MEIN G. S. COETSIER is the director of the Centre of Eric Voegelin Studies (www.evs.ugent.be) and the author of Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voeglinian Analysis. He wrote an article on Etty Hillseum in the Summer 2008 issue.
Life in the twenty-first century is easier
said than done. One of the main
postmodern tribulations to be dealt with
is the unrest of the “God confusion.” The
variety of personal experiences, understandings,
and symbolizations of divine
reality in the contemporary world—or
the lack of them—has created worldwide
religious tension. The intellectually disordered
language symbols, as pointed out
by Eric Voegelin, have bewildered our
modern world over the last epoch with
confused images of “God” and religious
terrorism. Till now, the various human
weaknesses that we have encountered in
the crisis have not battered our need for
divine reality, but they have afflicted many
of us with disappointment and anger about
religion and fierce doubts about God’s
existence. “God” is said. “God” is argued.
“God” is lost. According to the philosopher
Martin Buber, the crisis of deformed
existence has entangled the human heart
in an estrangement from God and human
beings.1 Voegelin formulated this kind of
breakdown as follows:
[T]he deculturation of the West is
an historical phenomenon extending
over centuries; the grotesque rubble
into which the image of God is broken
today is not somebody’s wrong
opinion about the nature of man
but the result of a secular process of
destruction.2
Voegelin is calling for a radical conversion
to transcendent order3 by turning to what
he terms “the fl ow of presence.”4 The deepest
reason for attuning to the Presence does
not lie in the weakness of our irrationality
but in the possibility of recovering a spiritual
understanding of what gives meaning
to our lives. Our personal reorientation
to the divine is the first step in bringing
an elementary recognition of transcendent
reality to our whole civilization. In
a culture of an ever-growing information
overload, amidst a global economic crisis,
it is not easy to maintain our integrity,
faith, and morals. In the midst of this climate
of confusion, someone like Voegelin
can encourage us to find an orientation
towards the divine which is a little more
palatable and hopeful. The divine inspi
ration present in his life and works might
seep through as we search for meaning and
clarity in a very complex time.
The God Delusion
The current war on religion is marked by
a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn
for religion and those who believe. Richard
Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) contends
that a supernatural creator almost certainly
does not exist. Belief in a god qualifies as a
delusion, and faith in “God” is a persistent
false belief held in the face of strong contradictory
evidence. Dawkins is hostile to
all religions, in particular to “fundamentalist”
Christianity and Islam.5 He maintains
that religion closes people’s minds to scientific truth, oppresses women, and psychologically
abuses children with ideas such as
“eternal damnation.” His rhetoric is fierce:
the biblical Yahweh is “psychotic,”6 “an evil
monster”;7 Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence
are “exposed as vacuous,”8 and religion
generally is “nonsense.” He affirms:
“I am not attacking any particular version
of God or gods. I am attacking God, all
gods, anything and everything supernatural,
wherever and whenever they have been
or will be invented.”9
Although he rarely calms down in tone,
Dawkins constructs a scientific scaffolding
for atheism. He draws on evolution
to refute the concept of intelligent design
and to prove that morality does not rely
on belief in God. Religion is a divisive
and oppressive force, Dawkins maintains:
“When one person suffers from a delusion
it is called insanity. When many
people suffer from a delusion it is called
religion.”10 The God Delusion marks a significant moment in modern history, not so
much because of its scientific contribution,
wit, or argument, but for its representation
of an intellectual breakdown in which
modern man consciously cuts himself off
from the divine presence, from “God.”
Dawkins is persistently derisive: “I have
found it an amusing strategy, when asked
whether I am an atheist, to point out that
the questioner is also an atheist when considering
Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras,
Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and
the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one
god further.”11
By an act of imagination, to “just go
one god further,” man can shrink himself
to a delusional self that is “condemned to
be free.” To this shrunken or contracted
self, God is dead or non-existent; the past
is dead; the present is the flight from the
self toward being what it is not. The future
is the field of possibilities among which
the self must choose its project. Moreover,
freedom is the necessity of making a choice
in a universe without God that will determine
the self ‘s own being.12 Dawkins’s
choice against God is a self-sufficiency
project called “atheist pride.” The freedom
of the contracted self, in Voegelin’s terms,
is the self ‘s damnation not to be able not
to be free. The God Delusion represents
sustained and often hostile attacks on religious
institutions and religious belief by a
man who seems to have lost awareness of
the divine ground.
Voegelin has explained how with modern
man, a specific balanced network of
ideas and symbols has arisen. Since reason
produces ideas, within the differentiated
experience, we have a new situation. This
new factor that appears when consciousness
becomes differentiated is, on the one hand,
the possibility of constructing and, on the
other hand, the possibility, as in Dawkins’s
case, of misconstructing. It is this misconstruction
of “scientific anti-God-ideas”
in the modern period exemplified by
Dawkins’s second chapter that we can put
under the title “The Revolt of Man”:
The God of the Old Testament is
arguably the most unpleasant charac
ter in all fiction: jealous and proud
of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving
control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty
ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic,
capriciously malevolent bully.13
Dawkins obviously intends to shock the
reader, and his assault seems productive.
By attacking the God of Sacred Scripture,
he is trying to weaken traditional values
and authority, which are based on God’s
commands—commands whose interpretation,
in Dawkins’s mind, has only led
humanity to a shameful history of inquisitions,
crusades, and jihads. The danger of
The God Delusion is that reflections such
as these, not kept in proper balance, can
cause serious problems. Imbalanced and
often hostile constructions, characteristic
of the revolt, can cause the breakdown of
religious, political, and intellectual institutions.
Atheistic constructions can create
a general problem of “spiritual illiteracy”
and precipitate a disharmony within society.
Voegelin believes that in order to
keep society in balance, we have to keep
that intellectual structure in order. So,
if a whole body of ideas like philosophy,
theology and religion should be rejected
or distorted, then inevitably the misconstructions
creep in. Nevertheless, one has
to bear in mind that the search for gods or
God and the construction of symbolism,
which includes the divine and insists on
God, are to be found long before classical
philosophy.
Atheist Pride
Dawkins reveals that although he was
raised as an Anglican, he discovered Darwinian
evolution at the age of fifteen and
escaped from traditional religion to atheism.
The underlying premise of his message
is that the existence of a supernatural
God who designed and created everything
including human beings is indefensible.
From his perspective, atheists are independent
thinkers, and believers in a supernatural
God are simply victims of childhood
indoctrination. His kindest thought
for the “deluded” is that ignorance is not
a crime. In rejecting “God” or the intelligence
that created the universe, he calls
for a twenty-first century “atheist pride.”14
His primary purpose is to assist others in
their rejection of “the God Hypothesis”:
“If this book works as I intend, religious
readers who open it will be atheists when
they put it down.”15 The marketing “to get
rid of God” is well done.16 Dawkins puts
his imagination to work and surrounds his
imaginary “atheistic self” with an imaginary
reality (expressed in various forms:
books, film, DVD, tee-shirts, stickers, lapel
pins, and so forth) apt to con firm himself
in his “scientific” pretense of reality.
When one rocks the boat as hard as
Dawkins, things are set in motion and start
to sway. In The God Delusion Dawkins creates
a Second Real ity, an atheistic worldview,
in order to screen the First Reality
(Voegelin: God, man, society, and
the world) of common experience from
a so-called “scientific viewpoint.” Consequently,
the frictions, far from being
removed, have grown into a general conflict between the world of his imagination
(“atheistic pride”) in a universe without
God and the real world in which God’s
presence is acknowledged. In “The Eclipse
of Reality,” Voegelin writes:
This conflict can be traced from the
discrepancy of contents between
realities imagined and experienced,
through the act of projecting an
imaginary reality, to the man who
indulges in the act. First, on the level
of contents, a reality projected by
imagination may deform or omit certain
areas of reality experienced; reality
projected, we may say, obscures
or eclipses First Reality. Ascending
from contents to the act, then, one
can discern a man’s intention to
eclipse reality. This intention can
become manifest in a large vari ety of
forms, ranging from the straight lie
concerning a fact to the subtler lie of
arranging a context in such a manner
that the omis sion of the fact will not
be noticed; or from the construction
of a system that, by its form, suggests
its partial view as the whole of reality
to its author’s refusal to discuss the
premises of the system in terms of
reality experienced. Beyond the act,
finally, we reach the actor, that is the
man who has committed the act of
deforming his humanity to a self and
now lets the shrunken self eclipse his
own full reality.17
Under a veil of skepticism and wit,
Dawkins tends to deny his humanity and
insist he is nothing but his shrunken atheist
self—to deny ever having experienced
common reality. He denies that anybody
could have a fuller scientific perception of
reality than he allows himself. In brief, in
The God Delusion, Dawkins sets the contracted
atheist self as a model for himself
as well as for every body else. Moreover,
his insistence on atheist conformity in
rejecting God is carried on by intellectual
aggres sion—and this aggressiveness
betrays in itself the anxiety and alienation
of the man who has lost contact with reality.
The God Delusion has grown into a social
force of such strength that its conflict with
reality forms a substantial part of global
atheism in our time. The man with a radically
contracted atheist self is as much of a
power in society and history as an ordinary
man, and as in Dawkins’s case, sometimes a
stronger one. The conflict of The God Delusion
with re ality turns out to be a disturbance
within reality. When the human heart
is steered by emotive arguments and media
sensation, be it politically, religiously, or
ideologically, conflicts arise causing waves
of misunderstanding. A careful discernment
of human experience, reality, and “God” is
called for. Voegelin explains:
The multiple meanings of reality are
not caused by loose usage of the term,
but reflect the structure of reality
itself. To be conscious of something
is an experiential process polarized
by the cognitive tension between the
knower and the known . . . . The
con sciousness of reality becomes a
process within reality.18
What Voegelin means is that there is a
possibility of eclipse, a risk of distortion in
the process. The pole of the known, in our
experience and reflection, is “God.” The
pole of the knower is the human carrier of
cognition, you and I, who also create the
symbols that refer to the known, “God.”
When we turn toward the experiential
process and the cognitive tension as a
whole, the process will become the something
we acknowledge as real. This process,
however, between the knower and
the known, as in Dawkins’s case, can be
twisted. Is Dawkins out of touch? Is God
a delusion? No, God is real! You and I are
real! These are the facts, the two realities
in one overall experiential process in reality.
How can it happen then that one of
those two poles is denied? By refusing to
mention either the “human pole” or to
accept the “God pole” of the experiential
tension, one refuses or eclipses reality and
creates a disturbance in the process, which
in itself can lead to a revolt against reality
Evolution as Revolt
Dawkins had argued against creationist
explanations of life in his previous
works on evolution. The Blind Watchmaker
(1986)19 develops the theme that evolution
can explain the apparent design in nature.
In The God Delusion he expands his argument
against the existence of God, yet
he is less convincing in arguing that the
world would be better and more peaceful
without religion. The “evolution card”
played by Dawkins is the “scientific justification” by which he believes he can
wipe God from the map of global consciousness.
We could formulate the predicament
of The God Delusion as follows:
if one posits the world (or science) as an
absolute, then man necessarily becomes a
function of the world, and consequently,
God becomes a function of man. In other
words, with the world as an absolute, everything
comes from the world and God
is created (explained, denied, banned, or
even killed) by man.
It is not that science really can disprove
God’s existence, but it is rather Dawkins’s
misconstruction of reality that degrades
God to the level of delusion. Instead of the
original reality, in The God Delusion we
have one part of that reality (the world,
science) made by Dawkins into an absolute
and so all other parts of reality must be
constructed as a function of that one absolute
so-called “scientific reality” or “atheist
pride,” which is in fact only a small part
of reality. According to Voegelin, reality,
which includes God’s presence, continues
to exist as before. If one insists that one
part of that reality is “the scientific” or
“the atheistic” reality (the absolute), then
one must do something about the rest of
reality—that is, kill or claim God as nonexistent—
which one no longer credits with
being reality; one then has to construct it
as “dependent.” For this construction as a
dependent, Voegelin uses the term “function.”
The God Delusion represents certain
favorite constructions for expressing such a
functional characteristic.
The first chapter of The God Delusion
introduces the aim of Dawkins’s project:
to disarm (naïve) theistic belief in a personal
God. The main thrust of Dawkins’s
work in general is that science deserves
respect (which it does not get), whereas
religion deserves little or no respect
(which it receives). In his new construction
of reality, he advocates an alternative
view:
I am not attack ing the particular qualities
of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or
any other specific god such as Baal,
Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define
the God Hypothesis more defensibly:
there exists a super human, supernatural
intelligence who deliberately designed and
created the universe and everything in it,
including us. This book will advocate
an alternative view: any creative intelligence,
of sufficient complexity to design
anything, comes into existence only as the
end product of an extended process of gradual
evolution. Creative intelligences,
being evolved, necessarily arrive late
in the universe, and therefore cannot
be responsible for designing it.
God, in the sense defined, is a delusion;
and, as later chapters will show,
a pernicious delusion.20
Following Dawkins, it is acceptable to
believe that there might well be other
beings of superior intelligence out there in
the cosmos—as long as they are not God.
For him, it is acceptable to use terms like
spirituality (which are vague enough to be useful
in proclaiming “atheist pride”) to describe the
awe-inspiring feeling that overcomes man
when he considers the beauty of the universe,
as long as he doesn’t symbolize it as
“God.” In Dawkins’s theory, it is tolerable
to have faith in physicists to solve the questions
of how everything came into existence—
as they just need more time—but
to say that God gives them the intelligence
and life to do so is unacceptable.
In response to Dawkins and other evolutionists,
Voegelin would point to the role
that the theory of evolution has assumed in
this erection of man into a function of the
world. The theory of evolution, not as a
scientific theory but in its broader ideological
sense, reduces man to the outgrowth
of natural evolution. In Voegelin’s perspective,
one cannot reduce man to a process
of natural evolution, beginning from
inorganic processes and culminating, after
a chain of organic development, in man.
Man, for Voegelin, is more than a function
of nature; man is not a “last product” so
to speak.
Voegelin explains that almost a century
before the theory of evolution was formulated
in the Darwinian form, people were
already talking about the problem of evolution.
It was much discussed shortly before
1750. For Voegelin, Kant gave in his Critique
of Judgment the reason why a theory
of evolution cannot serve the purposes for
which it was already being used: to make
man a function of nature and of this world.
For if one puts man as the last item in a
chain of evolution, one can then trace him
back through life in its simplest forms to
inorganic matter, even to subatomic particles.
That is, one does not have a beginning
of man: one cannot explain man by
arbitrarily putting a beginning somewhere
within that chain.
According to Voegelin, if one takes evolution
seriously, one has to go back further
into the vegetative and into the inorganic
part, and then one arrives at the question of
the matrix of a matter that contains all this
evolution as potentiality. Voegelin insists
on continuing the questioning: Where
does that matter come from? Who devised
it and who endowed it with that evolutionary
force that let it culminate, in the end,
in man? How can one explain all this? So,
no tracing back to an imaginary beginning
gets us around the question that there is no
beginning in time, but the beginning in
Voegelin’s line of thought is always a mythical
or metaphysical problem. He refers to
the famous question of Leibniz: “Why is
there something; why not nothing?” and
“Why is that something as it is?” And that
is then at the beginning. Although Voegelin
does not have any prejudice against the
empirical content of scientific observation
concerning evolution, he thinks that a theory
of evolution does not fully furnish an
explanation of man; it only shoves it back
to an imaginary beginning.
Explanations that see man as a function
of nature on the basis of a theory of evolution
always rest, Voegelin argues, on the
assumption that there is nobody present in
the audience who will ask questions such
as Kant’s. Finally, Voegelin would say that
only when the premises go unquestioned
can the argument of evolution work. He
refers to the problem of illiteracy and mentions
that many theories can be developed,
like a theory of evolution, because many
people do not feel the need to ask such
questions in the first place.21 It is the task
of the philosopher to do so.
God vs. Superman
The ideological misconstructions of reality
whereby God becomes a function of
man are not only found in The God Delusion,
but also in Feuerbach’s “Psychology
of Projection.”22 All religious ideas, as well
as the idea of God, were interpreted by
Feuerbach as projections of the contents
of the human mind. This psychology of
projection is a widely accepted part of the
science of psychology today, especially in
its psychoanalytic form, with its development
into a psychology of religion as an
illusion. Equally, Dawkins’s The God Delusion
suggests, with an increasing number
of biologists, that religion is a byproduct of
something else.23 He comments that an
evolutionary explanation of religious belief
need not postulate an evolutionary benefit
for religion itself. “I am one of an increasing
number of biologists who see religion
as a byproduct of something else,” he writes.
“More generally, I believe that we who
speculate about Darwinian survival value
need to ‘think byproduct.’ When we ask
about the survival value of anything, we
may be asking the wrong question.”24 The
reductionist psychological misinterpretation
by which Dawkins disparages religious
ideas is the vehicle by which God is
transformed into a function of the human
psyche. The center of all language symbols
used in the experience of (psychological/
“scientific”) revolt is the transformation
of human power over nature into human
power of salvation. When the transcendent
God is made into an immanent function
of Man, cutting off the divine pole of the
tension, one could simply speak of “murder.”
The murder of God is committed
speculatively by explaining divine being
as the work of man.25 For Voegelin, turning
away from the mystery of the ground
(arche) towards what Nietzsche calls “the
human conceivable” is a disturbance in the
balance of human consciousness.26
Where Feuerbach still left the matter at
the level of the psychology of projections,
Marx and Nietzsche more consistently
said: “Why should we project? Let us pull
these projections back into ourselves from
where they started.” In Voegelin’s reflection
that means: let us pull the divinity
back into our humanity, and thereby we
will become gods or, if not gods, at least
supermen. For Voegelin the substance of
history, however, is not something that
human beings are able to know, possess, or
control. It is rather encountered participatively
on the level of experience and on its
adequate symbolization, not on the level of
ideas. The Marxian transfiguration of man
into Superman is a further radicalization
of an earlier medieval derailment which
drew the spirit of God into man, while
leaving God himself in his transcendence.
In other words, man draws his projection
within himself when he imagines that he
himself is God, when as a consequence
man is transfigured into Superman. Thus
the word “Superman”27 was used by Marx
to designate the man who has pulled
the projection of God back into himself.
Nietzsche28 used the same term Superman
for practically the same purpose. For
Voegelin this vividly illustrates the revolt
of man as a revolt against God. When God
is pulled back into man, and the self-divinized
man becomes the center of all problems,
something has gone wrong.29
Man cannot and does not live without
accounting for himself in terms of a
ground. When the ground, which is the
transcendent ground, has been imaginatively
eclipsed, it must be replaced by a substitute,
world-immanent pseudo-ground
of being. For Voegelin, man is in revolt,
and there is no real direction towards the
transcendent because he cuts himself off,
he expresses himself through the invention
of substitute grounds (e.g. “science,” “atheist
pride”), instead of the ground of being.
Voegelin is radical in this regard: for him
all of the ideologies (as substitute grounds)
are theoretically, that is to say, as “science,”
wrong. Voegelin believes it to be the task
of the philosopher to unveil such substitute
grounds and to inspire the search for and
the attunement to the Ground of all being:
God.30
Deformed Language
To broaden the understanding of the eclipse
of God, the revolt of man, and Superman’s
control over the “God-reality,” we have to
confront the deformed language symbols
that are part of the unrest we experience
at present. Voegelin describes how questions
and answers pertaining to the “God
crisis” are held together, and related to one
an other, by the event of the search. He
explains that by nature we are truly questioners.
The calamity we face, however,
occurs when we deform our humanity by
refusing to ask the questions or by loading
them with premises devised to make
the search impossible. Truth, to be heard,
requires ears that can hear; philosophy is
not the life of reason if the questioner’s reason
is depraved. The answer will not help
the man who has lost the question, and the
predicament of the present age is characterized
by the loss of the question rather
than of the answer. With a Socratic nature
we might be able to recover the question
lost to consciousness. We must confront the
contemporary challenge by recovering the
question to which, in Hellenistic-Roman
culture, the philosopher could understand
divine reality—God—as the answer.31
In chapter eight, Dawkins writes: “As
a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist
religion because it actively debauches
the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not
to change our minds, and not to want to
know exciting things that are available to
be known. It subverts science and saps the
intellect.”32 In other words, the greatest
crime of “fundamentalist” religion is to
think without asking scientific questions.
To become angry in our situation is
understandable, but too easy. What is difficult is to be angry with the right person or
group—should we be angry with all religious
fundamentalists?—and to the right
degree, and at the right time, and for the
right purpose, and in the right way. Yet,
one could argue if becoming angry at all
would make any sense, as we are fighting
here over a deformed language symbol
that has lost its contact with reality. In the
end it is not the word “God” that makes us
angry, but the helplessness and alienation
of the situation we are in.
In Voegelin’s essay, “Immortality:
Experience and Symbol,” he writes that
the symbols in the sense of a spoken or
written word are left as traces in the
world of sense perception. Their meaning,
according to Voegelin, can be understood
only if they evoke, and through evocation
reconstitute, the engendering reality
in the listener or reader. What people
tend to forget nowadays, is that the symbol
“God,” for instance, exists in the world,
but its truth belongs to the transcendent
(or “nonexistent”) divine-human experience
which by this means articulates itself.
This intangibility of the experience of the
divine renders the symbol “God” and its
truth vulnerable to the ups and downs of
history. Because the originating experience
of divine reality, as in the present crisis,
can fade away, even the most adequate
interpretation of an experience of “God”
can achieve no more than words that are
the external shell of an original complete
reality containing both the experience
and its articulation. As soon, however, as
the symbol “God” has separated from this
fullness and acquired the status of a literary
account or religious dogma, the tension
between an engendering experience
of divine reality, and the symbol “God”
engendered, is liable to separate into a piece
of cold information and its dogmatic subjectmatter. There is no guarantee that the
reader of this account in the present God
confusion will be moved to a meditative
reconstitution of the engendering experienced
God-reality; one may even say the
chances today are slim, since “God” is
seen as “Delusion,” and honest meditation
requires more energy and discipline than
most people are able to invest.
Still, the tension we experience, as
revealed in the emotional responses to The
God Delusion, shows that we cannot do
without the truth conveyed by “God” as
one of the key symbols. So the pressure on
us is great to restate the original account
of “God,” interpreting the key experiences
as a set of simple propositions, rendering
what each person or translator considers its
essential meaning. If submitted to such proceedings,
the truth of “God,” the account
of the experience of divine presence, will
take the form of doctrine, as do the propositions,
“man is immortal” or “the soul is
immortal,” or else, in Dawkins’s case, “man
is a product of an extended process of evolution.”
33 In themselves, such statements
are fine, but Voegelin saw that doctrinal
propositions of this kind are liable to give
rise to various kinds of experience, such as
uncritical acceptance of “Science,” “God,”
or even more deficient (scientific) modes
of understanding who or what “God”
is. What Voegelin tries to explain is that
no matter what doctrine you hold—be it
philosophical, religious, or a “Dawkinsian
doctrine” of scientific atheism—each may
be in danger of the same thing, namely,
that it can lose the connection to what it
represents.
The transformation of “God” into religious
doctrine or the alteration of Darwin’s
evolution theory into (Dawkins’s) atheistic
doctrine is not the last hammering
that truth can suffer. When “Science” or
“God” assumes social prevalence as doctrinal
truth, even the facts of the process
by which religious or scientific doctrine
derives from the original account, and
the original account from the engendering
experience, may get lost. Seeing that
the symbol “God,” as in our contemporary
world, may altogether cease to be transparent
for divine reality, equally the term
“Science” can be deformed into nothing
more than delusional consumerism.
“God,” as in Dawkins’s case, will be misunderstood
as a figment of the imagination,
a proposition referring to “a thing”
in the manner of a proposition concerning
an object of sense-perception; and so
the delusional “It,” which for Dawkins has
neither relationality nor supernatural reality,
will provoke the reaction of skepticism
and ridicule. The scale of “God-mockery”
devolves from a suspension of judgment,
to vulgar agnosticism and atheism, and
further on to the smart idiot questions of
“How do you know there is a God?” and
“How can you prove God exists?” that
every college religious teacher knows from
his classroom.
Intellectual Cul-de-sac
Voegelin has anticipated the way in which
a writer like Dawkins falls into an intellectual
cul-de-sac. The point that he tries
to make is that the sequence of originating
experience of divine reality and expression
in the symbol “God” is followed by
summarizing accounts in the form of religious
doctrine, which in turn can lead, as
in the modern crisis, to the degradation
of “God.” In bland restatement at verbal
level, “God” provokes ferocious skeptical
reactions. The experience of God in terms
of Biblical I AM-meetings and in expressions
of attunement to life has disappeared.
What we often fail to acknowledge is that
no matter how often expla nations of and
doctrinal claims about God are defended,
attacked, or revised by both theists and
atheists, the real world refuses to be confined within the limits of such systems.
The attempt of the monotheistic religions
to act on such a doctrinal basis has repeatedly
led to the most bitterly disappointing
results. Dawkins does have a point in The
God Delusion concerning the disastrous
effects of religion but seems unaware that
he is fighting his battle for atheism over
deformed “God symbols,” which do not
say anything about the actual “God-reality
itself.” Dawkins has, to put it mildly, a
strong, uncompromising view on who or
what “God” is. Voegelin would reply that
the phenomena of an original account of
God’s reality, its development into a doctrinal
exposition—leading to what Romanian
anthropologist Mircea Eliade called
“the degradation of symbols”—and a skeptical
argument, such as Dawkins’s repudiation
of God, constitute a not unfamiliar
sequence. This series can attach itself to
every experience of nonexistent (that is,
transcendent) reality when it becomes
articulate and, through its symbols, enters
society as an ordering force. Skeptical reactions
to “God” and to deformed symbols,
in other words, are not new or particular
to our time. What a Dawkins forgets is
that in some instances, when the sequence
attaches itself to the great ordering experiences
of philosophy and Christian faith,
it is discernible as a structure in historical
processes of infinite complexity. A recollection
of divine experience, rather than a
blunt reaction, even if it can be no more
than the barest hint of these wide-arched
courses, will be of help in determining not
only our own position in them but the very
sense we can make of an inquiry concerning
“God” today.34 Or in Buber’s striking
statement: “We cannot cleanse the word
‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but,
defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise
it from the ground and set it over an hour
of great care.”35
NOTES
- Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor
Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958). See also Martin
Buber, Gottesfinsternis: Betrachtungen zur Beziehung
zwischen Religion und Philosophie (Zürich: Manesse Verlag,
1953). - Eric Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,”
in Jesus and Man’s Hope, Vol. 2, ed. Donald G. Miller &
Dikran Y. Hadidian (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary Press, 1971), 59–101. See also The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12: Published Essays
1966–1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 1999), 178. - Eric Voegelin, The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 31: Hitler and the
Germans, trans. & ed. Brendan Purcell & Detlev Clemens
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
1999), 51–69. Voegelin points toward the restoration
of order. For him, it is precisely the revolution of the
Spirit, what he will refer to as the Platonic periagogé,
the turning round or conversion of the soul, that he
upholds as an answer to the aversion from truth and
justice which characterised the totalitarian ideology. - Meins G. S. Coetsier, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of
Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 2008). - Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 37. - Ibid., 38.
- Ibid., 248.
- Ibid., 77.
- Ibid., 36.
- Ibid.,
5. Dawkins refers here to Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
(London: Bodley Head, 1974). - Ibid., 53.
- Eric
Voegelin, “The Eclipse of Reality,” in The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 28: What Is History? And
Other Late Unpublished Writings, trans. & ed. Thomas
A. Hollweck & Paul Caringella (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 1999), 111. - Dawkins, The
God Delusion, 31. - Ibid., 3.
- Ibid., 5.
- The Official Richard Dawkins Website: http://richarddawkins.
net/godDelusion and http://richarddawkins.net/store - Voegelin, “The Eclipse of Reality,” in What Is History?,
112. - Ibid., 113.
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind
Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
Inc., [1986] 1996). - The God Delusion, 31.
- Eric
Voegelin, The Drama of Humanity and other Miscellaneous
Papers 1939–1985, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin,
Vol. 33: The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous
Papers, 1939–1985, ed. William Petropulos & Gilbert
Weiss (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
2004), 222–23. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Judgment (esp. Kant’s first introduction), trans. Werner
S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN & Cambridge, MA:
Hackett, 1987). For further reading, see also Critique
of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis W. Beck (New York:
Liberal Arts, 1956) and Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1996). -
Voegelin, Published Essays 1966–1985, 69. See Feuerbach’s
psychology in The Essence of Christianity, where
he states that dogmatic propositions are projections of
the world-immanent consciousness of man. Voegelin
believes that Feuerbach’s psychology of projection has
remained one of the pillars of the ideologist’s creed
ever since. - The God Delusion, 172. Voegelin suggests
this kind of thinking started with the breakdown
of the German Idealist systems after Hegel, when the
question had to be asked very energetically: Where do
all these ideas come from, if one cannot explain them
in the specific Gnostic form of, for instance, an Hegelian
system that has been rejected? The psychology
of religious ideas as projections has its critical beginning
here. Of course, Voegelin is aware it has its prehistory
going back into the seventeenth century, but
he doesn’t want to go further into that. - The God
Delusion, 172. - Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of
Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5: Modernity without Restraint, Political
Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics,
and Gnosticism, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 279. - Ibid.
- On the Superman of Feuerbach and Marx, see
Henri de Lubac, Le drame de l’humanisme athée (3rd ed.,
Paris: 1945); for an English translation, The Drama of
Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley, (New York:
New American Library, 1950). See also, Eric Voegelin,
“The Formation of the Marxian Revolutionary
Idea,” Review of Politics 12, No. 3 (1950): 275–302 and
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 10: Published
Essays 1940–1952, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 2000). - Nietzsche, No.
230, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in Werke VII (Leipzig:
1903), 197–88; English translation: Beyond Good and
Evil, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: 1955), 158–59.
See also David J. Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997). - Modernity without Restraint, 279.
- Possible substitute
grounds of being: (1) the balance of economic forces,
(2) the balance of power, (3) striving for profit collectively
(a Marxist revolution), (4) the survival of the fittest
or evolution, (5) attempt to order history according
to the races and the struggle of races, (6) satisfaction of
one’s passions. For more detail see Eric Voegelin, The
Drama of Humanity, 224–34. - Eric Voegelin, Published
Essays 1966–1985, 175–76. - The God Delusion, 284.
- Ibid., 31.
- Thomas Crean, O.P., A Catholic Replies
to Richard Dawkins (Oxford: Family Publications,
2007); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London:
Bantam Press, 2006); Anthony Flew, with Roy
Abraham Varghese, There Is A God: How the World’s
Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York:
Harper One, 2007); Alister McGrath, Dawkins’s God:
Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005); Alister McGrath, with Joanna Collicutt
McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism
and the Denial of the Divine (London: SPCK, 2007);
David Robertson, The Dawkins Letters: Challenging
Atheist Myths (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus,
2007). - Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation
Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Humanity
Books, 1988), 8–9.