Demolishing Monotheism – an impossible enterprise?

El

At last I’ve got round to watching on iPlayer the second part of Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s series on the Bible. The title was ‘Did God Have a Wife?’ The reactions provoked in me this time were rather different from those that arose in response to her first programme which I blogged about earlier this month.

Then I was struck by how good an example it provided of the inherent ambiguity of complex realities, and of how different they can seem when viewed from different angles. This time I was not triggered by any divergent views among dispassionate scholars about the evidence. It is widely accepted, I think, that in the history of Israelite theology the move was from polytheism to monotheism. Stavrakopoulou find traces of this in the Bible itself and this is not a huge surprise. She makes as much as she can out of the moment in which she confronts a scholar of Judaism with this evidence in order to elicit the predictable response that this would not be a position acceptable within his theology.

The problem for me lies in the implications she derives from this and from his similar equally predictable failure to agree that Asherah was widely accepted by the Israelites of the time to be the wife of El, the name God was equally widely known by then.

Asherah

For her this calls into question the whole concept of monotheism, for her the ark of Yahweh is irreversibly holed below the waterline. She rightly points out that the masculine emphasis of early forms of monotheism, which suppressed the feminine side and therefore deleted Asherah from the record, was basically unhealthy. But this only sinks the concept entirely if the idea of one God must by definition be male and if we assume that a single deity of any kind can only be a figment of human imagination.

There is a subtler position, which she never mentions, that reflects the likely reality more faithfully. This position has, for me, been most effectively expressed by Robert Wright, whose book, The Evolution of God, I have reviewed elsewhere. I can’t reproduce his whole argument now anymore than I was able to last time. It is enough to say that his premise on this question is that human understanding of the divine, whatever that is, has evolved over millennia, usually under the pressure of harsh political realities.

He describes the point in Israelite history when monolatry took hold. He sees it interconnected with, though not reducible to, a nationalist Israelite foreign policy (FP – page 146). He feels this would explain, for example, ‘why the Bible’s calls for exclusive devotion to Yahweh are so often infused with a nationalist spirit.’ This can’t be a complete explanation, in his view, as Israelite monotheism did not only have to reject foreign gods but their own ‘indigenous pantheon,’ including Asherah, as well (page 147). The matter of domestic politics (DP – page 148) has also to be involved. There was a sense in which Yahweh ‘gave legitimacy to the king’ (ibid.). He succinctly summarises his case by saying (page 150):

Supernatural pluralism was an enemy of royal power.

Any alert reader could well be saying at this point, ‘If he thinks he is safeguarding the survival of the concept of monotheism by this line of argument, he must be more deluded than I gave him credit for.’ And of course by itself it does little to further the case for the objective existence of a single ‘God.’ What it does do is lend support to Wright’s overall case that humanity’s ideas about God have changed over time and, on average, have developed greater levels of subtlety and sophistication as civilisations have lifted to higher levels of complexity. I started at this unpromising point in the story because this is where Stavrakopoulou begins and ends.

If we move forward in time, there is Philo‘s appealing contribution to the evolution of our idea of God (page 189 passim). He saw ‘a deep streak of tolerance in Yahweh.’ Wright feels that something made ‘tolerance attractive to Philo’ (page 189) – something that made him pay selective attention to expressions in the Bible that pointed in that direction. The ambiguity of scripture allowed him to read tolerance into the record. What pointed him in that direction though?

Wright’s full argument is complex and multifaceted and has to be read in toto to do his case justice. I am simply going to pick out one key point here. It hinges upon the fact that Philo ‘inhabited overlapping worlds’ rather as we do now (page 194):

Ethnically  and religiously he was a Jew. Politically, he lived in the Roman Empire. Intellectually and socially, his world was Greek.

Maintaining his status as a member of a rich and influential family he needed to stay on good terms with many powerful people from many different backgrounds.  He was devoutly religious so repudiating his monotheism was not an option even though Roman leaders thought of themselves as divine (page 195).

He had to preserve the viability of his Jewish world – and the integrity of his Jewish faith – even amid the Greek, Roman and Egyptian worlds.

In the end (page 196):

Intolerance, he saw, would breed intolerance, and the result could be lose-lose. However false pagan gods may be, those who believe in them “are not peaceful toward or reconciled with those who do not gladly accept their opinion, and this is the beginning and origin of wars.” And, after all, “to us the Law [the Torah] has described the source of peace as a beautiful possession.”

He was astute enough to survive an encounter with the reputedly callous and sadistic Caligula (page 196).

While this does not do much either to make a completely convincing argument for the objective reality of monotheism, it does illustrate that an advance in a civilisation’s complexity seems to go hand in hand with a moral advance in our ideas of God. What was arguably true then is even more true now.

Would it then be too ridiculous to extrapolate from that, by analogy with the way that physical evolution, over long periods of time, equips organisms to respond more effectively to the objective environment and increase their chances of survival? Is it stretching things too far to say that advances in social complexity similarly enforce advances in moral understanding and that these are conducive to survival because our understanding then captures more accurately some superordinate reality?   Central to this moral understanding there could well be a concept of a single underlying power in the universe that turns out objectively to be the best approximation currently available to describe what is out there, and perhaps within us too.

There is much in Baha’i scripture that maps onto this – progressive revelation for example which teaches that this Being we call God, whose true nature we will never fully understand, speaks to us through people more able than the rest of us to access this deeper reality and what they can say becomes a fuller explanation of the truth as our capacity to understand develops over long spans of time. It is important to note that a full understanding of the nature of God is forever beyond us: this, of course, implies that a successful attack on some description or other of ‘God’ will never amount to a disproof of the objective existence of such a Being.

To be fair the most we can say, on the basis of reason alone, is that belief in either the existence or non-existence of God is equally rational.

Electromagnetic Brain Stimulation

It is also worth pointing out, though, that it is going beyond the evidence to declare that simply because the brain has simulated a belief or experience it must be utterly false. The brain is the physical substrate of all our experiences and thereby underpins all our beliefs, rather as a radio is the means by which we experience the programmes transmitted in the form of waves, but that does not make these experiences baseless.

There is something out there corresponding to our experience of blue even though it is not ‘blue,’ it is simply a wavelength of light. Similarly there may well be something out there corresponding to God, though such an entity is unlikely to be literally and simply the bright white light of some near death and mystical experiences.

And just as our ability to create the experience of blue by stimulating the brain with electrodes does not take away the reality of that wavelength of light, so our ability to create a sense of the divine by stimulating the ‘God spot’ with electromagnets similarly fails to prove there is nothing divine out there.

If Stavrakopoulou’s aim is irreversibly to undermine the construct of monotheism it is unlikely to be achieved by simply finding flaws in people’s ideas about God. In fact, the concept is inherently beyond proof or disproof in rational terms. It is a question of faith, and disbelief is as much an act of faith as theism. That’s a trap in reality from which there’s no escape, no matter how desperate reductionists of all kinds are to have us believe otherwise. We must choose what we believe: there is nothing there outside our minds that will compel us to believe one thing rather than the other on this issue. It is, though, imperative that we make this choice wisely. I have to leave it to you to decide what wisdom is in this case.

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Swallowing Tablets of Stone

Humourists know that the best jokes are mined from the most serious topics. Morality is no exception.

Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”

(From Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar: page 78)

Nobody likes taking tablets at the best of times so who’s going to take kindly to swallowing tablets of stone, especially when they taste so bitter to so many palates? After all, when was the last time a great religion told us to covet our neighbour’s wife?

The humour lies partly in drawing our attention to the conflict between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ that Susan Neiman discusses so perceptively.  What we should do is so often in conflict with what we would like to do yet we know we ought to like doing what we should: we just can’t seem to get to that point somehow. Commandments are forever over-riding instincts that refuse to go away.

Part of the reason for this is that we have evolved to think in the short term and be unduly influenced by concrete specifics in the here and now, including the stories people tell us as well as what we experience ourselves. We’re particularly poor with probabilities (Dan Gardner‘s book, Risk, deals with this brilliantly so I won’t go into that here).

Let’s focus on consequences and time scales. Smoking provides an easy way to illustrate this. The table gives a few pointers in each box just as examples. If I’m a smoker, the short-term costs are virtually invisible: I enjoy my addiction so it doesn’t feel like a cost and buying cigarettes looks like choosing to dispose of my income as I feel like.  The habit tastes sweet for the benefits it brings which I value greatly and are very obvious to me. The distant disasters my present pleasure could well bring seem very remote and unlikely to my primate brain. So I show a callous lack of empathy for my future self whose suffering I don’t trouble myself to imagine. After all, things like that don’t happen to me.

And if that wasn’t enough to make sure that I’ll carry on smoking (or indulging in any other ‘vice’ you care to mention) the same examination of what quitting would feel like stacks the odds even further against giving up. The present becomes soured with discomforts of all kinds while future benefits fade into invisibility in the mists of distance. The gain in disposable income will probably weigh little in my mind compared with the horrible unsatisfied cravings alone, never mind the weight gain and the social costs.

In short, the long-term costs of continuing to smoke and the long-term benefits of quitting have far less impact on behaviour than the short-term costs of stopping and the immediate pleasures of continuing the  habit. And this is true for almost any insistent pattern of behaviour you care to name including those which are morally loaded. Virtue goes against the grain of our animal nature in similar ways.

We are though animals with some very special powers, rational thought being one of the most obvious – well, perhaps not obvious all the time. So, we shouldn’t give up on the idea of giving up our bad habits, as Neiman explains:

You think that what failed in the past will fail in the future?  Kant reminds us of how many sheer technological advances have disproved this old saw. . . . . If we don’t abandon efforts where science hopes we may create technology, how dare we abandon them where morality demands we create justice? . . . Of course ideas of reason conflict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas are meant to do. Ideals are not measured by whether they confirm reality: reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. (Her emphasis.)

(Moral Clarity: page 153)

However, she does not underestimate the difficulty of acting on this realisation.

If you tell yourself that a world without injustice is a childish wish-fantasy, you have no obligation to work toward it. . . . Keeping ideals alive is much harder than dismissing them, for it guarantees a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Ideas are like horizons – goals toward which you can move but never actually attain. . . . . The abyss that separates is from ought is too deep to bridge entirely; the most we can hope to do is narrow it.

(pages 159-162)

And that can seem like a bad bargain — too much immediate discomfort for too little immediate gain once more. However, reason may not be as feeble and error prone as we sometimes think and there may be more at work in the world to push towards virtue than is immediately  obvious. Even if we are not convinced there is a God or that we have a soul that survives death, the way the world works should give us pause for thought.

Philo of Alexandria

Robert Wright‘s perceptive analysis, of how morality is essential (and perhaps inevitable) if civilisation is to progress and chaos to be avoided, deserves close attention from both the materially and the spiritually minded, as Neiman’s does also in its different way. It begins to tip the balance against the inertia of bad habits and hints that there is more to life than matter.

The same thread of thinking runs through the whole of his book, The Evolution of God, so a small sample of his argument will have to suffice. One of the most charming facets of this argument, that morality is a social cement that we ignore for long only at the risk of chaos, comes in his discussion of Philo of Alexandria.

The order at work [in the world] is the Logos, and it came originally from God. He set up the world so that mere self-interested learning – the study of cause and effect, and preference for happy effects  – would steer people towards virtue. So when Proverbs reports that ‘whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on the one who starts it rolling,’ we can think of God not as pushing people into pits and pushing stones back on people, but as the one who designed the social ‘gravity’  that brings these effects.

(page 227)

Virtue seems painful, if you accept this line of reasoning, only to those who do not understand its value. The difficult task for education and parenting is to enable developing minds to defer immediate gratification long enough to secure the benefits of self-restraint — benefits that accrue both to the individual and to society. I will return to that issue in a future post, drawing amongst other things on some useful recent material, while recognising that this delay might not help any of us deal with present temptations.

A last thought for now.

Perhaps this perspective, if they would only pause to consider it carefully, would help those who kick against moral constraints, whatever their origin, to understand the words of Bahá’u'lláh when He explains:

3. O ye peoples of the world! Know assuredly that My commandments are the lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of My mercy for My creatures. Thus hath it been sent down from the heaven of the Will of your Lord, the Lord of Revelation. Were any man to taste the sweetness of the words which the lips of the All-Merciful have willed to utter, he would, though the treasures of the earth be in his possession, renounce them one and all, that he might vindicate the truth of even one of His commandments, shining above the Dayspring of His bountiful care and loving-kindness. . . .

5. Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere code of laws. Nay, rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of might and power. To this beareth witness that which the Pen of Revelation hath revealed. Meditate upon this, O men of insight!

(Kitáb-i-Aqdas)

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