Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.
What Dennett is implying is that the orginal monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human.
Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.
Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity.
Dennett's Dilemma -- to give it a name -- is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific)assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I wll surely agree on this point.
But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.
This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism. Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. Dennett's reliance on it is thus dogmatic and uncompelling. Indeed, when he pins his hopes on future science and confesses his faith that there is nothing real apart from the system of space-time-matter, he makes moves analogous to the moves the theist makes who goes beyond what he can claim to know to affirm the existence of a spiritual reality within himself and beyond himself.
Dennett needs to give up the question-begging and the straw-man argumentation. His talk of the "deformation" of the God concept shows that he is unwilling to allow what he would surely allow with subject-matters, namely,
the elaboration of a more adequate concept of the subject-matter in question. Instead, he thinks the theist must be stuck with the crudest conceptions imaginable.
I just don't think about those questions anymore, not as a form of psychological denial, but because there is something more productive to do. Then am I inventing my own religion?
As much as I like Dennett, I'm forced to agree with you here. What Dennett is saying flies in the face of what we know through a study of the history of religions. The move from "concrete/literal" to "abstract/mystical" (or as some people put it, from exoteric to esoteric) is quite common in all religious traditions and not a deformation at all.
The Hindu notion of yajna, sacrifice, moved from the externalized, concrete ritual to something a Hindu practices daily-- every moment-- in his or her quotidian existence.
Magico-religious Taoism took several centuries to catch on to the fact that literally imbibing the products of alchemy could be a deadly business. Taoist internal alchemy came to replace external alchemy: there's no need to ingest real cinnabar when your body already has "fields of cinnabar."
In Islam, it was only a matter of time before a mystical movement like Sufism would arise. The other monotheisms evince the same sort of evolution.
External forms of kung fu gave birth to internal forms; other martial arts sired martial "ways" (the famous move from "-jutsu" to "-do").
This move from exo- to endo/eso- is so common that it boggles my mind to think Dennett is trying to attack religion here, at a spot where there are no chinks in the armor.
Kevin
Thanks for the very good comment, which supplements what I said quite nicely. Dennett completely ignores the mystical core of religions, which core is arguably their true core.
There are mystical interpretations of Christian dogmas. I found a passage in Juan de la Cruz in which the Incarnation is given a mystical interpretation. I should post it.
I also wonder about evolution in the other direction - from the esoteric to the exoteric. Was the God-as-essence experienced before the God-as-super-man? There are people having spontaneous mystical experiences in the present day, experiences that dramatically alter their world view. I would expect that this has been going on for many millennia.
Please do share with us any insights you might have on spiritual vs. literal interpretation. This interests me greatly.
The real source of religion is the experience of God-as-essence. This is not even allowed as a possibility on Dennett's' naturalistic scheme.
The distinction between literal and non-literal religious language must long pre-date Christianity. Poetic association is probably the oldest form of non-literal language. Symbolism, metaphor, allegory, parable were used, but how old these forms are, I'm not sure. One writer detects spiritual metaphors in the Indo-European mother language. The translator of my copy of the Illiad believed that the stories therein were encodings of esoteric wisdom. IIRC the term "mysticism" descends from the Greek mystery religion of Eleusis, whose origin is lost in the mists of prehistory.
Anyway, Jesus certainly taught in parables, which indicates that he distinguished between exoteric and esoteric meanings, and between those who were able to hear and those who were not. The parables and sayings themselves are obviously metaphorical. For example: "Store up treasure in heaven, where rust does not corrode and the moth does not consume." What actually does it mean? The difficulty of answering suggests that the interpretation was never handed down in a continuous fashion.
The apostle Paul also distinguished "that hidden wisdom" spoken only to "the initiates". There are a number of other such dualities in Paul, the "letter" (literal interpretation) versus the "spirit" of the law, discernment "according to the flesh" versus "according to the spirit", "discerning the things of man through the spirit of man" versus "discerning the things of God through the spirit of God." And of course Paul, by his account, never met Jesus in the flesh, nor was taught by any of the original 12 disciples, but was taught directly through mystical vision.
The Valentinian Gnostics, who appeared early in Christian history, carried this to extreme. They claimed that Valentinian was a disciple of Theudas, who was a disciple of Paul. They interpreted everything in Paul in terms of the inner/outer teaching and in terms of the "psychics" versus the "pneumatics". Unfortunately, their inner interpretation was based on the Gnostic myth, something that probably pre-dated Christianity, and so it strikes us as bizarre and manifestly difficult to reconcile with Christianity. But it shows that mystical interpretations of religion were current in that period. There is also the question about whether the Gnostic myth is an allegory produced by some still earlier mystical school, perhaps one of the Greek mystery religions.
In the desert fathers, such as Evagrios Pontikos, I was struck by how they import excerpts from scripture in support of their teaching on the practice of contemplation. Often their use of these excerpts implies a psychological or spiritual interpetation that is far from the plain meaning of the words. I believe that somewhere one of them addresses this explicitly, but I don't remember where. Also, didn't St Jerome distinguish multiple levels of meaning in scripture?
So I think it is easy to establish that the ancients were well aware of this inner-outer dichotomy in religion. Another interesting question is whether it can be established historically that mysticism is the source of religion.
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