor do they explain why this language struck these great men as so well fitted for their purpose." What occurred to me as I read it, and again when I turned the page to read Lewis's remarks about a rational universe, was that this was the only time I've encountered Bohr's rejoinder to Einstein's quip. Probably I just hadn't been paying enough attention. (In Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel The Mind-Body Problem [Penguin reprint, 1993], the narrator says that later in life, Einstein conceded, "Who knows, maybe He is a little malicious" [225-6].)

Einstein's position was circular: he didn't believe that God played dice with the universe because his concept of God, like that of the heretical seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was deterministic, and he held "that a person's actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet or star. 'Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions,' Einstein declared in a statement to a Spinoza Society in 1932." He rejected the notion of a personal "deity who could meddle at whim in the events of his creation. ... Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality." But this was Einstein's conviction, one that he shared with many other scientists, not the result of his scientific work but a preconception he brought to it. It looks like C. S. Lewis, who thought of matter obeying "the same laws which our logic obeys", agreed with Einstein on this issue.

On the other hand, I can see that for many people, theist and non-theist alike, an impersonal universe is too disturbing to face. Later in Science and Salvation, Midgley notes that for some scientists "the prospect of an eventual end to human life, however distant, is so awful as to deprive life now of all meaning. And the belief that some kind of post-human being, somehow produced by us, will in some sense survive seems to [them] enough to render it meaningful again" (21). Which reminds me of Wittgenstein's rhetorical question about 'eternal life' in the Tractatus (6.3412), "[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?" I've noticed that quite a number of science fans believe, against all likelihood, that the human race will survive until the Heat Death of the universe, which is not expected for a few billion years yet, and are eager for us to migrate throughout the universe to make sure that the human race won't die out when we blow up this planet. (As though we wouldn't do the same to the new places we moved to.)

A good many people look to belief in God for stability in the world, to give them absolutes, to give them a reliable ground for their values and other beliefs. Such people seem to think that if there's no god, the universe is chaos. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted!" Dostoevsky warned in The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe so, but you'd never conclude that from looking at how people, including Christians, imagine their gods. (I've argued that if God exists, just about everything is permitted.) Maybe God does play dice with the world; Christians and Jews attribute a great deal of not just irrationality, but outright capriciousness to their god. God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, etc. -- there's a rich vein of proverbial lore about how irrational God is, and I don't find that comforting.

In his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper, 1958), for example, the philosopher Walter Kaufmann retold a rabbinical parable in which God shows Moses a vision of the second-century rabbi Akiba, who was martyred by the Romans. Akiba interprets the Torah so wonderfully that Moses marvels, "Lord of the world, you have such a man and yet you gave the Torah through me?" "Be still," God replies, "that is how it entered my mind." Moses asks God to show him Akiba's reward for knowing the Torah so well, and God shows him Akiba's horrible death. Shocked, Moses protests: "This is the Torah, and this is its reward?" "Be still," God replies, "that is how it entered my mind." (Notice that in this story God does not reply that Akiba's martyrdom wasn't his fault, that he couldn't interfere with anybody's free will, that he suffered along with [and even more than] Akiba -- he declares that it was his whimsical doing.)

Worse yet, mythology about every god I've ever heard of depicts them as erratic, vengeful, malignant -- Yahweh as abusive husband, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, or as abusive father in the New Testament. And who knows? Maybe this is the true state of the world. My point is that a personal God, like the god of Judaism and Christianity, gives no warrant for a secure, stable, rational world. I think his existence would make the world no less frightening than his non-existence would. If the universe is orderly, it doesn't need a god to run it; if it's chaotic, I'm not reassured that it entered Someone's mind to make it that way. When I consider the images of divine beings that human beings have created, or the distant scientific futures they've imagined, I wonder what kind of "meaning" they're looking for.