Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Mittelalter; drei Wurzeln des Atheismus; Grund; Schöpfungsgedanke vs. Pantheismus, Materialismus; Agnostizismus, Phänomenologie

Kurzinhalt: Suppose you decide to say that God alone is. It will follow that ...; It may be asked whether this agnosticism is not a lower form of atheism than idolatry

Textausschnitt: 92a The third great medieval intellectual event, the most significant of all, was the construction of the problematic of creation. This was conceived to be what it still is, the central problem of Christian philosophy-the problem of the coexistence and coagency of the infinite and the finite, the necessary and the contingent, the eternal and the temporal, the absolute and the relative. There were two aspects to the problem-one metaphysical, the other moral. (Fs) (notabene)

92b The metaphysical problem of God-and-creature is easily stated. If God is, and if God is what he is, how can anything else be? Outside the infinite, necessary, eternal, absolute being of God there seems to be no room for another order of being that is finite, contingent, temporal, relative. It was integral to the tradition of reason in the medieval sense to say that this is a problem of synthesis. The problem was the reconciliation of truths that stand to each other in an opposition not of contrariety but of polarity. Conceiving it as such, the Scholastics wrestled with it with no little success. But the statement of the problem was itself an invitation to betrayal of the tradition. Modernity succumbed. It decided to consider the problem as a choice between alternatives that really are contrary. In this decision and in the choices that flowed from it, the modern will to atheism declares itself in its full determination. (Fs) (notabene)

92c The alternatives are clear enough. You may decide to say either that God alone is, or that the world alone is. From both of these decisions, the consequence is atheism. (Fs)

Suppose you decide to say that God alone is. It will follow that, since the world is there with all empirical obviousness, the world itself must be of the divine order of being. You thus choose pantheism in one or other of its forms. The most ancient form, primitive animism, is no longer a viable option, since to the modern it reeks of superstition. You may, however, choose to refine ancient Gnostic speculations into the less imaginative, seemingly more philosophical form of emanationist pantheism. Or you may opt for a dynamic pantheism, the theory of the emergent deity. Or your choice, inspired by the nineteenth-century exigence for system-building, may fall on some form of idealist monism; you may hold that only the Idea is the Real (God) and that all things else are but finite realizations of the Idea. In any case, you choose atheism, because pantheism is atheism. If everything is God, nothing is God. More exactly, pantheism is the denial of God as Creator, and, if God is not the Creator, he is not God. Here, I would note, the precise direction of the modern will to atheism appears with all clarity. It does not go against the sheer existence of God; it goes against the Christian affirmation that God is the Creator of the world. (Fs) (notabene)

93a On the other hand, you may decide to say that only the world is, that it is all there is or, at the very least, that it is all that matters. The material universe, man included, is a self-sufficient, self-contained entity and order. It subsists by itself, and it always has been there-from eternity, even. Somehow or other it managed to originate itself, if indeed there be any sense at all in speaking of its origination. In any case, it serves to explain itself. Beyond this world lies nothing. There is, first and last, no God. "The stars, she whispers, blindly run." With this, you have decided for materialism. It remains for you to choose the form of it. Ancient Stoic materialism is probably too much a piece of fantasy, too obviously unscientific, for the reason of modernity. In addition, its ethic was too sternly rational. You may, however, if you still belong to the earlier nineteenth century, choose mechanistic materialist monism. And you may update it a bit by the embellishment of a later evolutionism. In any case, your choice is atheism. The fact is patent, and it is usually acknowledged. Certainly it was acknowledged by the village atheist, that great nineteenth-century phenomenon for whom Haeckel, as completed by Darwin, was the Last Intellectual Word. (Fs)

94a You may, however, find the high rationalistic optimism of the nineteenth century a bit passe. You may, with Marx, see the shallowness of materialist monism, especially of the mechanistic variety. You may therefore want to choose Marxist dialectical materialism. But in that case you must be careful- that is, if you still want to carry through the modern will to atheism. The issue here is complicated; I shall cheerfully make it simple. It is quite obvious, and it was openly admitted by Marx, that atheism is the postulate of dialectical materialism in the Marxist sense. It is not at all obvious, even though Marx did not admit it, that atheism is the conclusion of Marxist dialectical materialism. If this theory of reality is held to be only a philosophical-scientific theory; if it is therefore held to be open to further critical development, as all such theories are; if, that is, Marxist dialectical materialism is not transmuted, by the alchemy of a political will to an atheist society, into an immutable dogma as has happened in the Soviet Union; if all this is the case, it may well be that dialectical materialism is open to the theist conclusion. It may well be that it does not run inevitably to the atheist conclusion. (Fs)
94b It may well be so, I say; there are scholars who say it is. For my part as a theologian, I am content to say that so it may be. For the rest, the issue is one of scholarship. The question is, what would an immanent critique of Marxist dialectical materialism reveal-that it is open to, or shut against, association with belief in God? The question is important today, but it is not my question here. My own proposition, derivative from the Bible, is that atheism is never the conclusion of any theory, philosophical or scientific. It is a decision, a free act of choice that antedates all theories. There are indeed philosophies that are atheist in the sense that they are incompatible with faith in God. But they are reached only by a will to atheism. This will, and the affirmation into which it is translated ("There is no God"), are the inspiration of these philosophies, not a conclusion from them. (Fs)

95a There are, in general, two such philosophies, a pantheist monism and a materialist monism. More simply, there is only one such philosophy, a monistic philosophy. (It is not clear that dialectical materialism is a monism.) Behind monism lies the decision to transform the medieval problem of synthesis, God-and-creature, into the modern problem of choice, God-or-creature. This decision was not reached by argument; it represents the will to atheism, the mark of the spirit of modernity. (Fs)

95b These two philosophies, which are radically one, are the pure positions. There remains the impure position, which is less a position taken by intelligence than a paralysis of intelligence itself. You may opt for the epoche of the contemporary phenomenological school, that is, for a systematic suspension of judgment in the face of all ontological or metaphysical questions. This school of thought will describe with great fineness the "situation," what is there to be observed, outside man and inside him, but it will not make judgments of existence. It declines the use of the formidable verb "is" in affirmations. If you retire to this school, you will have simply to refuse altogether the problematic of God in its Thomist mode of statement. The first question, whether God is, will stop you. It is the kind of question that you do not deal with on principle. Your position will be a metaphysical agnosticism, a sort of Eunomianism in reverse. (Fs) (notabene)

96a It may be asked whether this agnosticism is not a lower form of atheism than idolatry. The idolater does not hesitate to affirm that God is. On the witness of the Sage of Israel he is in search of God, not doubting that God can be found. Only then does he go astray, and his error is with regard to the second question, what God is. His error is inexcusable, but perhaps the Sage would say that he merits less blame than the modern agnostic. The latter, incidentally, is a phenomenon the Sage apparently never met. In the wisdom literature of Israel, one does indeed find the world-weary skeptic, but his temper of mind is quite different from that of the modern agnostic. This latter breed says in effect that, since he cannot know what God is, he will refuse to affirm that God is. But this stupidity, one may well think, surpasses that of the idolater. It is not merely an implicit refusal of God; it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. This is a truth, the Sage of Israel would say, that any man ought to know. It is the first among the truths that no man is allowed not to know, for not to know it is to nullify oneself as a man, a creature of intelligence. (Fs) (notabene)

96b Agnosticism is atheism by default. The agnostic gives up even the search for God. He calls an arbitrary halt to the movement of the mind that, as Paul told the Areopagus, is native to it. This movement is indeed a "groping," Paul said (Acts 17:27), but, he adds, it should not fail to end in a grasping. God is not beyond reach; he is "not far from anyone of us." Agnosticism is also an atheism of despair. The search for God, says the agnostic, is too perilous for me; it is beyond my powers. In this willful diminution of intelligence, God disappears. Surely this is a miserably flat denouement to the great intellectual drama in whose opening scene Plato appeared with the astonishing announcement that launched the high action of philosophy-his insight that there is an order of transcendent reality, higher than the order of human intelligence and the measure of it, to which access is available to the mind of man. (Fs)