The Lack of Reason for God, Chapter 10
Nov. 28th, 2014 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blimixThis is part of a series examining the the logic of Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: Chapter 9 treated morality as evidence that we believe in god.
Chapter 10
In which building an identity apparently doesn't work.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
p. 160. Keller describes a conversation with a despondent man. "As gently as possible I said that the good news was -- he was a sinner. Because he was a sinner he wasn't simply the helpless victim of psychological drives or social systems."
The upshot is that the man had agency in his life. There was no need to put this in terms of sin.
p. 160. Keller quotes Barbara Brown Taylor: "Neither the language of medicine nor of law is adequate substitute for the language of [sin.] Contrary to the medical model, we are not entirely at the mercy of our maladies."
I doubt that anyone credible has claimed that we are entirely at the mercy of our maladies. In any reasonable paradigm, one recognizes that life is partly what we make it, and partly what happens to us. (Note the hedging words "reasonable" and "credible". Victim blamers and Christian Scientists, for example, will attribute everything to a person's own actions. Much more rarely, one may encounter determinists, behaviorists, or apologists who make the opposite mistake (the one described by Taylor).) I suspect that Keller is using this quote in order to downplay secular acknowledgment of a person's agency in their own life, and by contrast play up this same acknowledgment as a benefit of the "language of sin".
p. 160. Inside that same Barbara Brown Taylor quote: "'All sins are attempts to fill voids,' wrote Simone Weil. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but only God may fill [it]."
"All sins are attempts to fill voids" only makes sense in the same way in which all actions (of any sort) are attempts to fill voids. When you eat, you fill a void called "hunger". Even metaphorically, this isn't a god-shaped hole, but a protein-and-fat-and-carbohydrate-shaped hole. No matter my actions, whether Taylor would consider them "sin" or not, I feel no "god-shaped hole" to be filled.
p. 162. Keller quotes and then paraphrases Soren Kierkegaard: "'Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God... Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.' Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him."
Keller's interpretation is not supported by Kierkegaard's quote. Here, Kierkegaard essentially says that being yourself is good, where goodness is measured by your relationship with god. This is different from using god to define yourself.
p. 164. Keller lists various bases for people's senses of self. In a footnote (8), he then briefly explains how each of these bases can fail or cause hardship. (e.g., "If you center your life and identity on your work and career, you will be a driven workaholic, and a boring, shallow person. At worst you will lose family and friends and, if your career goes poorly, develop deep depression.")
The footnote was insightful, and deserved to be in the main text. I have seen people succumb to the pitfalls that he describes. Given the constraints of brevity, the too strong claims (about what will (rather than might, or will probably) happen) can, I think, be excused.
As an aside, healthily creating a sense of self can (as Keller notes) be a tricky business. In my personal opinion, "who someone really is" depends upon their actions, and the choices they make. Thus, people are not limited to discovering or describing their identities; they may also create themselves. A person can decide who they want to be, and proceed to make their choices in line with that idea. (Failures will happen, of course. They reveal obstacles to be overcome.)
pp. 164-165. Keller argues that a sense of identity that is built upon anything other than a relationship with god is unstable, and a threat to those other bases constitutes a threat to one's identity. "There is no way to avoid this insecurity outside of God. Even if you say, 'I will not build my happiness or significance on anyone or thing,' you will actually be building your identify on your personal freedom and independence. If anything threatens that, you will again be without a self."
Giving examples of bad ways to create a sense of identity is nice, but it does not provide a basis for concluding that there are no good (secular) ways to do so. Building one's identity on god suffers exactly the same insecurity as his other examples. Many religious people feel threatened by even the existence of atheists, as if the fact that some people don't believe in god is somehow a threat to one's own faith. (Homophobia is (among other things) the fear that you might be gay. Similarly, extreme hostility toward atheists might be caused by fear that there is no god. When a person has given themselves up to god, and has dedicated decades of their life to god's worship, or (as my book club friend points out) when a person's worldview depends upon god bringing order to the universe and making everything right, how terrifying would the thought of god's nonexistence be?) The final sentiment, about "building your identity on your personal freedom and independence," is simply false. By refusing to "build my happiness or significance on anyone or thing," I may be building it upon any conglomeration of thoughts, events, passions, and/or actions; or letting it coalesce from the gestalt of my life; or even living happily without a sense of identity (in a Buddhist state of Nirvana). These options are not based on freedom, and are not subject to destruction or insecurity due to lost freedom.
p. 168. Keller cites Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue: "He argues that human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love. If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then, says Edwards, we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic... only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general."
This argument leads us straight from family to nation, then veers away from the obvious next step: What if our highest goal is the good of all people on Earth? (Or, to not be planetist, solar systemist, or galaxyist, the good of all sapient (or even sentient) creatures in the universe?) This goal seems to be immune from Edwards' criticism. In fact, since the achievement of that goal is what justifies his love of god, isn't the love of all people the higher, more important goal? (One might compare with this a sentiment found in the Tao Te Ching: "[The Tao] might appear to have been before God.")
pp. 169-170. Keller explains that Genesis describes humans in a state of peace, joy, and harmony, which was destroyed when we sinned by serving ourselves instead of god. ("... we abandoned living for and enjoying God as our highest good...")
There is no reason to believe any of this. As my book club friend points out, this argument depends upon the reader already believing in Christianity and its particular interpretation of Genesis, and so cannot persuade non-Christians that there is a problem with "sinning".
The rest of the chapter builds upon and repeats the errors described above, and warrants no further mention here.
Oddly, this chapter was called "The Problem of Sin," though it focuses almost exclusively on problems of identity. (Keller used his misrepresentation of Kierkegaard's quote to define "sin" as building an identity on anything that is not god. This definition is either unusual or unique, but in any case is less than useful for communication.)
Next week: In chapter 11, a particular style of Christianity is the only correct way to accept god.
The whole series.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: Chapter 9 treated morality as evidence that we believe in god.
In which building an identity apparently doesn't work.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
p. 160. Keller describes a conversation with a despondent man. "As gently as possible I said that the good news was -- he was a sinner. Because he was a sinner he wasn't simply the helpless victim of psychological drives or social systems."
The upshot is that the man had agency in his life. There was no need to put this in terms of sin.
p. 160. Keller quotes Barbara Brown Taylor: "Neither the language of medicine nor of law is adequate substitute for the language of [sin.] Contrary to the medical model, we are not entirely at the mercy of our maladies."
I doubt that anyone credible has claimed that we are entirely at the mercy of our maladies. In any reasonable paradigm, one recognizes that life is partly what we make it, and partly what happens to us. (Note the hedging words "reasonable" and "credible". Victim blamers and Christian Scientists, for example, will attribute everything to a person's own actions. Much more rarely, one may encounter determinists, behaviorists, or apologists who make the opposite mistake (the one described by Taylor).) I suspect that Keller is using this quote in order to downplay secular acknowledgment of a person's agency in their own life, and by contrast play up this same acknowledgment as a benefit of the "language of sin".
p. 160. Inside that same Barbara Brown Taylor quote: "'All sins are attempts to fill voids,' wrote Simone Weil. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but only God may fill [it]."
"All sins are attempts to fill voids" only makes sense in the same way in which all actions (of any sort) are attempts to fill voids. When you eat, you fill a void called "hunger". Even metaphorically, this isn't a god-shaped hole, but a protein-and-fat-and-carbohydrate-shaped hole. No matter my actions, whether Taylor would consider them "sin" or not, I feel no "god-shaped hole" to be filled.
p. 162. Keller quotes and then paraphrases Soren Kierkegaard: "'Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God... Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.' Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him."
Keller's interpretation is not supported by Kierkegaard's quote. Here, Kierkegaard essentially says that being yourself is good, where goodness is measured by your relationship with god. This is different from using god to define yourself.
p. 164. Keller lists various bases for people's senses of self. In a footnote (8), he then briefly explains how each of these bases can fail or cause hardship. (e.g., "If you center your life and identity on your work and career, you will be a driven workaholic, and a boring, shallow person. At worst you will lose family and friends and, if your career goes poorly, develop deep depression.")
The footnote was insightful, and deserved to be in the main text. I have seen people succumb to the pitfalls that he describes. Given the constraints of brevity, the too strong claims (about what will (rather than might, or will probably) happen) can, I think, be excused.
As an aside, healthily creating a sense of self can (as Keller notes) be a tricky business. In my personal opinion, "who someone really is" depends upon their actions, and the choices they make. Thus, people are not limited to discovering or describing their identities; they may also create themselves. A person can decide who they want to be, and proceed to make their choices in line with that idea. (Failures will happen, of course. They reveal obstacles to be overcome.)
pp. 164-165. Keller argues that a sense of identity that is built upon anything other than a relationship with god is unstable, and a threat to those other bases constitutes a threat to one's identity. "There is no way to avoid this insecurity outside of God. Even if you say, 'I will not build my happiness or significance on anyone or thing,' you will actually be building your identify on your personal freedom and independence. If anything threatens that, you will again be without a self."
Giving examples of bad ways to create a sense of identity is nice, but it does not provide a basis for concluding that there are no good (secular) ways to do so. Building one's identity on god suffers exactly the same insecurity as his other examples. Many religious people feel threatened by even the existence of atheists, as if the fact that some people don't believe in god is somehow a threat to one's own faith. (Homophobia is (among other things) the fear that you might be gay. Similarly, extreme hostility toward atheists might be caused by fear that there is no god. When a person has given themselves up to god, and has dedicated decades of their life to god's worship, or (as my book club friend points out) when a person's worldview depends upon god bringing order to the universe and making everything right, how terrifying would the thought of god's nonexistence be?) The final sentiment, about "building your identity on your personal freedom and independence," is simply false. By refusing to "build my happiness or significance on anyone or thing," I may be building it upon any conglomeration of thoughts, events, passions, and/or actions; or letting it coalesce from the gestalt of my life; or even living happily without a sense of identity (in a Buddhist state of Nirvana). These options are not based on freedom, and are not subject to destruction or insecurity due to lost freedom.
p. 168. Keller cites Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue: "He argues that human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love. If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then, says Edwards, we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic... only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general."
This argument leads us straight from family to nation, then veers away from the obvious next step: What if our highest goal is the good of all people on Earth? (Or, to not be planetist, solar systemist, or galaxyist, the good of all sapient (or even sentient) creatures in the universe?) This goal seems to be immune from Edwards' criticism. In fact, since the achievement of that goal is what justifies his love of god, isn't the love of all people the higher, more important goal? (One might compare with this a sentiment found in the Tao Te Ching: "[The Tao] might appear to have been before God.")
pp. 169-170. Keller explains that Genesis describes humans in a state of peace, joy, and harmony, which was destroyed when we sinned by serving ourselves instead of god. ("... we abandoned living for and enjoying God as our highest good...")
There is no reason to believe any of this. As my book club friend points out, this argument depends upon the reader already believing in Christianity and its particular interpretation of Genesis, and so cannot persuade non-Christians that there is a problem with "sinning".
The rest of the chapter builds upon and repeats the errors described above, and warrants no further mention here.
Oddly, this chapter was called "The Problem of Sin," though it focuses almost exclusively on problems of identity. (Keller used his misrepresentation of Kierkegaard's quote to define "sin" as building an identity on anything that is not god. This definition is either unusual or unique, but in any case is less than useful for communication.)
Next week: In chapter 11, a particular style of Christianity is the only correct way to accept god.
The whole series.
