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<\/a>I just started reading Jerry Coyne\u2019s new book, Faith vs. Fact<\/a> and I\u2019m finding it to be quite good. Last year he wrote a piece for The New Republic<\/em><\/a> in which he addressed an issue that always frustrates me: the so-called sophisticated theologies. For those of you who haven\u2019t spent years and years studying religion, these are notions of \u201cGod as Ground of Being\u201d or the many varieties of process theology. They veer away from an interventionist God, sometimes even shunning the heavily supernatural.<\/p>\n After considering some of these ideas, he came up with three questions he would pose to proponents of such theologies:<\/p>\n 1. On what basis do you know that God is a Ground-of-Being God instead of an anthropomorphic God? (In your answer, you cannot include as evidence the dubious claim that the former God is the one most people have accepted throughout history.)<\/p>\n 2. How do you know that your Ground-of-Being god embodies truth, goodness, and beauty rather than lies, evil, and ugliness?<\/p>\n 3. What would convince you that the god you describe doesn\u2019t exist?<\/p>\n Let a theologian, for once, answer the best arguments of atheists: those that involve the question, \u201cHow do you know that?\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ve had this argument with many colleagues who have told me how they explain to their congregants \u201chow God works.\u201d God is not a big buddy in the sky, reward and punishment are not matters for the divine, God can\u2019t stop a tsunami or the Holocaust. You get the idea. My question for them was always identical to Coyne\u2019s, \u201cHow do you know?\u201d<\/p>\n But the question doesn\u2019t suit every notion of God. There are proposals about God\u00a0that are immune to it because\u00a0they\u00a0involve\u00a0complex\u00a0re-definitions of the word itself. For such proposals there is no answer to the\u00a0question because they are built on sensible things that we do know; things that are subsequently assigned\u00a0the name \u201cGod.\u201d<\/p>\n Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, was the Jewish master of this approach. He posited a very different kind of God. His notion was wholly non-supernatural. I was at one time completely enchanted by his ideas and my regard for him continues.<\/p>\n Kaplan argued that the discoveries of science compel modern people to \u201ctransvalue\u201d the idea of God. He explained this in his 1937 book, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n Transvaluation consists in ascribing meanings to the traditional content of a religion or social heritage, which could neither have been contemplated nor implied by the authors of that content.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This was a radical idea at the time. God, he argued, is a force that emerges from the human experience, what he sometimes called the \u201cPower that makes for salvation.\u201d It is a kind of internal aspiration engine for humanity, pushing us\u00a0to be better. I really enjoyed the freedom to see God this way and it salvaged traditional narratives\u00a0and rituals\u00a0for me. Until it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n The more I read Kaplan and thought about his ideas, the more I realized that no matter how non-supernatural he thought his God to be, it was impossible to understand without regarding it as having some kind of independence from humanity; as being a kind of force in the universe. He granted that his God could do nothing independent of human action, but he also described God as \u201cthe sum of the animating, organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, I abandoned my Kaplanian journey. When he spoke plainly, it was clear that the only thing that he claimed\u00a0was actually\u00a0real was human action. When he discussed God in the context of\u00a0Jewish tradition, it all\u00a0became murkier. Even as he\u00a0was making\u00a0radical alterations to the liturgy, he continued to insist\u00a0upon retaining all too many traditional words and rituals. And I never really got a straight answer as to why exactly I should preside over genital mutilation ceremonies in celebration of my fictional ancestors\u2019 covenant with this non-supernatural power.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, he was an adherent of humanistic values and, alongside the insistently non-theistic founder of my own movement, Sherwin Wine, Kaplan signed the Humanist Manifesto II<\/a> in 1973. And importantly, Coyne\u2019s question \u2013 \u201cHow do you know that?\u201d \u2013 could be easily answered by Kaplan. The answer is, \u201cWhat\u2019s to know? It\u2019s obvious that people have within them the ability to act\u00a0morally and righteously. I call that God.\u201d There are plenty of problems with Kaplan\u2019s work \u2013 not the least of which is how complicated it is and how many internal contradictions there are \u2013 but at its very core\u00a0it was a statement about humanity that was (at least seemingly) free\u00a0of any real supernatural insistence.<\/p>\n Kaplan\u2019s greatest failure lies in his assertions\u00a0about\u00a0transvaluation. Despite his best efforts to transvalue God into some kind of brand-new idea\u00a0and of\u00a0taking every single story, prayer and ritual in Judaism and turning them into metaphors about human aspirations, the word God is not given to such a radical make-over. Despite the best attempts of Kaplan \u2013 and his contemporaries in other religious traditions\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the vast majority of people will always think about God in pretty\u00a0traditional ways. This\u00a0makes perfect sense when we consider that God is a mostly anthropomorphic character in just about every one those traditions (God \u201cspeaks,\u201d \u201ccreates,\u201d \u201ccommands,\u201d and so forth ad nauseum<\/em>).<\/p>\n Not everyone who thinks about God this way has learned the\u00a0lessons of\u00a0Kaplan\u2019s failure. Now comes along a self-proclaimed lifelong atheist, Nancy Ellen Abrams, who thinks she has stumbled upon a wholly original conception of God.<\/p>\n In her new book, A God That Could Be Real<\/em><\/a>, she expands on this idea. I have not read it and I don\u2019t intend to; I understood it well enough from her online essays.* Like Kaplan, she ties her God-idea to human aspirations. This is from her piece in Tikkun<\/em> magazine<\/a> where, after shooting down all the traditional ideas of God (like any\u00a0good atheist), she writes:<\/p>\n Something new has to have emerged from the staggering complexity of all humanity\u2019s aspirations, interacting. What is that Something?\u2014that emergent phenomenon both fed by and feeding the aspirations of every human being? It didn\u2019t exist before humans evolved, but it\u2019s here now, and every one of us is directly connected to it simply by virtue of being human and having aspirations. It didn\u2019t create the universe, but it has created the meaning of the universe, which is what matters to us. Meaning, universe, spirit, God, creation, and all other abstract concepts are themselves ideas that took form over countless generations, as people shared their aspirations to understand and express what may lie beyond the visible world. This emergent Something has created the power of all our words and ideas, including ideals like truth, justice, and freedom, which took millennia to clarify in practice, and which no individual could ever have invented or even imagined without a rich history that made it possible.<\/p>\n This infinitely complex Something, which has emerged and continues to emerge from instant to instant, growing exponentially and shape-shifting, can be accurately said to exist in the modern universe. It\u2019s as real as the economy, as real as the government. It doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Hindu or Christian or Jewish or atheist or agnostic, because I\u2019m not proposing an alternative religious idea. I\u2019m explaining an emergent phenomenon that actually exists in our scientific picture of reality. You don\u2019t have to call it God, but it\u2019s real. And when you search for a name for it, it may be the only thing that exists in the modern universe that is worthy of the name God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On one hand, who can argue with the idea that \u201cSomething\u201d has emerged from human experience? A lot of somethings have been developed by people over time. We all subscribe to endless cultural constructs and mass myths. Many, like the economic rules and governments, can be quite useful even if they are terrifically flawed.<\/p>\n But we do not relate to the economy on anthropomorphic\u00a0terms. We don\u2019t call it \u201cSteve\u201d and tell mythological narratives about it. So why should we take the \u201cSomething\u201d that has emerged naturally from human experience and call it God? What sense is there in that? Why God? Why not Frank or Bill or Suzy?\u00a0What is it about the craving\u00a0to re-purpose and revivify\u00a0\u201cGod\u201d that makes a very smart woman (who takes pride in being married to a world-class physicist) write a book about a human phenomenon and decide that \u201cGod\u201d is the best word for it? Is it to avoid calling herself an atheist? Is it so that she can pray to and feel comforted by this fantasy?<\/a><\/p>\n News flash for Ms. Abrams: We already\u00a0learned from Kaplan\u2019s attempts\u00a0that\u00a0transvaluation of God is not possible. Words have meanings. And while there is room for all kinds of linguistic nuances for many ideas, there is simply no sense in taking normal human processes and collectively naming them \u201cGod.\u201d<\/p>\n (Abrams writes about how she began to think about all this when she joined a Twelve-Step recovery group. I\u2019ve got my own issues that decades ago brought me into such groups. I found them to be quite useless, thank you very much, and I\u2019ve had more success dealing with similar problems since I ceased participating in their pseudo-scientific semi-religion<\/a>.)<\/p>\n In both Kaplan and Abrams we have ideas that can easily withstand Coyne\u2019s (and my) usual challenges about \u201cHow do you know?\u201d But this is only because at the very bottom of their proposals they are offering us literally nothing except bad reasons to use words and traditions in ways that they were never intended and that make no real sense.<\/p>\n There was a time that I found such notions terribly compelling with\u00a0their attempts to make \u201cGod\u201d relevant and naturalistic by\u00a0applying it to every human phenomenon. But really, why bother? When I stopped playing these theological games, I discovered that it is\u00a0a more worthy pursuit to simply examine these human phenomena for what they are, abandoning\u00a0the\u00a0exasperatingly useless and impossible attempts at reviving God through transvaluation.<\/p>\n __________<\/p>\n