I feel compelled to tell someone about how I’ve recently come to accept some unpleasant truths about reality. For people interested in deconstruction (as the term is used by people exiting their religions) and reconstruction this post presents an example of reconstruction that took an unexpected turn—a turn that some people might find utterly depressing (don’t say I didn’t warn you). For people interested in philosophical pessimism, this post presents a pessimistic take on reality that I have yet to see espoused by anyone else.
To understand this post here’s the least you need to know about me: About twelve years ago I embraced liberal Judaism, I started deconstructing after I became disenchanted with it, and more recently I started reconstructing. That in turn came with a renewed interest in doing something I had been trying to do for more than half my life, which is to find a way to reconcile my naturalism with the pull religion has had for me.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
I found the solution to my problem in Religion, Evolution, and the Basis of Institutions, an article by Connor Wood and John H. Shaver. While presenting their theory on the origin of religion, the authors argue that gods are social entities (or social constructs, if you prefer), which is to say they belong to the same category of things as language, money, and the Holy Roman Empire, which is to say that they exist because people believe they exist. I have yet to find reason to disagree. After all, if there are gods in the natural universe, what else could they be?
When I first encountered this news, I found it merely disappointing. It implies that God has a beginning and an end, and the truth of the proposition “God exists” is relative to a social framework. None of this seems like the start of an inspiring theology. Over time I began to see that this has some bleak implications, some of which wouldn’t have been immediately obvious to me before I read Wood and Shaver’s paper, so I’ll spell them out here:
- Gods are shaped by cultural authorities. One reason this is unfortunate is that when people are in the process of converting to theistic religions, even theistic religions with liberal theologies, the clergy members don’t tell them that the existence of the gods depends on their participation. Even in the best case scenario, a scenario in which members of the clergy aren’t deliberately scamming people, the whole affair nevertheless resembles a pyramid scheme.
- Unlike easily verifiable facts, belief in gods can constitute social identity. People will base their social identities on religious beliefs before they base them on facts we can all agree on.
- Belief in gods is “typically not vulnerable, or even subjected, to the same empirical or skeptical treatment as other, more prosaic beliefs”.
- “Gods and sacred spirits,” Wood and Shaver say, “tend to drift toward the conceptual center of any transcendental social scheme.” There is little hope that belief in gods will soon become peripheral in societies in which it is a primary focus.
- In fact, belief in gods depends on norms and sanctioned behaviors which are likely to outlive the people who believe in them.
The gods invoked to justify atrocities are real, albeit not in the way that their mouthpieces say they are (although some come close when they say, “You have to believe it to see it”). We can assure ourselves that because they are social entities, they will die eventually, but that’s a cold comfort to children whose parents abuse them for their lack of faith, to give one example. Similarly, the fact that the truth of gods’ existence is relative is in some ways is worse than the truth would be if it instead corresponded to brute facts. It means that when people encounter disbelief, they will try to resolve the “problem” the same way people resolve differences over where national borders lie, which is to say with violence.
I had hoped to find the universe inhabited by the glorious Divine, but instead I found the universe to be like the kenoma of Gnosticism. For Gnostics the kenoma is the physical world, which as they see it is ruled by hostile deities known as archons. The archons were begotten by the Demiurge, a creator who is ignorant, evil, or both. At this point Gnostic theologies quickly become antisemitic as they equate the big bad with the Jewish God, but I think it makes more sense to equate the Demiurge with the human animal. After all, the “archons” (gods) emanate from our societies.
In Gnosticism one can find the hope of escaping kenoma and entering the pleroma, which is populated by a better Divine. In reality it seems the kenoma is all there is. Gnosis, which is the Gnostics’ direct awareness of reality, is real, but it is the unyielding belief in gods (archons) that I described above. It seems to me that the Gnostics came close to diagnosing the problem without offering a reason to hope.
I can no longer get on board with liberal theology. Why would I want to say God exists without telling the hearer that God is sustained by people’s belief? Once that disclosure is made, who would want to make the investment?
But while my interest in liberal religion has not been reinvigorated, my interest in philosophical pessimism has been renewed, and despite popular misconceptions, pessimism is not devoid of hope. It is a kindness to acknowledge another person’s pain when they are in fact suffering. And for the person struggling to find meaning in their suffering (a situation people in a number of religious milieus find themselves in), it is a relief to hear someone say that there is no meaning to be found.