A similar thought seems to have occurred to Stephen Hawking, whose 2010 book The Grand Design (which I’ll confess I haven’t read) claimed that recent advances in cosmology render a supernatural creator entirely redundant. In doing so he claimed to have answered the rhetorical question posed in A Brief History of Time:

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Now Hawking, tells us, we have our answer: string theory shows us that our universe is just one of a multitude of universes that “arise naturally from physical law”. There is no “beginning”, and hence no need for a “creator” to explain it.

But against that we have William Carroll, the Thomas Aquinas Fellow in Science and Religion at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, who addresses Prof Hawking’s an essay entitled Stephen Hawking’s Creation Confusion (and see also Dr Carroll’s Aquinas and the Big Bang).

Stephen Hawking’s book “invites us to think again about what it means ‘to create’ and what, if anything, the natural sciences can tell us about it”, Dr Carroll writes, continuing:

The assertion—which is broadly philosophical and certainly not scientific—that the universe is self-sufficient, without any need for a Creator to explain why there is something rather than nothing, is the result of fundamental confusions about the explanatory domains of the natural sciences and philosophy. What is often being affirmed is a kind of “totalizing naturalism” that eliminates the need for any appeal to explanations which employ principles that transcend the world of physical things.

However, Prof Hawking and his fellow “totalizing naturalists” are misunderstanding the concept of creation. Creation is not about whether the universe has a “beginning” or needs a god to “set it going”. Rather:

Creation, as a metaphysical notion, affirms that all that is, in whatever way or ways it is, depends upon God as cause. … [It] is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists.

Carroll continues:

Cosmology, evolutionary biology, and all the other natural sciences offer accounts of change; they do not address the metaphysical questions of creation; they do not speak to why there is something rather than nothing.

And he reiterates this point later in the essay:

Creation is not primarily some distant event. Rather, it is the ongoing, complete causing of the existence of all that is. At this very moment, were God not causing all that is to exist, there would be nothing at all.

It’s important to note, too, that God’s intimate causation of all that is doesn’t exclude the existence scientifically-observable processes. Rather, we need to recognise that God’s causation and “natural” causation operate on different levels of reality:

To say that God is the complete cause of all that is does not negate the role of other causes which are part of the created natural order. Creatures, both animate and inanimate, are real causes of the wide array of changes that occur in the world, but God alone is the universal cause of being as such. God’s causality is so different from the causality of creatures that there is no competition between the two, that is, we do not need to limit, as it were, God’s causality to make room for the causality of creatures. God causes creatures to be causes.

“Ah, though,” interjects my inner atheist. “Now you’re cheating! Because science has conclusively disproved the Christian account of how the universe and life on earth began, you now move the goal posts and claim that God’s involvement happens on a level that is inaccessible to scientific refutation! This is just ‘God of the gaps’ with a bigger gap – or rather, the final metaphysical smile left after the disappearance of the cosmic Cheshire Cat!”

Well, if the goalposts are being moved, then they were moved first in the 13th century, long before the scientific discoveries invoked in support of God’s obsolescence. Thomas Aquinas, working “within the context of Aristotelian science and aided by the insights of Muslim and Jewish thinkers as well as his Christian predecessors”, formulated this understanding of creation and science, of the different levels of causation for God and his creation. And while he “accepted as a matter of faith that the universe had a temporal beginning”, he also “defended the intelligibility of a universe simultaneously created and eternal”.

Thomas would also warn us, Dr Carroll advises, against appealing to cosmology as evidence for creation.

Thomas … thought that neither science nor philosophy could know whether the universe had a beginning. He did think that metaphysics could show us that the universe is created, but he would have warned against those today who use Big Bang cosmology, for example, to conclude that the universe has a beginning and therefore must be created. He was always alert to reject the use of bad arguments in support of what is believed.

Even if science swings back round to the idea of a “beginning”, that would still not be the “beginning” in the sense understood by the doctrine of creation. In short, as Dr Carroll concludes:

When some thinkers deny [or even, we might add, affirm] creation on the basis of theories in the natural sciences, they misunderstand creation or the natural sciences, or both.

For Thomas and his contemporaries, as they rediscovered Greek philosophy, the great question was “What is God?” For us, the question is “Where is God?”; “what (if anything) in our world betrays his presence?” And Christians today give a very different answer from that of our medieval forebears, seeing God as showing himself “not in the prudence and power of the rulers of this world, but in the powerlessness and foolishness of the poor” (p.xlvi).

McDermott argues, however, that while Thomas was “a man of his time”, he was also “a giant of his time”, who “laid the foundations for the questions to come”. So while Thomas shared the medieval view of God as being at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of power, he recognised that our picture of power contains elements which “must disappear from from our assertions about God’s power”. God is not a “powerful manipulator”, imposing his choices on his world from outside:

He is neither a God from above, nor yet a God from below led by the events, but he is a God in the events as we and the world determine them, because he is a God within our and the world’s determining of them. … The fundamental insight as always is that every natural doing and every chance doing in the world, and every free doing of man, is a tool of the doing of God. (pp.xlvi f.)

This leads Thomas to his understanding of God’s grace as “not simply the external favour in God, but something residing in us and empowering us”. Grace is:

the loving favour of God operating and cooperating with man’s doing, so that the intent of man and the intent of God become one. For Thomas this is the true place where God’s power shows itself, this is where God is. (p.xlix)

This grace is seen most fully in “the great act and symbol of Calvary”, whose meaning Thomas describes as follows:

Christ’s sufferings, considered as something done by God, can be said to effect our salvation, but as willed by Christ with his human soul are said to earn it; and as something undergone in the flesh are variously said to be amends made for us if thought of as freeing us from liability to punishment, our ransom if thought of as freeing us from slavery to sin, and our sacrificial offering if thought of as reconciling us to God. (ch.14 p.529, quoted on p.li)

God’s love calls to us from the cross of Christ, and this call (and the opportunity to respond to it) are spread throughout the world in the sacraments (above all the eucharist), where “we make present to ourselves the presence of God through Calvary; and God uses our celebrations as his tools to introduce himself and his intent into our lives, and continually reinforce that presence” (p.lii)

And so we have our answer both to Thomas’s question, “What is God?”, and to our question, “Where is God?”:

What then is God? The love revealed on Calvary calling to men. Where then is God? In the acts of love by which men respond to the call, and so keep God’s love alive and calling today: actions which are themselves kept alive by God’s eternal love. (p.lii)

McDermott argues that “our unconscious mechanist assumptions” colour “all our thought about the material world”. We want to know how things work, and regard the most fundamental, basically “true” account of reality as lying in understanding the temporal processes of cause-and-effect at the lowest level of observable reality.

This means that when we read Thomas talking (in his “five ways”) about the “first cause” or “unmoved mover”, we assume he is talking about the earliest in a temporal “relay-race” of causes and effects. However, for Thomas it is more a question of “whomever (or whatever) has the idea of the relay-race in the first place“, on a different level of reality from the relay-race itself.

As McDermott writes:

The irony of the clash [between these worldviews] is that each party thinks of the other party’s assumptions as something that it has outgrown. The theoreticians of modern science think of themselves as having rescued human thought from an Aristotelian and medieval anthropomorphism, and having won through to a proper objectivity; Aristotle, followed by Aquinas, thought he had overcome the abstract reductive view of existence found in earlier mathematicizing thinkers, and had won through to appreciation of the concrete variety of what actually exists. For modern science is in essentials a return to a way of thinking found among the earliest Greek philosophers, and a way of thinking which Aristotle and Thomas thought they had outgrown.

McDermott implies that modern science mirrors the “early philosophers” who, in Thomas’s words:

…began somewhat crudely by thinking that only bodies we can sense exist, that the essential substance of such bodies [what they really are] is uncaused, and that they change only [how they are] in inessentials, being now rarefied, now condensed, separating and combining under the influence of attraction and repulsion, mind and so on.

McDermott suggests that our modern view of reality:

…grants objective status to only the lowest level of description of the world (that of physics and chemistry), regarding natural things as more and more complex organizations of coincidences of such simple objects.

This “would strike Aristotle and Thomas simply as developed versions of a view they think philosophically crude”:

For Thomas there is not just one level at which things really exist but many: there are organizations of matter which are not mere products of general laws of attraction and repulsion arranging matter…

What I find exciting about all this is that it puts into more rigorous terms a basic conviction I have had for a long time: that, as Christians, it’s not our job to pick holes in the story told by science, but to insist that it is not the only story that can, or needs, to be told about reality: that there is more than one level on which reality needs to be understood.

The question is whether philosophical arguments in favour of God’s existence are worth bothering with, or whether (as Revd Joel Humann puts it here):

@johnthelutheran There is only one Christian way to contend for the existence of God. Begin with the human and historical Jesus.—
Joel Humann (@joelhumann) January 31, 2012

This in turn led to a discussion on the extent to which Thomas Aquinas (who I’m currently making some first efforts on getting to grips with) would agree with that statement. Mack Ramer observed that Thomas “was pretty satisfied with his five proofs”. However, Prof Ralph McInerny’s Stanford Encyclopedia article argues here that a distinction needs to be made between philosophical proofs that there is “a god”, and knowledge of the Christian God (who can only be known by revelation). The waters being muddied by a combination of (a) Latin’s lack of an indefinite article and (b) the fact that any Christian who embraces a philosophical proof for “a” god will naturally conclude that the god in question is the God revealed in Scripture.

Prof McInerny develops this further in his essay Why the Burden of Proof is on the Atheist, where he writes:

The Thomist distinguishes rigorously between theism and Christianity in terms of the distinction between praeambula fidei and mysteria fidei. The preambles of faith are truths about God which happen to have been revealed but which had been discovered, independently of revelation, by the pagan philosophers. Theism, call it natural theology, establishes truths about God on the basis of other truths which are accessible in principle to any human being. Mysteries of faith, on the contrary, are truths about God which cannot be established as such by grounding them in or deriving them from what anyone knows.

This distinction would seem to imply that even if the best conceivable results were obtained on the level of theism, this would do nothing to establish the truth of the mysteries of faith, precisely those truths which are the heart and soul of Christianity, viz. that Jesus is both human and divine, that there is a Trinity of persons in the one divine nature, that we are called to an eternity of blissful union with God, etc.

My own personal history is of having been persuaded at an early age that the philosophical arguments for God’s existence were bunk, and that consequently God didn’t exist; but then being subsequently persuaded that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are how we can know that God exists and what he is like. In the process, though, I’ve retained a sceptical attitude towards the philosophical arguments.

However, the above quotation (and other reading of works by/about Thomas) are making me reappraise my view slightly: that maybe it would be more accurate to say that (by God’s grace) I came to believe the mysteria fidei, without ever feeling much need to deal with the praeambula fidei; however, that doesn’t mean that I was right to conclude as a teenager that the philosophical arguments for God’s existence were wrong, but that I was being presented with (and rejecting) caricatures of those arguments. I’m still not persuaded, and my instincts remain to prefer Luther’s declaration that “I know of no God other than the one called Jesus Christ”, but still: that’s where my thoughts are at the moment.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true. — Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists

From John Betjeman’s poem, Christmas:

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Bored, Alain?

…the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

(Interestingly, Eagleton avoids directly quoting the sentence immediately following this, presumably because he considers it to have been hammered flat by overuse: “It is the opium of the people.”)

How can the Marxist Professor Eagleton reconcile this with his own warm words for the “thoroughly orthodox, scriptural, and traditional” (p.47) account of Christian faith as summarised in my previous post?

Eagleton begins by asserting that:

The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver. (p.39)

Within a society of “packaged fulfilment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics”, God has little function other than as:

ideological legitimation, spiritual nostalgia, or a means of private extrication from a valueless world.

It’s religion functioning in this way that Marx had in mind when he spoke of “the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions”. Eagleton gives as examples both New Ageism (“which is just the sort of caricature of the spiritual one would expect a materialistic civilisation to produce”) and Islamic and Christian fundamentalism.

However, it’s important to note that these phrases – “the sigh of the oppressed creature”, “the heart of a heartless world”, “the soul of soulless conditions” – are “not for Marx purely pejorative”. They “signpost a problem to which they themselves are not the solution”. Marx’s (and Eagleton’s) objection to religion is when it enables us to ignore or hide from or cover up the oppression, heartlessness and soullessness of the world – and our complicity in this.

Christian faith, however, “takes the full measure of human depravity and perversity”. It recognises – in words of St Paul that were called to my mind by Marx’s “oppressive, heartless, soulless” – that human beings are:

foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

And rather than offering either spiritual escapism from these hard facts of human existence or culture-war confrontation with them, it offers only crucifixion and resurrection.

Or at least, it should.

In reality, this section of Eagleton’s book has challenged me on how much of Actually Existing Christianity is indeed “the heart of a heartless world”. A glance at the shelves of many Christian bookshops will confirm this. And I found it hard to disagree with the person who suggested on Twitter recently that many churches “basically function as middle-class absolution in service of the market economy”.

But as Eagleton also observes, it is not just religion that provides this opiate. For many, “it is culture, not religion, which is … the heart of a heartless world” (p.159). Another example that comes to mind is “ethical”/”green” consumerism, which can provide a comforting escape from our complicity in the systems that exploit human beings and wreck the planet.

Not that recycling or drinking fairtrade coffee (say) are bad in themselves, any more than going to the theatre, attending a concert or feng shui-ing your living room (if people still do that!) are necessarily wrong. On the contrary: the goodness of any of these things comes from enjoying them for their own sake, rather than using them as a means to avoid the “process of self-dispossession and radical remaking” with which we ended my previous post.

Prof Eagleton is not a Christian, but he is (a) highly sympathetic towards the account of Christian faith he first encountered as a student “with the aid of a few maverick Dominicans [such as Herbert McCabe] and rather more pints of bitter”, and (b) at least equally hostile towards the “nineteenth-century liberal rationalism” of the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

These two passions drive Prof Eagleton to write a book that combines a frequently-hilarious demolition of “Ditchkins’” arguments with a vision of the Christian faith that is often so inspiring it’s hard to believe Eagleton doesn’t believe it himself: one in which God created the world “as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture” (p.8); in which Jesus preaches a morality that is “reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents” (p.14); in which the true freedom of our dependence on God (“the power that allows us to be ourselves”) is contrasted with “the great bourgeois myth of self-origination” (pp.16f.); in which “you shall know [God] for who he is when you see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent away empty handed” (p.18); in which salvation is found in the everyday work of “feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich” (p.19); but in which “the only authentic image of this violently loving God is a tortured and executed political criminal” (p.23).

As Eagleton observes, what Jesus inaugurates is “not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles, but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new” (p.23) in which:

God’s love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalising little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world upside down. (p.22)

Eagleton has some interesting perspectives on specific texts. For example, Jesus’ “notoriously enigmatic injunction” to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”:

[W]hatever it means, it is unlikely to mean that religion is one thing whereas politics is another, a peculiarly modern prejudice if ever there was one. Any devout Jew of Jesus’s time would have known that the things that are God’s include working for justice, welcoming the immigrants, and humbling the high-and-mighty. (pp.19f.)

Or one of Jesus’ most difficult statements, Luke 14:26, which Richard Dawkins “greets … with chilly suburban distaste”:

Such a cold-eyed view of the family can suggest to him only the kidnapping habits of religious cults. He does not see that movements for justice cut across traditional blood ties, as well as across ethnic, social, and national divisions. Justice is thicker than blood. (p.31)

But the fundamental appeal of Christianity, as Eagleton sees it, is that “it places love at the centre of its vision of the world — even if, as we have seen, its version of love is peculiarly unlovely” (since, done properly, it involves getting crucified!):

That love is the focal point of human history, though everywhere spurned and denied, has a convincing enough ring to it in one sense. In another sense, however, it is a hard recognition — partly because in reality love is so palpably not the focal point of history, and because we live in an age in which it has effectively been privatised, which is no doubt one reason among many why the Christian faith makes no sense to a great many modern men and women. (p.32)

For Eagleton, the Christian gospel leads us to an understanding of love that has political and social dimensions denied to it by liberal-capitalist modernity, where love has been “almost wholly reduced to the erotic, romantic, or domestic” (p.32), and where “words like ‘grace’, ‘fallenness’ or ‘redemption’” are greeted with the same “bemused silence” as a word like “emancipation” (p.45).

In short, Eagleton sees Christianity and his own socialism as standing on the same side of a divide between the “liberal humanism” of capitalist modernity and a “tragic humanism” in which the “free flourishing of humanity” can come about “only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking”  (p.169).

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 35 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Depression is also costing the economy nearly £11bn a year in lost earnings, NHS care and drug prescriptions. Research by the House of Commons found the cost to the NHS of treating the illness is more than £520m a year. People who are unable to work due to depression lose £8.97bn of potential earnings a year, while the loss of earnings from suicide is put at £1.47bn.

Someone on Twitter commented on this research:

@itsmotherswork seems a bit harsh to complain about 'loss of earnings from suicide', or is that just me?—
Petersmam (@petersmam) December 30, 2011

It occurred to me that what would really be harsh would be to offset against that the financial savings of suicide (reduced healthcare and pension costs, for example). But if we’re making a cool, dispassionate assessment of the financial costs of suicide, why shouldn’t that be taken into account?

But of course, that would be more than harsh: it would be obscene. Which shows that the real problem is trying to calculate a figure for the “cost to the economy” of depression and suicide in the first place. It reflects and reinforces the commodification of social and political issues, in which a problem only becomes politically visible once it is expressed in terms of its “cost to the economy” (preferably ending in the word “billion” or, increasingly, “trillion”).

This has some unfortunate consequences: for example, the way in which chronic illness and disability have come to be seen, on a political level, principally in terms of their “cost to the taxpayer” – so that the solution is to reduce that cost by any means necessary, through the removal or reduction of social security benefits, with the human consequences seen as merely incidental; “anecdotal” evidence unworthy of political consideration.

You’ll want to read the whole thing (much of which quotes a thorough debunking from a pagan forum), but here are the key points that leapt out at me on reading it:

• Christmas is “the Feast of the Nativity,” not “Jesus’s Birthday.”: “While modern fundamentalists typically claim it’s Jesus’s ACTUAL birthday because they’re theologically and historically ignorant, mainline denominations have never so claimed.”
• Why Christmas trees, holly and the rest? Not because they’re “stolen from the pagans”, but because church law required (and still requires) green plants to be in the church for all services as an expression of creation and life. And in northern Europe, in December, that means “fir trees, evergreen boughs, and holly.”
• A reiteration of William Tighe’s argument that December 25th was chosen for Christmas only because it was nine months after March 25th, which the early church had concluded must be the date of Christ’s conception.

As Alastair points out, though, in many ways the whole argument rests on the pretty fatuous notion that “the origins of a particular tradition or practice have some privileged claim upon its ‘meaning’”. The “meanings” of cultural traditions are as changeable as the meanings of words.

Alastair’s conclusion is one I agree with entirely, which is why I enjoy both the “secular”, “commercial” elements of Christmas, and the specifically Christian aspects:

Within contemporary Western society, Christmas means more, but considerably less, than the ‘meaning’ Christians find in the feast. The ‘real meaning’ of Christmas in contemporary Britain is shaped by commercialism, pop culture, British and Western European cultural traditions, and many other forces besides Christianity. I don’t believe that we can maintain that Christians have some exclusive claim upon its celebration. Rather than seeking bland acknowledgements of the rightfulness of our claim from an indifferent society, we are better off enjoying the celebration for what it is, while maintaining the peculiar and unique place that the celebration holds in the lives of Christians.