Patrick Appel has a long, introspective roundup of reader reax to some posts on atheism at the Dish. He closes with a personal take, acknowledging
there is a connection between pantheism, agnosticism and atheism. [...] Most of the tension between the terms does revolve around “God” and how you define it. As for the connection between agnosticism and atheism, the Pope has a point when he discusses the difficulty of living an agnostic life. From Benedict’s Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures:
Even if I throw in my theoretical lot with agnosticism, I am nevertheless compelled in practice to choose between two alternatives: either to live as if God did not exist or else to live as if God did exist. If I act according to the first alternative, I have in practice adopted an atheistic position and have made a hypothesis (which may also be false) the basis of my entire life…By this measure I would be an atheist. I no longer believe in a personal God that possesses consciousness as we understand it or requires prayer and obedience. I’m not sure I ever did. And I live my life as if God does not exist. At the same time, I’m overwhelmed by the complexity of life and my inadequacy in understanding the systems that created and maintain the universe. “God” seems like an appropriate term for these mysteries.
Call it “Appel’s Paradox” — a tension or anxiety experienced, I think, by quite a lot of people nowadays. One can approach this paradox seeking to cure or to cope with it. A life lived according to a final choice between as-if theism and as-if theism, even if ‘merely practical’, aspires to cure Appel’s Paradox. But it’s to be expected that the cure never really comes; the predicament of the agnostic mirrors the predicament of the believing Christian, who must make a worthy home of this temporal vale which can never provide us the full measure of respite and repose that we dream of when we dream of home. But the consolations of faith fortify Christian pessimism in a way that the agnostic, to follow this line of thought, cannot enjoy. When the incredible can no longer be denied, even atheism becomes unbelievable. But the failure of the agnostic to find repose, in faith or out of it, leads him or her altogether past any basis of an entire life and into a long, chaotic oscillation, moving between living as if ultimate meaning shaped life and living as if it did not.
The promise of the therapeutic is that this chaos may be ordered institutionally — a task that requires ritual-making and ritual-breaking performances of commitment and de-commitment. Pessimism, from this standpoint, tends too severely toward the nihilistic embrace of complete randomness or meaninglessness. The promise of the therapeutic, then, holds out the prospect of coping with the soul’s wearying oscillations by sustaining performative change in a condition of open-ended linear progress. The linearity of contemporary optimism, often deemed the logical consequence of modern scientific thinking, can actually be sourced independently or alternatively in our passionate efforts to escape the destructive exhaustion of our souls or psyches, and seek repose without God.
Even our therapeutic optimists realize that we finally have to be pessimistic about technology’s ability to provide that repose. Ultimately, they must be optimists about our ability to provide it to one another — despite the many ways in which we tacitly (at least) consent to mistreating and instrumentalizing one another. I think that this view our our human interrelationships leads us forcefully to think of persons as containing powerful qualities that we can access and enjoy, pick up and put down, almost like deities in a polytheistic cosmos. But no matter how profoundly our individualistic qualities can be turned against our integral individual being, they are not gods, as we readily admit. Away from polytheism, and toward pantheism, we go.
UPDATE: Patrick enrages a pantheist, whose remarks fascinatingly and suggestively hop among Spinoza, Islam, and gnosticism.
July 21st, 2009 | 6:44 am
In a recent series of excellent posts here at PoMoCon this one is the most contemplative.
“But the failure of the agnostic to find repose, in faith or out of it, leads him or her altogether past any basis of an entire life and into a long, chaotic oscillation, moving between living as if ultimate meaning shaped life and living as if it did not.”
And now comes allotriosis, the near and dear alienation where the “mood is aroused to intense consciousness and engenders a characteristic group of symbols” that generally and vocally denegrate God’s creation via philosophy and gnositicism.
“God is to far,” we whine in the manner of the Mandaean, the basis of the complaint carrying onto Hegel’s “new critical attitude of existential analysis.” Nothing is really new, and this one is as ancient as the demon god of the East wind, good ole Pazuzzu, who would go on to have a major role in the Exorcist. But this one, alienation, is rooted in existential being (a product of the “great humility?”) and tears at the fabric of existence in that it “estranges us from the timeless…”, from the world in which we belong, and from any possiblility to live in truth. But, the real horror is that we adapt ourselves to the pathology and this “home among strangers,” this alien world, becomes reality.
The condition appears to be significant and represents an egophanic revolt that may be reaching something of a eschatological denouement; but there’s Heb. 11:6: “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”
July 21st, 2009 | 10:58 am
This is a great little gloss on what it means for God to be jealous.
August 30th, 2009 | 10:08 am
I don’t doubt that some find a certain “repose” in the comforting wrap of an ideology. All the non-believer can do is appeal to them to grow up, intellectually. Some will. Some won’t.
August 30th, 2009 | 11:14 am
[...] via Randomness and Pantheism » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things Blog. [...]
August 30th, 2009 | 11:35 am
For someone who clearly isn’t agnostic, you sure seem comfortable describing the agnostic experience as if you know something about it.
Maybe there is ultimate meaning, maybe there isn’t. But let’s say there isn’t–then what? Blow your brains out in a fit of pique? Or try to enjoy your meaningless life for what it is?
Humans are small and stupid and confused, and I’m certainly no exception. If there is ultimate meaning, I wouldn’t want it to be anything I’m capable of comprehending. Therefore, my investigating it can lead to no happy outcome. To me, it makes sense to live as if life were meaningless. That you call this outlook pessimistic and nihilistic suggests to me that you would be dissatisfied by a meaningless existence. Fine, but not everyone is like you.
I don’t feel any “chaotic oscillation” in my life. I look at life and I ask myself, “even if this is meaningless, is it still beautiful enough, as is?” The only possible answer is yes. This is the only way I’ve found to say yes to life. I see it as a positive approach, not a pessimistic or nihilistic one. I also feel far more grounded than I did when I was a meaning junkie. To be able to accept and forgive my own inadequacies is a calming thing, not a source of “chaotic oscillation.”
August 30th, 2009 | 2:06 pm
[...] at First Things, James Poulos writing about, I think, the need to find some sort of meaning in life, worries about (inter alia) the plight of [...]
August 30th, 2009 | 2:23 pm
We have no need for an external source of meaning because we create our own sense of meaning. For us, meaning is based on our own dreams and goals which, of course, are entirely self-created. Any external concept of meaning is, well pardon the pun, essentially meaningless.
August 31st, 2009 | 10:15 am
Many of the arguments by God Believers for their own specific belief system seem to boil down to “You’ll be so much happier if you can somehow talk yourself into accepting as true a series of highly detailed stories that an intelligent twelve year old would find ridiculous unless brainwashed at an early age. And, of course, it’s only our stories that are true. All those others are mere pagan, heretical myths.”
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