Why do we believe? After writing books about the god of Islam and Jesus of Nazareth, religion scholar Reza Aslan takes on the biggest question of all: What does “God” mean, anyway? Aslan comes to the surprising answer that God looks a lot like humans. Does this make him a deep believer or an atheist? Is God everywhere or nowhere? Find out in this interview about his latest book, “God: A Human History.”
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“There is no I and Thou.”
–the interviewee
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God never stays one and the same as you approach.
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God is before and after God. God died in creating, in creating Himself, that is to say in multiplying His death.
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Schism: kin to the scythe. Bread must be divided.
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With nothing left to invent God drowned in Himself. It would be interesting to know what was His last invention–the fatal one. Some say it was man.
–Edmond Jabes, all from The Book of Questions, Yael
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Another wonderfully joyous discussion which creates a sense of common goal toward understanding–what common I shall return to below. There are two points I think underlie this discussion and discussions generally on the topic of what divinity is. First, whether deconstruction of God, which the interviewee certainly performs, has much relevance to those believing in God as a form of practice. Second, if the answer to the first is no (as I believe), then how should God be framed as a matter of praxis. This second will return to the joyous discussion of thought as a commonality among people.
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1. Nietzsche impotent.
We are evolved creatures, here because our ancestors morphing through the past into forms we would not own, reproduced, entailing all the conflict and cooperation needed to that singular end. If I travel back to such ancestors and pontificate on exactly why they act as they do it will not help them in their evolutionary arenas one jot. To understand is not to act, the distance between these quite great in the analysis of evolutionary trajectory (yes, there are counter examples, such as curtailing the overuse of antibiotics to avoid super resistant bacteria, but the analysis is already close to the focal tool [antibiotics], no disruption of the latter by applying practical evolutionary intervention, subject and analysis fused at start). God discourse may be wholly baseless materially, but it endures, all attempts to eradicate it providing temporary substitutes or promptly failing; one can alter the frequency of unbelief and belief, but not really erase the latter, it immune to the brilliant analyses of its origin.
Deconstruction in the broad social sciences is geared to competitive success within academia and adjacent ideologies such as anti-racism (pluralism) and feminism. These latter can be internally consistent and morally affirmed, yet they hit walls, some rather great ones at the moment, as soon as their forced adherence limits the targeted’s opportunities. At that point, as we now endure, these ideologies are thrown off as attempts to shackle by inferiority. People want to win, or at least not lose, rather than be pure. Since deconstruction privileges the pedigree of its speaker, it becomes an oppressive ideology blocking access to a hope which the deconstructionist asserts is flawed or unclean. Nietzsche had his Superman who, apparently, would awe the lesser until they vanished into the history they were. Perhaps academia is the former, but the latter refuse to vote in adequate numbers to affirm the pleasure of being inferior. Knowing how the concept “God” originated will not erase that concept as presently employed. The paleontologist deals with echoes of life, but the deconstructionist is as distant from its subject in life lived.
The problem is how to employ an evolutionary analysis as praxis in the present knowing that its core principles will not at all be universally accepted. The Academy and its adjuncts cannot apply their (false) internal egalitarianism of merit onto the greater world. It must accept a pluralism outside of itself, not admonishing righteously as the New Atheists but rather letting what it indeed sees as error thrive, even helping it so. An altruism toward what otherwise is the enemy will be needed, for, if our (well, not mine) theories are correct they will assert eradication of the enemy impossible anyway; the question is how to live together.
Aslan is no New Atheist, but his personal position is not what belief is for a great majority. The question is whether that personal position actually enables contact with the majority in what they are, not what they should become. I think it can. But first a sidebar on the deconstruction Aslan sketches.
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2. Happenstance of soul.
Aslan says that the soul, our perception of self severed from the world surround, is prior to any concept of God and likely universal even down to Homo erectus (I suspect meaning evidence of burials with objects or adornments). This is a strange assertion given where Aslan will end, fusing all into God. But for the moment the focal point Aslan makes is that there seems no adaptive value to the concept, for selection is a matter of life, not afterlife. Not if the concept is forced onto the dead by some of the living. I recall Homo sapiens burials where an individual, usually male, is buried tied, legs folded at the knees, restraints also on the hands. Why do this as the bound is dead? Tying represents subjugation, so possibly erasure of past social power: tied, this one cannot hurt you again; untied, his allies or relatives may have his power in the present. Soul here becomes a measure of network position in the now, the tied corpse signal that the prior network of power has significantly altered. Soul does not have to be my inference of singularity against the world; it can rather be application (or destruction) of social bonds after the death of their holder.
Surely a singularity against the world can have adaptive consequence in my life. I can as well try to impose mine upon my (extended) family group, or that done otherwise after my death, I now used to invoke prior bonds between those bonded to me, with or without threat of dominance as such, of selective value to others after my exit. And once entertained such a soul can be imposed by more distant for their own coercive or cooperative ends (cooperation really with its own forms of coercion in possible actions). The soul can then possibly be deconstructed by evolutionary path, not sui generis beyond deconstruction, gift of spirituality ultimately forming God.
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3. No I without thou: fractured divinity, fractured monotheism.
I suggest that soul/God is akin to speaker/language spoken and to mind/matter and that an interface of these binaries might be possible via evolutionary game theory of all things–a kind of materialistic conception of the world. Yet at the end God becomes quite manifest in social acts and the hope of future social acts.
Strategies in a game have first moves. In standard strategies, that move is either endogenous (always do xx first) or triggered by an outside cue (jump if its adequately light, else hunker down). Social games have more than one player; in standard strategies first moves are independent across players. Even if an outside cue is used, there is no sense in which if I do xx someone else will do something else, say yy. What I do does not in itself determine what another does when all make their first move simultaneously. But this is not true in another kind of strategy, termed correlated. In a correlated strategy, that I do xx necessarily means my opponent is doing yy on first move. This seems strange, but there are external mechanisms which will induce such (I actually worked on ants where such a mechanism exists). In correlated strategies individuals are not true isolates; their response sets are bound from the very start. Mathematically, such strategies can often be cast as a form of group selection where, in simplest case, dyads are in competition with each other, not lone individuals.
I suggest, and no more than that here, three things: that language applied is much like a correlated strategy, and that, if so seen, the mind/matter distinction vanishes, as the mind is in its essence determined by the outside world–it is play under the correlation of language. Strategy play is the mind, but the strategy is embedded as much in the group (dyad, above) as in the individual; these correlated responses define self, but no self isolate, even though language, internalized, can mimic outside response on its own (the isolate ascetic). Then, lastly, that God is a call for a correlated response through language.
There is nothing new in all of this. Parental care naturally employs correlation. Yes, the parent is already there, but for the infant first response is tied to a correlated yet different response from the parent. The unit of selection is the parent and offspring, neither as isolate. From this all kinds of Freudian descent are possible. And language can be seen as evolving coordination games beginning in the parent/offspring bond/group, then extending to other groups. In the end, what we say is not ours; it is no one’s, yet some more or less amorphous many’s.
Flip now to soul/God. The soul communes with God; the individual speaks in and TO a language (so poets are said to extend the language). The soul’s communion defines itself; the individual is, in analog, defined by its speech. Aslan at interview’s end asserts a pantheism where all are God, with slight reference, via an interviewer, to Spinoza. There is no I and Thou, he says, for I am in God as you are in God as all is in God. This almost carries through to what I have said, but with an error: language is a somewhat open ended set of correlated strategy responses, selected for in evolution by actual individuals in which these strategies are embedded. There is a relational structure across individuals allowing groups to form, compete, fail, win, endure, outlast. The sum of all this is language, but it is a sum–not a reified entity. The ancient short hand “God” is here a false reification of process built out of very real and often devastating material outcomes. We are not all in God, and I do not have to praise the Ebola virus as participating in God with me. This last reifies God beyond summed language, making THAT reification absorb all existence. Unlike Spinoza or Aslan, the view barely sketched here does not exit into totality; God does not save us from asking where we came from–nothing can save us there. In that, this game theory analog is purely scientific materialism.
Yet there remains a strong sense in which language is divine. It molds us, opens our eyes, tells us what to be, and gives us the tools for change, even unto rebellion against a set form of language. This is, I think, our sense of God. Our manipulative power comes from speaking (now) and we call this unfathomable multi-chain causation active in its own right. In the beginning there was the Word. But there is no single human community, even among ostensive same language speakers. The micro processes, between people, of language diversify humanity. There is then no single, uniform, group structure on humans, so language itself diversifies–seeing language as the origin of God, there is no single God. This plurality is fundamentally a fractured divinity. When I approach others, I potentially approach a divinity distinct from mine embedded. This fracture can take the form of pantheism or a fractured monotheism, the latter asserting that the nature of a single God is always under contention, a nature humans make and contend among themselves. God is open ended, subject to evolution, but not in a teleological sense: what was lost perhaps can recover, including horrible gods or God.
In this view, we need a God concept which is quite real yet ever under contention. This concept can be actualized by constructing arenas for what amounts to the self confrontation of God derived from various locales, geographic or from various discourse spaces not geographically isolate but somewhat isolate in themselves. God does not alter physics, but It can alter social relations, and that can apply physics to new outcome. This has always been the power of God: no appeal to change the physical world, but appeal to change or intervene in the social world. So the religious often say that God brought someone to them–social relations were changed.
This God is fractured, just as language is fractured as applied. The fracture might be framed as a pantheism, or as a monotheism where God contends with Itself for outcomes undecided. This, I think, is how God emerged and how It evolves, purely a concept but capable of sundering worlds and lives, or uniting those formally lost. But not all everywhere ever. Humanity will never be one; God will always be contending with itself, this is price of individuals.
If you recur to the quotes of Jabes with which this too long piece began, I think you will see evidence of this fracturing poetically. If there is any value in the sketch herein, I have no doubt it has been derived from others long in the making. Note that one can stand apart from the contention and actualization of God, as a scientist watching grand physics or evolutionary process. That scientist is the Academy. It has a fundamental role, yet it can only survive by entering the contention which is God for God, for it too is a creature of language. In that, it is one joyous discussion among many.
One last quote of Jabes from Yael: God is against God.
The understanding of God in Edward L. Greenstein’s Job a new translation is certainly a human interpretation of God and if you want to commune with that, then go ahead, I would better not, I have had the same vision and if you really believe in an intuitive reality beyond the what we can empirically know and commune with it go ahead but it is ugly. We live on a lie.