Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

For some reason, many of the arguments about Church and State, and about divine will versus natural selection, have taken place at Oxford University. If Shelley or Huxley had known that J. L. Mackie (of Shelley’s own college) would be intervening in this old dispute in the late twentieth century, they could have relaxed in the knowledge that a brilliant philosopher had laid waste to the enemy camp.

We may approach our conclusion by considering Hans Küng’s massive work, Does God Exist? [12] 1. H. Küng, Does God Exist? (Collins, London, 1980; first published in German as Existiert Gott? by Piper-Verlag, Munich, 1978). Subtitled “An Answer for Today,” this book not only brings together many lines of thought that bear upon this question, but also sets out to interpret our whole present moral and intellectual situation. It displays a fantastic wealth of learning; it is also extremely diffuse. Time and again after raising an issue Küng will slightly change the subject, and often when we need an argument he gives us a quotation, a report of the views of yet another thinker, or even a fragment of biography. I think he is also unduly concerned with contemporary relevance, and is liable to tell us that some statement or argument is out of date, when all that matters is whether it is true or false, sound or unsound. Nevertheless, as we shall find, there is a main connecting thread of argument, and his final answer, at least, is explicit (p. 702):

After the difficult passage through the history of the modern age from the time of Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Hegel, considering in detail the objections raised in the critique of religion by Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, seriously confronting Nietzsche’s nihilism, seeking the reason for our fundamental trust and the answer in trust in God, in comparing finally the alternatives of the Eastern religions, entering also into the question “Who is God?” and of the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ: after all this, it will be understood why the question “Does God exist?” can now be answered by a clear, convinced Yes, justifiable at the bar of critical reason.

However, the substance of his discussion is far less satisfactory. One crucial question is whether his final “Yes” is to the god of traditional theism or to some “replacement for God”; but the answer to this question is far from clear. For example, in his Interim Results II: Theses on secularity and historicity of God we find this (pp. 185–186):

God is not a supramundane being above the clouds, in the physical heaven. The naive, anthropomorphic idea is obsolete… For man’s being and action, this means that God is not an almighty, absolute ruler exercising unlimited power just as he chooses over world and man.

God is not an extramundane being, beyond the stars, in the metaphysical heaven. The rationalistic-deistic idea is obsolete… For man’s being and action, this means that God is not now—so to speak—a constitutionally reigning monarch who is bound, for his part, by a constitution based on natural and moral law and who has largely retired from the concrete life of the world and man.

God is in this world, and this world is in God. There must be a uniform understanding of reality. God is not only a (supreme) finite… alongside finite things. He is in fact the infinite in the finite, transcendence in immanence, the absolute in the relative. It is precisely as the absolute that God can enter into a relationship with the world of man…God is therefore the absolute who includes and creates relativity, who, precisely as free, makes possible and actualizes relationship: God as the absolute-relative, here-hereafter, transcendent-immanent, all-embracing and all-permeating most real reality in the heart of things, in man, in the history of mankind, in the world… For man’s being and action, this means that God is the close-distant, secular-nonsecular God, who precisely as sustaining, upholding us in all life and movement, failure and falling, is also always present and encompassing us.

And, after rejecting both the “Greek-metaphysical” and the “medieval-metaphysical” concepts of God, he adds (Chapter 26):

God is the living God, always the selfsame, dynamically actual and continually active in history. Precisely as the eternally perfect, he is free to seize the “possibility” of becoming historical…. For man’s being and action, this means that God is the living God who in all his indisposability and freedom knows and loves man, acts, moves, and attracts in man’s history.

Later, for comparison with Eastern religions, he reports and seems to endorse “the Western tradition of a negative theology from Pseudo-Dionysius to Heidegger”: (pp. 601–602):

God cannot be grasped in any concept, cannot be fully expressed in any statement, cannot be defined in any definition: he is the incomprehensible, inexpressible, indefinable.

Neither does the concept of being embrace him… he is not an existent: he transcends everything… but… he is not outside all that is; inherent in the world and man, he determines their being from within…

In God therefore transcendence and immanence coincide… Before God, all talk emerges from listening silence and leads to speaking silence.

Later again, in discussing “the God of the Bible,” he says (p. 632):

God is not a person as man is a person. The all-embracing and all-penetrating is never an object that man can view from a distance in order to make statements about it. The primal ground, primal support and primal goal of all reality…is not an individual person among other persons, is not a superman or superego.

But also (p. 633):

A God who founds personality cannot himself be nonpersonal…God is not neuter, not an “it,” but a God of men…He is spirit in creative freedom, the primordial identity of justice and love, one who faces me as founding and embracing all interhuman personality…. It will be better to call the most real reality not personal or impersonal but…transpersonal or suprapersonal.

But, despite all this, Küng also accepts in some sense the God of the Bible who, he says, is wholly and entirely essentially a “ God with a human face ” (p. 666). It is “overhasty” to dissociate the God of the philosophers from the God of the Bible, but also “superficial” simply to harmonize them. Rather, we should “ see the relationship in a truly dialectical way. In the God of the Bible, the God of the philosophers is the best, threefold sense of the Hegelian term “sublated” (aufgehoben)—at one and the same time affirmed, negated, and transcended.” What is more, he “venture[s] without hesitation to declare: Credo in Jesum Christum, filium Dei unigenitum ” (I believe in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten son of God) and “can confidently say even now: Credo in Spiritum Sanctum ” (I believe in the Holy Spirit) (pp. 688, 699). That is, for all the contrary appearances, he affirms his own orthodoxy.

Küng is obviously fond of having it all ways at once. This is further illustrated by his remarks about miracles (pp. 650–651). Miracles recorded in the Bible “cannot be proved historically to be violations of the laws of nature”; a miracle is merely “everything that arouses man’s wonder,” not necessarily a divine intervention violating natural law. The miracle stories are “lighthearted popular narratives intended to provoke admiring faith.” (If so, we may comment, they have no tendency to support any kind of supernaturalism or theism.) Yet “no one who links belief in God with miracles is to be disturbed in his religious feelings. The sole aim here is to provide a helpful answer to modern man for whom miracles are a hindrance to his belief in God.” That is, if your belief in God is supported by miracles, Küng will endorse them for you; but if you find them an obstacle to belief, he will explain them away! Similarly he quotes with approval Bultmann’s remark: “By faith I can understand an idea or a decision as a divine inspiration, without detaching the idea or decision from its link with its psychological justification” (p. 653).