Way Beyond Atheism: God Does Not (Not) Exist
Why Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist, and why most atheists reject far too little
By Paul Wallace
December 14, 2010
Religion Dispatches
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/3820...There is within Christian theology a great tradition of negating “God.” By this I mean the negation of everything we think we know about God, every concept we carry about God, every image we imagine of God, everything that God “is” to us. In order to demonstrate how this works, we will consider three levels of statements about God. In addition, four different images of God from the Bible will be used: (a) God is a fire, (b) God is a king, (c) God is love, and (d) God is being itself (I AM). These four are presented in order of increasing abstraction.
The first level of God-talk is simple affirmation. It is typical for Christians to use statements like those above when speaking of God. This is conventional cataphatic, or positive, theology. This is the way nearly all popular theology in the West is done, whether in worship, in personal devotions, or in Bible study. These are positive statements signifying what theologians call the “God of the Attributes”; that is, the God that can be named.
The second level is simple negation, in the manner of Aristotle. It is less typical for Christians to deny things of God, but it is done. I think every Christian would agree that God is not a fire, really, nor is God the ruling male member of a royal family. These are obvious cases of negation that should cause no one any difficulty. It is a bit harder for Christians to say things like “God is not love,” but theologians have said things like this for centuries, and have meant it too. What this comes down to is, God is not that warm feeling or even that sincerely other-centered state of the will that often goes by the name of love. Whatever our highest conception of love might be, God is very much not that.
The third level is the most difficult but the most important. This is second-order negation, or the inversion of the inversion. Here we would say, “God is not a fire, but God is not a not-fire either,” and “God is not love, but neither is God not-love.” God transcends the (human-based) distinction between love and not-love. Obviously what is happening here is a deliberate straining of verbal logic. It may sound like mere mental gymnastics or game-playing, but it has a very serious purpose: To question and test language, to step outside of ourselves and ask ourselves what we are doing when we talk about God, to critique the very ground upon which theology stands, to search for that place—if there is a place—where concepts fail.
Also on this third level is found the insistence, made for centuries by theologians throughout Christendom, that
God transcends the distinction of being and not-being. Therefore, if we use the conventional definition of existence, God does not exist. Our category of existence does not apply to God. Put another way, the word “exist” cannot be used univocally of things and God. These are artificial categories imagined and used by human beings; they are manifestly not divine attributes. In the end, to speak correctly, there are no divine attributes. Which means that God is not distinct from creation, nor is God not-distinct from creation. That is, in God there is no distinction at all, nor is there non-distinction. No affirmation or denial properly applies to God.
Notice that this second sense of negation, the “negation of the negation,” does not simply return us to our positive statements, e.g., from “God is not love” back to the original affirmation, “God is love.” Instead, it challenges the very basis of our discursive thought and dialogue: language and image. It pulls out from under us our tacit
assumption that language and image are sufficient to describe reality. ...
Alex's comment:
I disagree with this author. The subtitle of this article is attractive: "atheists reject far too little." It would be interesting to consider where will we go if we reject further. It turns out, however, that the author disappointingly and insidiously misleads the readers to go back to the Christian, even biblical, God.
If we think that language and image are insufficient to describe reality (which I agree), why not just stop at this statement, stop at this point (instead of going on citing "Cod" or anything)?
If we believe that there is something we don't know which transcends human language and human concepts of being and not being (which I could agree, at least I could not refute), there are more accurate terms to be used to call it, such as
Unknown or
Mystery or
Transcendence. Why stick to the notoriously ambiguous term "Cod," which means different things to different people?
Worse still, why just mention a single type of "Cod" cooked in Christian flavor (albeit by world-renowned chefs such as Thomas Aquinas and Anselm of Canterbury)? There have been more than a thousand flavors of "Cods" ever cooked up by humanity in history. Where have they gone?
The core of Buddhism is also negation of all human notions and human language, so complete that no concept of God remains, just a plain honest Void. Beyond Atheism, the direction the arguments in this article point to is
Buddhism, not Christianity as the author tried to mislead us.
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