OF GOD AND GARDENS

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PAST GALLERIES

Believers have got into a tangle trying to fend off the likes of Richard Dawkins. And then there’s the problem of the horticultural parable. Anthony Gottlieb does some digging ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009

In 1944 John Wisdom, an aptly named British philosopher, wrote a parable about a garden. It took up just a few paragraphs of an intricate essay in a professional journal, but it seeded a controversy that ran for a good few years before subsiding into the mulch of abandoned philosophical debates. The essay was about religion: the parable raised the question of what meaning, if any, could be given to the idea that the world is watched over by a loving God. Sixty-five years later, Wisdom’s tale is ripe for retelling because religious apologists have argued themselves into a frightful muddle. A slew of books aimed at rebutting the so-called “New Atheists"—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—has unintentionally given new life to an old controversy about the meaningfulness of statements about God.

The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees...They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer...insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”

It seems that no evidence could make the man who believes in a gardener concede that he was wrong. Come what may, he will hang on to his faith in a guiding hand with green fingers. Wisdom hinted that this dispute seems not to be one about what it is reasonable or correct to believe, but is instead more like a difference in attitudes towards the garden.

By elaborating on Wisdom’s parable, several philosophers of the 1940s and 1950s challenged religious believers to explain what they were up to. “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?” asked Antony Flew, a British sceptic, in an influential article on “Theology and Falsification”. Like other philosophers who were under the influence of Logical Positivism—a theory about language that emphasised the importance of testability—Flew suggested that statements about gods and gardeners, if they could not possibly be tested, did not really count as assertions at all. In fact, they were pretty much meaningless.

Logical Positivism went too far: its conception of language was too narrow, and the charge of meaninglessness could not plausibly be made to stick. But the parable of the gardener did raise an unsettlingly powerful point about the nature of faith. If you believe something, shouldn’t it be possible to say what would make that belief true or false? What is the content of your so-called belief in the existence of a God, or of a gardener, if you cannot say what difference his presence or absence would make to the world?

Fundamentalist believers, and many others among the faithful, are not troubled by such questions because they know exactly what they are claiming. They maintain that a supreme being made the world, which bears the signs of his handiwork, and that they therefore have concrete evidence, or even decisive proof, of the existence of God. (According to their official catechism, Catholics are supposed to believe that the existence of God can be deduced from the order and beauty of the world, and from the existence of man’s sense of morality.) But in writings such as Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), the New Atheists have undermined the idea that the state of the world points compellingly to the existence of a God. Like the sceptic in the parable, they are unimpressed with the alleged evidence of an invisible divine gardener, and reckon that evolution and cosmology can explain the wonders of nature instead. In reply, religious thinkers have launched a counter-attack in which they claim that the New Atheists, in their wilful ignorance of theology, are attacking an old-fashioned God whom few people believe in anyway. And that is where the trouble starts, because these believers now seem to have painted themselves into a corner.

Consider, for example, “The Case for God”, the latest of 22 books on religion by Karen Armstrong, who was once a Catholic nun but now espouses a vague, universalist religion of compassion. In her opinion, God “is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God ‘exists’, because our concept of existence is too limited.” Her main idea is that the only authentic and defensible God is one who utterly transcends human understanding and therefore cannot be described at all. She maintains that religion took a wrong turn during the Enlightenment when it tried to imitate science and develop an articulate and rationally defensible concept of God, thereby leaving itself open to the slings and arrows of the atheists.

Considered as history, Armstrong’s account is puzzlingly eccentric, since many of the greatest religious thinkers before the Enlightenment—such as St Thomas Aquinas—took great pains to spell out their conception of God and to offer proofs of his existence. What is even more baffling is the idea that one can talk about a wholly indescribable God who cannot be said to “exist” but who nevertheless in some sense “is”. By definition, atheists say that God does not exist. So what, according to Karen Armstrong, does the difference between an atheist and a believer amount to? We seem to be back in the thickets of Wisdom’s garden—only now the gardener is so far beyond our allegedly limited “concept of existence” that we cannot even say that he is there.

Simon Blackburn, a British philosopher, remarked that Armstrong’s attitude to religion is reminiscent of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are.” Armstrong is far from alone among believers in retreating to the haven of incoherence. One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as “what sustains all things in being by his love, and...is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.

(Anthony Gottlieb is a former executive editor of The Economist and author of "The Dream of Reason". His last article for Intelligent Life was on whether electronic books will solve the problem of printed errors.)

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Comments

Why worry?

December 17, 2009 - 08:40 — Porzitski (not verified)

Nice closing comment. It accidentally explains the primary -maybe only- way to prove the existence of God. Since He is so far above, beyond, or incomprehensible to people, the only way a believer can prove His existence (such as it is) is to live the Creed. Only by reflecting His light can believers indicate, imitate, or imply Him, or in any way make Him knowable to others. Blue Laws and behavioral restrictions just won't do it.
People like to think themselves the acme of evolution, smarter than those who came before. In looking at humanity with this competitive view, a person tends to lose sight of the long-term, eternal contest. It is not whether we are smarter than anyone else, but whether we are smart enough, individually, to recognize our own REAL self-interest.

One can't correctly

December 17, 2009 - 15:15 — Visitor (not verified)

One can't correctly contemplate religious/spiritual beliefs without also contemplating the nature of reality.
I've always considered the conceptualization of a god as the only method many of us can utilize to ponder the fact that the universe is more than just carbon matter. Reality is nothing more or less than how we perceive the world around us, and the human race has only the five senses which can only perceive so much. We evolved with the necessary tools to survive, nothing more.
To believe we perceive the exact and only nature of existence would be arrogance. Just as we once believed there was only this one planet on which we lived, most people believe there is just this one universe, just this one reality.
We are not equipped to make any definitive conclusions as to what is objectively real and what is not; we can only deal with what is subjectively real to us. In the end, as you put so well, tend your own garden.

Interesting that so many

December 17, 2009 - 17:20 — Visitor (not verified)

Interesting that so many people start with an assumption that it is the believer's obligation to prove the existence of God, as if the non-existence of God is the natural state of things. To the contrary, as much as the believer cannot prove that God exists, the non-believer cannot prove that God does not exist. We are, after all, talking about faith, not proof. As a previous poster said, our concept of reality is limited. In some ways, it is a leap of faith to believe that there is nothing else, God or otherwise.

Natural State of Things

December 17, 2009 - 17:21 — Tim (not verified)

How did it all start?

December 18, 2009 - 02:22 — Visitor (not verified)

Terry Pratchett once described our concept of the beginning of the universe, the big bang theory, as: "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded". Now phycisists mumble that there must have been something, maybe energy. Somehow, when you go to the beginning of the universe, it seems to me that science demands faith quite as much as religion. Either we are to believe that something arose out of nothing, or there was never a beginning. I can believe that God is without beginning or end, but the physical universe?

A Bit More Work Needed

December 18, 2009 - 06:25 — Recusant (not verified)

Terry Eagleton is not a Catholic: he is an atheist from a Catholic upbringing. His current God is Marx.

Interesting choice of Anthony Flew as well, considering his very public conversion from atheism to theism and that he published, in 2007, 'There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind'.

Karen Armstrong does represent a good example of a religious person arguing themselves into a muddle, but I think you will find the majority of religious people would agree with you if she is the example. As a representative of the norm, however, she fails spectacularly.

"...just get on with the

December 18, 2009 - 06:33 — Visitor (not verified)

"...just get on with the gardening."

Indeed, but in the 260 years since Candide recommended this, the metaphysicians and sophisticated theologians have ignored his advice in favour of Pangloss's verbal effusions.

Kiwi Dave

'...and just get on with the

December 18, 2009 - 06:46 — Kiwi Dave (not verified)

'...and just get on with the gardening.'

Definitely wiser, but in the 260 years since Voltaire gave this advice, metaphysicians and theologians have preferred Pangloss to Candide.

Belief

December 18, 2009 - 07:31 — Visitor (not verified)

1. Every event after the big bang is scientifically explicable.
2. Initiators of debate over a god or gods must not duck the obligation to present debate-worthy propositions on the how and why of the big bang and its exclusively nuclear components.
3. Debate is non-existent that requires the negative side to accept that miracles exist -- not statisitcally unlikely outcomes but scientifically impossible events.
4. That makes the debate, so-called, a shallow confrontation whether scientific rules of the universe are always open to miraculous suspension.
5. It is a subject of disappearing value except to those who insist on raising it.

responses

December 18, 2009 - 07:39 — Visitor (not verified)

As a Christian I agree that, in an important sense, God is unprovable. This question does not deal with the argument posited in this article per se but rather with the idea that the books that The Economist is reviewing as (implicitly) representing Christianity are popular books that most church leaders do not respect. Karen Armstrong is not Christian and neither does she represent the most thoughtful writing on Christianity. There are books out there in response to "New Atheism," eg. The Atheist Delusion by David Bentley Hart that WOULD actually merit the printed response on this page were they to be reviewed. Most orthodox Christians can find common ground with the author in countering Karen Armstrong - we'd be in agreement. Perhaps the author should take a look at the strongest writings as a matter of subject in his articles.

existence and gratitude

December 18, 2009 - 07:46 — Topher (not verified)

I agree with many of the insightful comments here, especially that the existence or non-existence of God cannot be proved, so go and tend the garden...

Just one additional thought, however: for me my sense of God's existence comes from my existence. In other words, I am an imperfect, selfish being who really doesn't deserve to exist - to have time as a sentient being in this amazing universe. I never did anything to deserve this wonderful thing. Somehow through billions of years of evolution after the big bang, I manifested as a thinking organism here in a spectacular world. I may even have a soul of some kind beyond this physicality! But either way, soul or no soul, as I said, I don't deserve this gift of a human life here on earth. So I feel gratitude, and therefore feel gratitude to a creator of the whole jumbled mess, including this unworthy "me" that the universe somehow spit out into existence.

Missing middle ground

December 18, 2009 - 08:07 — Earl Wajenberg (not verified)

Gottleib critiques those whose religious belief is very vague and abstract, but other theists are fluffed off as "Fundamentalist believers, and many others among the faithful," which lumps a wide range of religious opinion together with a very specific group whose name has become a secular swearword for "contemptibly fanatical conservative." This wide range contains most believers who think about the problem at all. (A great many believers have no taste for philosophy and just "get on with their gardening," just like non-believers.) Gottleib's criticism touches only a very recherche fringe of belief.

?

December 18, 2009 - 08:40 — v for visitor (not verified)

I always scratch my head when I see statements like this -- "To the contrary, as much as the believer cannot prove that God exists, the non-believer cannot prove that God does not exist." Similarly, the non-believer cannot prove that unicorns, fairies, and aliens do not exist, nor that monkeys won't ever fly out of my butt. Are believers then justified in believing in these things...? I sometimes wonder how people get through everyday life with such flimsy standards of reasoning...

..well, ok...

December 18, 2009 - 09:24 — jay (not verified)

Then you too must prove that those you don't believe in don't exist....

prove that Zeus does not exist, Thor, Ra, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy....

Oh my, obviously they do exist, because you have failed to prove otherwize

Well...

December 18, 2009 - 10:07 — runbei (not verified)

"Believers have got themselves into a tangle..." Well, of course. Belief - and Dawkins-style fashionable atheism - equally commit the cardinal sin in scientific investigation: arguing ahead of the evidence.

The question of spiritual experience is mysteriously absent from the screeds of the fundies and crypto-atheists. The lab of spiritual investigation is the human body. Paramhansa Yogananda, a great modern yogi, said, "At the inner end of the human nervous system, the mind, interiorized, communes with God." Not an experiment that the f's and a's are likely to try soon. (Indeed, the fundies claim that trying to experience God is "satanic," etc.)

The tools of investigation are prayer and meditation. Not likely to be picked up by the likes of Dawkins any time soon, either. Dawkins, in any case is a fraud - consider how he flatly rejected the findings of Rupert Sheldrake regarding the primacy of consciousness. Wouldn't even look at them - rejected them on purely logical grounds. Some scientist.

Is Eagleton a Catholic?

December 18, 2009 - 11:28 — Ben (not verified)

Just to add to recusants's comments ("Terry Eagleton is not a Catholic: he is an atheist from a Catholic upbringing. His current God is Marx."): I once heard Eagleton give a talk on his religious beliefs. He explained that Catholic Church is a hierarchy. At the top is God, then the saints. Immediately below the saints (he said) are lapsed Catholics, such as myself. Below them are practicing lay Catholics and, at the bottom, priests, bishops and then the Pope.

More useless boilerplate

December 18, 2009 - 11:29 — Sick of Atheist Cliches (not verified)

The thesis you describe as a "self deluding comfort" *has* been explicated, even though Terry Eagleton is hardly the go-to-guy if you want a clear statement of it. Of course, you might have to get your hands dirty and do a little research in order to understand the claim that "God is a preconditon for the possibility of existence." (Hint for all you web-skeptics: It is not a pre-scientific 'empirical' hypothesis nor is it some meaningless bit of pomo rubbish. Do make sure you know what you are talking about before you mouth-off.)

There are books on Thomistic metaphysics available that will explain these concepts to you, and present arguments that you can evaluate for yourself.

Now, dear skeptical reader, before you reflexively shout "Courtier's reply!" do realize that there are Courtier's replies and then then there are "Courtier's replies." If I were demanding that you read up on, say, affinities between Boethius's epistemology and neo-Platonism before criticizing Christianity, then I would indeed be guilty of a Courtier's reply in the perjorative sense.

This case, however, clearly isn't like that. The thesis our author dismisses as "unintelligible" is part and parcel of basic Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, which is the underpinning of the mainstream Catholic understanding of God. It is not some obscure proposition from the nether-regions of mystical theology. There is simply no excuse for dismissing it so glibly, and so the charge of "unintelligibility" simply won't wash. Nor will the feeble "Courtier's reply!" quip that is so popular with the net-skeptics these days.

But, then again, why bother examining the actual arguments for Theism when you can trot out some warmed-over arguments from the twilight of the logical positivist era? After all, who is going to call your bluff? The people who seriously believe that the likes of Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton have made intelligent contributions to this debate? Yeah, sure.

Wisdom's parable

December 18, 2009 - 11:45 — Apothegms (not verified)

was the most memorable reading in my old philosophy of religion course. It discredits theistic discourse as thoroughly as Flew's later challenge to believers, but it also shows why the debate is fruitless. (Flew's challenge engendered some wildly fatuous responses from the theists.) At the end of the day, the believer goes on believing in the Invisible Gardener, and the skeptic would be well advised to save his breath to cool his porridge.

But since the theists will go on talking, kudos to Anthony Gottlieb for pointing out how vaporous the writings of Armstrong and Eagleton are.

We might compare two

December 18, 2009 - 12:16 — Ted Reynolds (not verified)

We might compare two approaches to this question.

First: This position is not disproved; therefore I can choose to believe it.

Second: This position has a preponderance of evidence against it: therefore I should choose not to believe it.

Persons who accept one of these approaches are very likely to show disrespect to persons who prefer the other approach.

We are showing an awful lot of unnecessary disrespect to each other in such threads as this one. Christians, scientists, and humanists should all expect better of themselves. Let's try harder.

(This comment is in place of a nastier one for which I would have reproached myself.)

Correcting the penultimate paragraph

December 18, 2009 - 12:17 — cgestabrook (not verified)

The late Herbert McCabe (Eagleton's mentor) wrote, correctly it seems, that Thomas Aquinas was "the most agnostic theologian in the Western Christian tradition - not agnostic in the sense of doubting whether God exists, but agnostic in the sense of being quite clear and certain that God is a *mystery* beyond any understanding we can now have. He was sure that God *is* because he thought that there must *be* an answer to the deepest and most vertiginous question, 'Why is there anything instead of nothing at all?' But he was also sure that we do not know what that answer is." (Faith Within Reason, p.96)

courtier's reply

December 18, 2009 - 13:03 — Valentinus (not verified)

Yes, the article above is wearisomely religiously and philosophically uninformed. It's also worth noting more generally that the 'Courtier's Reply' rejoinder is a philosophical dead-end. Despite its suave meretriciousness, it is without substance because as a rejoinder it already presupposes that the argument it seeks to rebut is an invalid one (explained in its allusion to the Emperor's New Clothes). Hence its habitual and tedious recourse to sarcasm rather than irony. In other words, CR is rejectionist rather than disconfirmatory. It seeks to scorn rather than refute. There are powerful arguments against the existence of God and they have historically provoked sophisticated responses from theists. I have not heard one of them from Richard Dawkins. Indeed, when I once asked him for his reaction to Alvin Plantinga's S4 defence of the ontological argument, I got waved away with an embarrassing joke about Plantinga's name, eliciting hysterical laughter from Dawkins' cheerleaders in the audience. Who then was the Emperor and who the Courtier, I wondered.

the purpose of the argument

December 18, 2009 - 13:17 — Mia (not verified)

What I'm hearing in this debate is some of the world's leading thinkers being angry, belittling and sarcastic. Whether God exists or not, is it not clear that uncompromising kindness is the whole and the only point?

Imperfect and Selfish...

December 18, 2009 - 13:36 — Moi (not verified)

To me this illustrates how religion can poison the mind. I suppose these sentiments issue mostly from belief in original sin and the idea of Jesus’ having had to come to Earth to save its thoroughly unworthy and undeserving creatures. What a repugnant conception of humanity! And why should we deem ourselves imperfect? We’re perfect humans. Is a tiger imperfect? Is a fly unworthy of existence? Why would we be? What twisted notions…

Mia writes "What I'm hearing

December 18, 2009 - 13:52 — Ted Reynolds (not verified)

Mia writes "What I'm hearing in this debate is some of the world's leading thinkers being angry, belittling and sarcastic. Whether God exists or not, is it not clear that uncompromising kindness is the whole and the only point?"

I am pleased to be in the same discussion with Mia.

Those who lose their temper have, in some ways, already lost their argument.

We all need a philosophy or religion which evades neither experience and reason, or human needs and morality. This is a very difficult thing to achieve, and even harder to achieve if we assume that we already possess it.

The only believers (or

December 18, 2009 - 16:10 — Joe Sabbagh (not verified)

The only believers (or non-believers) "obligated" to justify their views are the ones imposing them on the rest of us. Anyone beyond age 14 still clinging to the notion of a "loving" god should not be afraid to look silly, but that's his business.
Nobody can prove any of it, one way or another: agnosticism is really the only defensible stance.

the nature of a revelation

December 18, 2009 - 18:11 — Robert Landbeck (not verified)

"unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right".

This crux which applies to all theological exegesis, across all monotheisms and points to the dangers of any 'tradition' which attempts to fix limits upon human thought and imagination. Because progress and the future often demands a rethink of the very nature of those ideas that were once unquestionable, but two thousand year on exude the odour of being well past their sell by date. Yet this only polarizes opinion for the simple reason that theists are in a 'theological' denial on what the nature of revealed truth is and opposing factions rightly see this process of thought no longer a valid conception of reason for the 21th century. The tragedy is that religion has so discredited the very idea of God. And atheists, due to their declared position, have no real impute on the issue, even while by their own pretensions, they declare there is no God, when all they know is that religious tradition is an intellectual and moral dead end, unable to contribute to any realizable vision of the future and more often than not impeding any attempt to break its mindset.

One might presume that the very nature of this impasse makes any congruence only a temporary bout of political correctness necessary as neither side has an argument to make that might resolve the question: Is there a God?

But that an answer cannot and will not come from the obvious protagonists, is not to say an answer is not possible. Just not one that conforms to embedded prejudices or the dogma and doctrines of these opposing sides.

But what science and religion have agreed was not possible, may already be in the pipeline and all too inevitable. An error of presumption which could now leave 'tradition' staring into the abyss and humble all secular, atheist speculation.

The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Christ is on the web. Redefining all primary elements including Faith, the Word, Baptism, the Trinity and the Resurrection, this new interpretation questions the validity and origins of all Christian tradition. and for good reason, no pun intended!

It describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle, and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds directly to an act of perfect faith with a individual intervention into the natural world; correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where 'death' is ignorance and 'Life' is knowledge, this personal experience of transcendent power and moral purpose is the 'Resurrection', and justification for faith.

For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new moral tenet, not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof for its belief.

Revolutionary stuff for those who can handle it? Expect both atheist and ecclesiasic feathers to begin flying any time soon. http://www.energon.org.uk

Mia

December 18, 2009 - 19:17 — Mia (not verified)

Ted Reynolds writes "I am pleased to be in the same discussion with Mia."

Why thank you, Ted. I have to say that I'm pleased you're here, too.

Of God & Gardens

December 18, 2009 - 19:47 — John (not verified)

I much prefer the Understanding of Gardens and the Garden of Eden and Acausal Real God communicated in these references.

ww.dabase.org/tfrbkgil.htm

www.dabase.org/noface.htm

www.fearnomorezoo.org/literature/observe_learn.php

www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-god.aspx

Gardening for God

December 18, 2009 - 21:41 — Visitor Linda OReilly (not verified)

It would be great to just go on with the gardening but all too often someone with a bible in their hand comes along to smack you with it and tell you that you're doing it wrong and that you've got to do it GOD's way.
Hard not to take umbrage at that.