The Fool Says in His Heart, “There is No God”–What Did the Psalmist Mean?

In Psalm 14:1, we find the statement, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Thomas Aquinas and many others have used this verse to talk about atheism versus theism. But what did the Psalmist really have in mind? I doubt it was an intellectual, highly theoretical and abstract disputation about the existence or non-existence of a transcendent Absolute Entity we call “God.”

First of all, the Hebrew word translated as "fool" is not primarily someone who lacks intelligence but who is morally deficient. Second, and in line with that, the whole Psalm is about "evildoers" who "devour" God’s people and oppress the poor. Therefore, the statement about the fool saying in his heart that there is no God is meant to convey: People who suppress their conscience and mistreat other people say to themselves, "There is no one who will take me to account. There is no ultimate justice. I will get away with my crimes."

But neither does the Psalm assert that atheists are necessarily morally deficient. In my understanding, the Psalmist does not say, "All those who deny God’s existence are morally deficient." Rather, he means to say, "All those who blatantly mistreat other people cannot, in their heart of hearts, really believe that there is a God who will hold them accountable."

He does not say, "He who does not believe in God is a fool," but, "The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’" Note the phrase, "The fool says in his heart …" The "fool" may outwardly proclaim quite loudly allegiance to God. But if he acts in such a way that it shows utter disregard to others, his outward confession of faith belies what is in his heart.

Of course, by interpreting Psalm 14 in this way I do not deny that there is a long Western tradition about atheists not being morally upright—a tradition that several morally upright atheists of the past few centuries have tried to dispel.

Christmas Present for Christian Harry Potter Fans (or skeptics, for that matter)

My new book is now ready to order at Amazon! If you’re still looking for a Christmas present for someone interested in Harry Potter, Fantasy, and Christianity, maybe this would be an idea:

Seven Years at Hogwarts: A Christian’s Conversion to Harry Potter

www.amazon.com

Blurb and Back Cover of My New Book on Harry Potter (soon to be released)

After sharing the cover for my new book, here’s the back cover and the blurb. A link to order the book will follow soon.

“Harry Potter has not only had many fans, but also many critics. Some of the criticism has been religiously motivated. But is Harry Potter really as un-Christian as these critics suggest?

Come and join Jacob Schriftman as he explores the world and worldview of J.K. Rowling’s Fantasy, drawing comparisons to Christian writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as well as to explicitly non-Christian ones like Philip Pullman and H.G. Wells.

In the process of analysis, Schriftman deals both with literary and existential questions. Should Harry Potter be understood as a parody of our own society? How does Harry Potter treat serious issues? It is common for humans to ask, “Where do we come from? What can we know? What should we do? Do we have a purpose? And how do we approach death?” These questions are woven into Harry Potter, and some of the answers take a surprising turn.

A book that delights as much as it instructs, a challenge to fans and skeptics alike.”

The Epistemology of Don Quixote

I just finished another Great Book that could hardly be of a more different character than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (see my last post), namely Don Quixote, the epoch-making novel written by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes and published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615. Yet, in spite of their vast differences, they both share an interest in epistemology.

The story centers around a retired country gentleman who becomes obsessed with medieval stories of knightly adventures and chivalrous sentiments. Here is the first epistemological issue: He loves these stories so much that he permanently suspends all disbelief about them and actually considers them to have truly happened. The next step in his delusion is to believe that he, himself, could be a knight-errand and go on similar adventures as the ones he has read about.

The basic message is that books can be dangerous. They can mess with your common-sense perception of the world and make you see the world through the lens of what you have read about. Truth always rises above falsehood as oil above water, one of the fictional narrators says at one point, but certain books seem to have the ability to dunk the truth under—at least temporarily.

Accordingly, the deluded gentleman renames himself “Don Quixote,” puts on an old suit of armor, dedicates his life to the service of an unsuspecting farm girl that he once briefly glimpsed and now christens “Dulcinea del Toboso,” and sets out on his first adventure. As this should make clear, Don Quixote is a parody of books on chivalry, and it would be a mistake to take it too seriously. Nevertheless, epistemological questions and other serious issues keep coming up in the story.

One of them is the question to what degree our passions can distort our perception. The only joke on record that Immanuel Kant has ever made is, “The young man passionately in love with the lady of his choice sees in her no imperfection whatever. This condition of blindness generally clears up about three weeks after marriage.” Kant makes a distinction between our passions and emotions (see his Metaphysics of Morals). Emotions, he says, are an integral part of our personality, while passions come and go rather quickly and severely distort our perception. The unusual thing about Don Quixote is that his passion lasts as long as it does. Perhaps that is due to the fact that he has absolutely no contact with the object of his passion, having taken a girl that he had only briefly glimpsed and turned her in his imagination into a noble lady of incomparable grace and beauty.

A fascinating aspect of Don Quixote’s epistemology is that he never lacks an explanation that fits into his distorted view. In probably the most iconic scene of the book, he attacks windmills that he believes to be vicious giants. He drives his lance-point into the sail, but the wind whirls it around with such force that it shivers the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who goes rolling over on the plain, “in a sorry condition.”

His faithful squire Sancho comes to his aid and says, “God bless me! Did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head.”

“Hush, friend Sancho,” replies Don Quixote, “the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword.”

The problem with this kind of epistemology is that it can be easily turned against you. When Don Quixote asks Sancho to find his lady Dulcinea del Toboso for him, and Sancho is at a loss of what to do, he points at the first woman that comes their way and declares her to be the beauteous and elegant Dulcinea. Don Quixote says in astonishment that he only sees a coarse country wench with cataracts in her eyes and a foul smell in her mouth, but Sancho, feigning equal astonishment, declares that he sees the peerless Dulcinea. It surely must be those malignant magicians again, says Sancho, that always persecute Don Quixote and have now enchanted his perception to see his noble love as an ugly wench. Well, given the frequency with which Don Quixote himself had used this argument to support his beliefs, he cannot really argue against it now.

As fantastical as the story is, I think this still has an application for today. How many devoutly religious people are there who are too eager to believe anything that seems to fit their belief, only to become prey to some money-grabbing faith healer or other questionable people? Surely, whether we have religious beliefs like Kant or no religious beliefs like Hume, we can all use a large dose of their epistemological care not to buy into beliefs too quickly. Otherwise, the end result might be a Quixotian tangle. This, of course, also goes for other beliefs such as the many quick fixes that are sold in our capitalist society. The whole advertising industry has taken on Quixotian proportions.

There are still other epistemological issues in the book. Let me just briefly mention one more before bringing this post to a close. As I said above, the book was published in two volumes with an interval of ten years between the two. Now in the second book, Don Quixote is actually told that a book has been written about his previous adventures. The characters talk about this first book, and Don Quixote questions the veracity of some of its parts. To complicate matters, the second book is narrated by more than one fictional author, and the fictional compiler sometimes adds that he believes a certain story he includes to be apocryphal. Thus, it is not only Don Quixote’s perception that is unreliable, but we, the reader, are forced to question to what degree the stories about Don Quixote himself are reliable.

This additional epistemological element was probably inspired by the fact that, between the publication of the two volumes by Cervantes, an anonymous author had published his own Part Two of Don Quixote.

But enough said. Don Quixote is a very long book, and perhaps it is only my boredom with the repeated parody that makes me turn it into a philosophical work.

Ahab in Moby Dick: Pure Villain or Tragic Hero?

The other day, I listened to this free online course by Hubert Dreyfus, which included several lectures on Moby Dick. Though intriguing and worthwhile, I wondered whether he did not overstate his case, not only by his strong emphasis on the supposed evils of everything “mono,” but by casting Ahab almost entirely as a villain.

While listening to Dreyfus, I kept thinking of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique during and after WWII of the Western tradition and asked myself whether Dreyfus did not anachronistically impose similar ideas on Melville. Adorno and Horkheimer were Germans of Jewish descent who had to emigrate to the United States due to the rise of Nazism, and they thought that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were not so much an interruption of the Enlightenment, but a natural outgrowth of Western scientific and Enlightenment thought. Western science and Reason, they maintained, were inherently totalitarian because they tried to subdue the whole of existence, first theoretically by unified theories, and second through the application of technology. Hence, totalitarianism was only the political manifestation of an essentially totalitarian thought pattern. In fact, they thought that our modern Capitalist countries were also infected by totalitarian thinking, although in more subtle forms.

Could it be that Adorno, Horkheimer and related philosophers like Marcuse rubbed off on Dreyfus, who now applies this critique of totalitarian thought to religion and then attempts to see the whole thing already laid out in Melville?

I am not saying that Dreyfus is completely wrong in his analysis, just over the top. As a balance to Dreyfus, I listened to several lectures on Moby Dick as part of a course on American literature by The Teaching Company. The lecturer, Arnold Weinstein, has what I would say is a more balanced approach to Melville, Ahab, and Moby Dick. Weinstein is not diametrically opposed to Dreyfus, but he puts the book in a slightly different context. Here are some things that I learned from his lectures.

First of all, we need to realize that the idea of whaling had very different emotional associations for Melville than it has for us. After the rise of environmentalism and the Animal Rights movement in the 20th century, and after the numerous human-made disasters we have inflicted on the other species on this planet, whaling has now, from the outset, a negative connotation. Not so for Melville. For Melville, whaling was the most powerful example of a great pursuit, and, so argues Weinstein, “greatness” is the main theme of the book. Both the object of the pursuit is great, as well as the pursuer, Ahab. Yes, as Dreyfus keeps pointing out, he is monomaniacal (considered an actual mental illness at the time Melville wrote the book, and a quite popular psychiatric concept), but also great. Without a considerable dose of admiration for Ahab, Melville would have hardly put the grand Shakespearian soliloquies in his mouth that he did.

In the 19th century, whaling was not an occupation for villains but heroes. Professor Weinstein talks about how it was a thriving enterprise then. “When we remember that petroleum was not discovered until 1859,” says he, “we realize the importance of whale oil. In 1844, $120 million was tied up in whaling. Whaling was especially significant in the American economy in the middle of the 19th century, when the industry was competing with textiles. Whaling finally became America-dominated, and considerable national pride is evident in Melville’s depictions.”

Weinstein goes on to say that Melville’s emphasis on indigenous American achievements is central to his project of fashioning an American epic. “National pride is sounded again and again, in Melville’s poetry of democracy, his homage to the great American promise. He contrasts American democracy with the hierarchy of Europe.”

So, according to Weinstein, Melville was not so much an enemy of monotheism and a champion of what Dreyfus calls “polytheism,” but a democrat. Could it be that he supported the diversity of religion because he was foremost an American who took great pride in the liberty of his country as against the—at that point still not completely democratic—old world?

Be that as it may, at the center of the story stands (or rather swims) the Whale, both one of man’s greatest challenges to conquer and a creature of legend, connected with many old tales. He is Melville’s “candidate for grandeur,” the great object for his new epic, written for a new country.

Such a great sphinx of the sea needs a worthy opponent, and we find him in Ahab, “a tragic, indigenous American hero.” Melville borrowed from the Old Testament and Shakespeare to construct a “modern Prometheus who is at war with the gods,” a new Faust who insists on “striking through the mask.” Ahab’s obsession and despotism thus become a symbol for the whole human enterprise, “and Melville charts its heights and depths in unforgettable ways. The most haunting note in this symphony is the vacating of self, the loss that inheres in such monstrous inflation.”

Ahab, pure villain or tragic hero? I think I go with the tragic hero interpretation, albeit one whose downfall is of his own monomaniacal making.

William James: Does It Matter Whether or Not Our Beliefs are True?

As mentioned in my last post, I recently read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. It is certainly a worthwhile read, even if only for the many testimonies that James gathered for his work. I should add, however, that a large proportion of these testimonies comes from a Christian background, so the Varieties do not have quite as much variety as one might hope of such a work. Still, it should be praised for taking religious experiences seriously and not dismissing them out of hand only because they are religious.

Now on to the problems. James’ pragmatic approach to religious experience, which essentially says that one ought to judge the value of religious experiences solely by their fruit, raises many questions. As Richard Rorty has pointed out, it is not quite clear in James whether or not the actual existence of God/gods is relevant. At times, James talks as if it were of no consequence whatsoever whether or not there really is a spiritual realm beyond our perception. At other times, he seems to say that it matters a great deal.

For example, he says, “Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How can you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of his religion—it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.”

This is an important point. For instance, the Aztecs (in what is now Mexico) believed that the shedding of human blood and the sacrificing of human life were necessary to keep the cosmos running. Without continuous human sacrifice, the present age would come to an end. Now, as James rightly pointed out, it matters a great deal whether or not this belief is actually true. If it is true, then human sacrifices are necessary. Perhaps we might still consider it an evil, but a necessary evil. As the many wars even in our own time show, we are quite willing to sacrifice human life if we think it necessary for the protection or continuation of our society. And, since we tend to sanction and even sanctify whatever we deem necessary, we might even consider human sacrifice a noble institution. (For anyone who has a hard time imaging how people could ever consider human sacrifice a noble institution, I recommend the novel Aztec by Gary Jennings.)

Now in our modern democracies we tend to say, “You can have any religious belief whatsoever, but you still have to keep the law. If your religion induces you to act against the law, you will be punished like everyone else.” But such a separation between belief and practice is not completely honest. If the Aztec belief is true that human sacrifices are necessary to keep the cosmos running, then, to any morally-minded person, this cosmic reality ought to take precedence over any petty national laws. If the belief is true, it becomes a moral imperative to disobey the law and keep sacrificing humans.

Or, to use a more relevant example for us, take the belief in the existence of an immortal soul. If, as some firmly believe, an immortal soul is created at the moment of conception—or, alternatively, if a pre-existing soul unites itself with the human cells at the moment of conception—then we cannot simply consider the fertilized human egg a fertilized human egg. If this belief is true, then taking the morning-after pill would amount to separating a soul from its body. Our common word for that is murder. And if you truly believe that every woman who takes a morning-after pill is a murderess—and probably a mass-murderess at that—you might feel morally driven to take extreme measures to prevent such murder from taking place. Most people would not consider it morally reprehensible to kill a mass-murderer who is about to kill further victims, if his death is the only way to prevent more crimes. Granted, killing pregnant women would be of little point, since you would kill the baby with her, but targeting abortion clinics or the manufacturers or sellers of morning-after pills would be morally justifiable or even obligatory.

So, by making laws prohibiting such actions, governments are taking a clear stance on the truth or falsehood of certain religious beliefs. By telling the believers in Aztec theology and those who believe in the existence of an immortal soul, “You are not allowed to act out the logical conclusions of your beliefs,” governments are making the clear statement that those beliefs are not true. If they granted that these beliefs might be true, they would make appropriate allowances in the law—just in case Aztec believers really are saving the cosmos through human sacrifices and believers in an immortal soul really are preventing mass-murder.

Like James says, “To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.”

But then, how do we decide which beliefs we reject outright and which beliefs we tolerate as possibly true? Only those who fit our own moral framework? But where does our moral framework come from? Our moral framework is to a large extent determined by the kind of presuppositions we have about the world. How can we judge religious claims by their fruit if tastes vary so significantly between different people? In that case, we are using a kind of reasoning that my two-year old daughter is fond of using at the moment, “I like bananas because … I like bananas.” My daughter has picked up from us older ones that she ought to, if possible, give a rational justification for her opinions, but in many cases the only rationale she is able to give is her own preference.

Does, then, the Jamesean maxim “Judge a religion by its fruit” simply boil down to “Judge a religion by whatever suits your taste?”

Well, in some passages James comes very close to saying so: “But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men’s imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.”

To summarize: Sometimes it matters a great deal whether a religious belief is objectively true or not, because the belief determines whether certain actions are considered right or wrong. Judging religious beliefs merely by their fruit is insufficient, since people’s tastes change significantly throughout the ages. One might say, “Well, then, let’s not judge religious beliefs at all.” But that is not an option either, because we need to make laws to govern civilization, and some of those laws prohibit what would be the logical consequences of certain beliefs.

Would anyone like to contradict my conclusion? Did I misunderstand James?

Tough-Minded vs. Tender-Minded: William James’ Pragmatism and the Empiricist-Rationalist Divide

It’s been a while since my last post. Lest you think I have shuffled off this mortal coil, let me show a little sign of life.

And speaking of life, I am often struck by how lively discussions become when religious questions come up. I’m part of a book reading group, and I’d say there is definitely above-average participation whenever religious questions come up. That, in itself, is worthwhile to consider.

One person in the early 20th century who thought a lot about the important role religion played in exciting and driving us was William James.

James was born in 1842 and is “the quintessential Yankee philosopher,” as Daniel Robinson has called him. He was the oldest of four children and the grandson of a multimillionaire. After his studies at Harvard, he spent six years completing studies for a medical degree. A trip to Germany, where he listened to a few lectures, aroused his interest in psychology and the way we process our sensory input. After completing his medical training, James joined the faculty at Harvard and eventually started giving lectures on psychology, particularly physiological psychology.

Through it all, James experienced periods of depression and anxiety, and he used himself as the subject for his psychological investigations. He also read ferociously, which he considered a pretty helpful therapy for his inner turmoil. The result of his deep thinking about psychology was his massive work The Principles of Psychology, which is still considered by many the magnum opus of academic psychology.

Predictably, his philosophy emphasizes human psychology. He was against the kind of grand philosophical systems such as Hegel’s idealism and rather stressed a kind of American version of Nietzsche’s perspectivalism. That is, he stressed that thoughts and philosophies do not exist apart from individuals thinking those thoughts and coming up with those philosophies. Hence, in evaluating their philosophies, one should also look at the psychological motivations that drive them. Thoughts do not come in independent pieces but arise in an organic way out of the whole person.

That is why he interpreted the European divide between empiricists/positivists on the one hand and German idealists/rationalist on the other hand in a psychological way. He talked of the “tender-minded” and the “tough-minded.” The tender-minded are the German idealists and rationalists. Now I know this might sound confusing, since the word “rationalist” does not exactly call up a picture of “tenderness.” But, in fact, rationalists in the philosophical sense are tender-minded in that they have an emotional need for an overarching, rational system that gives hope and meaning to an otherwise (ultimately) meaningless existence.

The tender-minded are the religious and quasi-religious, the Platonists and Kantians and Hegelians, the system builders who become depressed if they do not have a definite cosmic worldview in which they can place the particulars of their everyday life. They need a sense of the spiritual, of the transcendent. They need inspiration and hope, even at the price of their intellectual conscience. As Darren Staloff has remarked: “They are idealistic and optimistic and stress the idea of free will.” In a word, the tender-minded want meaning—or, as James put it, principles.

Now don’t get me wrong. James did not deride the tender-minded. In fact, he thought he had a large tender-minded side to him as well. Hence his struggles with depression in the face of a lacking optimistic teleology.

The tough-minded, in contrast, are the empiricists and positivists (not to be confused with optimists!), the critics of religion and what they perceive to be false promises. They are pessimistic, pluralistic and skeptical. They, above all else, don’t want to be lured into any kind of slumber in which one fails to face up to the physical world. They always strive for objectivity and want to reserve judgment. Consequently, they are often not only irreligious themselves but tend to be insensitive toward more tender-minded people. They constantly step on other people’s toes, give offence, and have the tendency to talk as if all tender-minded people did not have a mind at all. To the tender-minded, they actually seem rather narrow-minded, obsessing over meaningless details while dismissing the big, more emotionally laden questions of life. In a word, the tough-minded want facts, facts, facts, and nothing but facts!

James thought that most people are somewhere in between tender-mindedness and tough-mindedness, and he stressed that this was an extremely simplified way of caricaturing the European empiricists/rationalists divide. Nevertheless, he considered it a helpful way of approaching the divide in a more psychological way—a way that, he hoped, would not deepen the divide but actually bring the two sides together.

“Facts are good, of course–give us lots of facts. Principles are good–give us plenty of principles.” That’s the pragmatic approach.

But that’s only the starting point for James’ Pragmatism. For further thoughts, you might want to read his Pragmatism for yourself, if you haven’t already done so.

Voltaire: Is God at Work in This World of Suffering?

When I was on a Voltaire kick last month, I also read his story Zadig, or The Book of Fate, published in 1747, and it, too, is related to some of the themes we’ve been discussing lately in this blog.

The basic plot of the tale takes place in ancient Babylon, where a virtuous citizen by the name of Zadig rises in the esteem of the king but is betrayed by envious neighbors. Consequently, he falls out of favor with the king and becomes a wanderer in the Middle East, enduring injustice, ingratitude and all manner of suffering. After a while, a civil war breaks out in Babylon, which gives Zadig the opportunity to return and conquer his enemies. In the end, Zadig is king and rules with justice.

That’s the basic plot. But there are several philosophical questions raised by the experiences of Zadig, some of them implicit in the storyline and others explicitly asked by various characters.

When I wrote about Voltaire’s Micromegas, I quoted Professor Kors. Let me quote him again now to list the questions he sees in the text:

1. What are the ethics (not the form) of good government? What matters under any form of government are the morals, civic virtues, and compassion of whoever rules and the ruler’s capacity to remain above flattery.
2. Why does so much human injustice exist in the world?
3. What might be remedies of human injustice?
4. What is the role of chance in human justice?
5. Why does chance seem so opposed to divine providence?
6. Can one look at the human condition and find divine justice?

As is typical of Voltaire, he raises these questions without giving a definite answer to any of them. Rather, he shows the dilemmas of our human condition and thus creates empathy in the reader. Voltaire is foremost a humanist, not a system builder or even at all a systematic thinker.

Although justice triumphs in the end, much of Zadig is dominated by injustice, and it raises the old question of Plato’s Republic: What is justice? What would justice look like? How can we achieve a just society? Is it possible to achieve justice on earth or is injustice so deeply engrained in us that all we can do is to create a few safeguards against the inevitable abuse of power? Should we have an optimistic or a pessimistic view on human nature? Should we go with Hobbes or with Rousseau? And finally, how are we to reconcile God’s justice and providence with the obvious injustice within human civilization?

The Bible and Later Christian Thinkers: A Difference Between Catholics and Protestants

Following some of my recent posts on the imperfection of this world and the Apostle Paul’s understanding of the Fall, I had an exchange with a Catholic about these issues. Now I noticed that he approached the Bible primarily through the (no doubt often helpful) lens of later thinkers. In contrast, I was trained to look at the Bible purely from within a biblical framework. This was especially stressed in the Protestant university where I completed a degree in Biblical Studies.

Hence, I had read the Apostle Paul literally hundreds of times before I read a single chapter by Augustine or Aquinas, and I learned to ask over and over again: What were the authors of the Bible trying to say in their own historical context and cultural framework? How did they understand their own words? Not: What did Augustine or Aquinas make of it later?

And though I’m much more critical of my Protestant background now and much more familiar with Catholic thought, I still think that Augustine’s synthesis of neo-Platonism with Christianity and Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotelianism with Christianity have blurred the picture of what Paul and other authors of the Bible thought about creation, the Fall, perfection, and the reason why Jesus had to come. Augustine’s and Aquinas’ syntheses have been enormously fruitful, but it is one thing to discuss those things within the framework of such syntheses and another thing entirely to discuss them within a purely biblical framework. As someone who grew up breathing the Bible and very little but the Bible, I naturally framed the questions in a completely non-Platonic and non-Aristotelian way.

So, any discussion of these matters first has to settle the question: What is the framework in which we want to discuss them? Do we try to think through the implications of what we (in our fallibility) take to be the view of the biblical authors? Or do we discuss them within a synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem?

Myth is Not a Bad Word: The Value of Genesis

In my last post, I mentioned that I was raised as a Creationist with a strong preference for Young-Earth Creationism, but that I have since come to support the generally accepted age of the earth and life on earth. Thus I no longer take the account in Genesis as a scientific account of the earth’s history.

However, it was not my intent to depreciate the Genesis account as an incredibly rich story that can be used to illustrate a lot of points about our human condition. Even to a great humanist like Erich Fromm the biblical story of the Fall was essential for his thinking—not as a literal historical occurrence, but as a mythical picture. Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a powerful picture of the fact that we are creatures who are conscious of themselves, and because of this self-consciousness we are no longer entirely in harmony with nature. We are still part of nature, but we now feel naked and ashamed; we now can foresee our own death and yearn for a better world that seems to have been lost. We have been expelled from the Garden of Innocence and now have to toil under the sun, building our civilizations that, it seems, are always doomed to fail because we have lost our harmony with the world.

All of this and much more can be seen in the Genesis account. The idea that humans are made in the image of God is another compelling concept. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has repeatedly remarked, you don’t have to be a believer to appreciate the thought it tries to convey (see his Glauben und Wissen [“Faith and Knowledge”], for instance). And it’s doubtful that Kant would have developed his concept of the dignity of man without it. If every human being is seen as the image of God, then I can never treat that person merely as a means to an end but always as an end in itself, with the utmost reverence. Human interaction hence gains a sacredness, a sense of standing in a holy place. You take off your shoes even in front of the lowliest of slaves, because there, before you, stands the image of God.

I could go on and on. Genesis as well as other books in the Bible can be wonderfully inspiring and have nourished some of the greatest thinkers in history.

For me, myth is not a bad word. In fact, I think myth often has the power to express timeless truths much better than concrete historical events. That is the case of pagan myths as well as of biblical ones.