OF GOD AND GARDENS

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 <a href="http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6u.htm">John Wisdom</a>, 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"—<a href="http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/freedoms-lost-and-gained">Richard Dawkins</a>, 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 “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004">The God Delusion</a>” (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, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307269183">The Case for God</a>”, the latest of 22 books on religion by Karen Armstrong, who was once a Catholic nun but now <a href="http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14446991">espouses a vague, universalist religion</a> 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.    (<a href="http://moreintelligentlife.com/authors/anthony-gottlieb">Anthony Gottlieb</a> is a former executive editor of The Economist and author of <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall02/032365.htm/">"The Dream of Reason"</a>. His last article for Intelligent Life was on whether <a href="http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/anthony-gottlieb/facts-errors... books will solve</a> the problem of printed errors.)