The Fraud of Theology

In an interview with The Washington Post, one of Donald Trump’s advisors on theological matters, Robert Jeffress, supported Trump’s apocalyptic August bluster against North Korea, by citing Romans 13. At the beginning of that chapter of the epistle, Paul recommends that Christians obey their secular rulers, because “the authorities that exist have been established by God” (13:1). But in a NY Times article, Steven Paulikas, an Episcopal priest, contends that Jeffress tore that scriptural passage out of context and perverted Christian theology in Jeffress’s fetishizing “message of violence over the clarion call to love of Romans 13:8,” which speaks of love of others as the fulfillment of Jewish law. That latter idea of the Golden Rule seems to derive from Rabbi Hillel who lived a century before Jesus is supposed to have lived.

Paulikas’ point about context is that “Paul is telling Christians to obey the Roman authorities in temporal matters such as taxation, not justifying the authority of one ruler over another,” such as Trump over Kim Jong-un. But Paulikas seems to be forgetting Rom.13:4, which says the secular authorities “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” Just because a ruler’s power derives from God doesn’t mean the ruler can’t misuse his power. For example, Jews considered Moses to be an instrument of God’s wrath against the Pharaoh. Instead of being commanded to obey the Egyptians, the Jewish slaves (who never historically existed) rebelled against Egypt to build their own society in Israel, according to Exodus. So if Christians can construe Kim Jong-un as a “wrongdoer,” they’re free to interpret Rom.13 as meaning that Trump might be “an agent of wrath” who will “bring punishment” upon North Korea.

Moreover, while Paulikas calls it a “clarion call,” meaning that the call for love of others trumps the advice to obey secular authorities, the context actually indicates that this allusion to the Golden Rule is just a digression and an extended figure of speech. It’s just a fancy way for Paul to make his point that his readers should “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law” (13:8, my emphasis). The rest (13:9-10) pursues the tangent about love as the fulfillment of Jewish law, a digression invited by that turn of phrase about the only “debt” that should be left standing (the obligation to love others). It’s like saying, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. And fish don’t need land transportation, because they live underwater. Did you know that fish come in a variety of sizes and colours? And fish taste differently too, especially if you choose to add a sauce. The best way to catch fish is with the special lures I sell at the local shop, which I’m pleased to announce is open six days a week.” The intended main point, of course, is that women don’t need men, the rest being a tangent that follows only from the rhetorical way of expressing that point. Likewise, the main point in the middle of Romans 13 is that Christians should pay all their secular debts, not that love is all-important.

Mind you, if secular authorities as well as their subjects can misbehave, as Jeffress would have to be assuming, there’s no longer an imperative to obey any particular secular ruler, since perhaps President Trump is as bad (as sociopathic, psychotic, and otherwise loathsome, etc.) as the North Korean leader, in which case Jeffress’s case falls to pieces, after all. Alas, this criticism is mooted by the rest of the context which Paulikas doesn’t address, in Rom.13:11-14, which begins, “And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.” So the overriding reason for Christians to obey their secular masters, to pay their taxes and avoid debts, besides the interest in avoiding secular punishment, is that the whole natural world was about to end in any case, so presumably there would be no time to make like Moses and rebel against society to establish a new earthly one. And of course, once this bit of context is entered into the hermeneutic ledger, both Jeffress’s and Paulikas’s arguments come to nothing, since obviously the Kingdom of Heaven didn’t arrive in the lifetime of those early Christians. The Jewish Temple fell in 70 CE, but the apocalyptic significance of that event was only subjective, since it mattered much more to Jews than to the Romans, for example. The secular world as a whole endured for two millennia and persists to this day despite Paul’s assurances that the contrary scenario would unfold. So this entire theological discussion of Trump and North Korea falls apart because Rom.13 itself implodes. 

Theology, Fiction, and Reason

In any case, Paulikas’s discussion raises a deeper, more interesting question, when he lays out an assumption that’s crucial to his article. According to Paulikas, “There is such a thing as incorrect theological and moral thinking, and the best way to neutralize it is with an intellectually and morally superior argument on the same terrain. Only good theology can debunk bad theology.” 

Is it true that theological statements, as such, can be correct or incorrect, and that the best way to conduct theology is by offering an intellectually superior argument? If so, theology would be a lot like Western philosophy. In fact, theology would be indistinguishable from a branch of philosophy called the philosophy of religion, because argumentation is philosophy’s specialty. And if we’re meant to yolk theology with the burden of engaging in hyper-rationality, as in the testing of hypotheses with excruciating attention to empirical detail, theology would instead fall under scientific cosmology and other sciences. In that case, theology would be dismissed in Laplace’s manner, since scientists have no need for the God hypothesis. Moreover, theology’s assumption of supernatural metaphysics would be barred by science’s methodological naturalism.

The reason Paulikas seems confident in asserting that theological statements should be rationally evaluated is that he confuses the literary, textual sort of analysis in which he engages in his criticism of Jeffress’s support of Trump, with what Paulikas presumes is a separate discipline called theology. The giveaway is Paulikas’s appeal to “the context” of Romans 13, and indeed Protestants in general, who are those Christians who seemingly idolize the Bible, can be counted on to argue explicitly about the scriptural context of this or that verse, in virtually every one of their writings. Their “arguments” are actually textual analyses and belong in the field of literary studies. This is to say that Protestant “theologians” should be regarded instead as literary critics whose operating assumption is that the Bible is a work of fiction, in which case the question isn’t whether a biblical statement is factually correct, but whether an analysis of the text is coherent. Likewise, the Christian religion that built up around this work of fiction would be comparable to a zealous fan base, such as the cult of Star Wars. Fans of Star Wars aren’t interested in whether the contents of the movies or books are factually “correct” in terms of having anything to do with events transpiring in a real, faraway galaxy; instead, they argue vociferously over questions that arise only within the fictional universe. Given that Han Solo said such and such in the fictional narrative, is it plausible that he would have fired his gun first in the Mos Eisley cantina? Similarly, you could argue about the correctness or incorrectness of biblical interpretations on literary grounds, as Paulikas seems to have done in his appeal to context in his dispute with Jeffress, and as I did in my above criticism of both of their interpretations of Paul’s epistle.  

To understand theology as being the literary criticism of a great work of fiction, namely of the myths told in texts held to be scriptural or ultimately authoritative by an ardent fan base is to view religion as Yuval Harari does in Sapiens. He writes, “Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination” (30). He thus contends that the ancients regarded their religions much as we regard the brands of our favourite corporate suppliers of goods. Effectively, the gods were idols, that is, entertaining characters that signified collective differences in brand loyalty, and the myths were treasured fictions that defined and maintained group identity and kept the peace in large societies that otherwise would have collapsed for the reason discovered by the philosopher Sartre: hell is other people. Ancient religions were one with their corresponding secular empire, and the theocratic synthesis operated in some ways like a modern corporate monopoly. Compare the Aztec or Babylonian religions, for example, to Apple or to Google. In either case, you have a massive secular power the deeds of which are justified by a set of stories—in the modern case, bogus economic models, advertisements, propaganda, intertextual allusions in other cultural works such as movies or television shows—that imply social conventions essential for maintaining group cohesion by fostering enthusiasm for the brand and thus a corresponding way of life for the fans.  

Religious people today will be loath to think of their scripture as being comparable to the oeuvre of J.K. Rowling or to the blockbusters of George Lucas, and that’s because the Scientific Revolution has established a division between purely literal, natural, physical, factual truth, on the one hand, and subjective impositions of meaning and value on the other. The ancients may have had a semblance of some such distinction between, say, mere mundane, practical questions and matters of ultimate significance. But they had no globe-spanning enterprise that cemented the dichotomy and thus thoroughly disenchanted what we now think of as the whole universe of natural time and space. Instead, the more or less animistic ways of thinking in the ancient world took the natural world to be infused with spirits, including immanent deities or other such powerful agents, and thus with purpose, meaning, and moral value. So if you told an Aztec farmer that Quetzalcoatl is only a fictional character, he wouldn’t have taken it as an insult, because for him what we call the world of cold, indifferent natural facts is instead itself halfway fictional. There was no ironclad fact-value distinction, so only if you belittled Quetzalcoatl in something like the way a Star Trek fan might slight the greatness of Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back would the farmer set upon you with pitchfork in hand. To question Quetzalcoatl’s existence would have been as nonsensical as making a point of saying that Darth Vader doesn’t really exist. You would have been subjected to medical treatment on the assumption that you’d have to be insane to bother being an atheist, just as you’d have to be churlish to interrupt the showing of a Harry Potter movie to announce that there’s really no such thing as magic wands; you’d be booted from the theater, not because your statement is “incorrect,” but because you’d have spoiled the entertainment.

Again, the fictional status of the gods would have been taken for granted, but only because fictions were elevated as the best available theories that both explained how the world worked and kept civilizations running. Now that after the rise of science the value of fictions has instead been demoted to being a private matter of opinion, to equate the Bible or the Koran with a Harry Potter novel is to take for granted that the scriptures might be factually correct on some point or other only by accident, given the authors’ need for verisimilitude to enable the reader to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. Moreover, to kill in the name of a religion would necessarily be as insane as waging war to convert Star Trek heathens to the cult of Star Wars. Violence caused by confusion between entertainment and reality does still happen, as in the case of football hooliganism in Europe and elsewhere. But the pressure on religious individuals like Jeffress and Paulikas to insist on the objective, absolute correctness of their theological statements, as opposed to conceding their mere aesthetic status, is overwhelming primarily because of science’s impact on modern epistemology and metaphysics.

Modern Theology as a Fraud

So if theology isn’t a kind of literary criticism, nor is it a branch of philosophy or of science, what else might it be? There is an even less flattering alternative, which is that modern theology operates as a massive con. Theological statements are shape-shifters, their meaning kept nebulous in the service of self-deception. Take Paul’s assurance that Christ would soon return to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and put aside how premodern Christians might have understood the truth of that prediction. Today, we know that Paul’s theology would fail drastically as philosophical argumentation or as scientific investigation. Moreover, Christians can’t afford to concede that Paul’s eschatology is entirely fictional—and not just because the religious entertainment would have to compete with the secular variety, such as with the Hollywood superhero movie, but because religious fictions, when viewed as such, can no longer function in the ancient fashion, as the glue that binds together a population. Again, this is because the world in general has been disenchanted, as Weber put it, so a fiction no longer has universal scope. The animistic dream of a living universe is dead, and all fictions are only so many futile diversions or protests against nature’s indifference, whispered in terror of the dark.

Paul’s theological statement is really just fiction and it was always just so, but Christians today can’t accept it as such. Instead, they maintain the statement is factually correct, as Paulikas presumes, but the Christian must evade not just the rock of an admission of theology’s mere literary status, but the hard place of the philosophical or scientific standard of inquiry. Thus, to avoid Paul’s prediction of the imminent end of the world being dismissed as obviously false on empirical grounds, the theologian will say the prediction is “rational,” “factual,” or “correct” even though it refers not to any ordinary temporal or otherwise natural matter. One of the epistle writers himself ventured that since a day is like a thousand years to God (2 Pet.3:8), when he implies that his first-century audience is living through “the last days” (3:3), that could mean Christ would nevertheless return millennia after all their deaths. This is semantic sleight-of-hand, though, since the epistles were addressed not to God but to human readers. From our vantage point, at least, the equivocation suggests, then, the advent of a duplicitous genre, the theological charade, which takes place in a halfway house between the literary analysis of fictions and the rational discovery of facts.

Again, knowing that theology has always been merely fictional, whereas the ancients wouldn’t have understood our distinction between fiction and fact, we might be inclined to credit the author of 1 Thess.4:14-15 and of Cor.15:50-52 with prodigious chutzpah because he had the nerve to maintain that even though Christ’s second coming hadn’t happened before some of his readers had gone and died, there was nothing to fear because they could still be resurrected even after their corpses have been turned to dust; after all, as those epistles say, the archangels themselves would descend and blast God’s trumpet to raise the dead even before the living are raptured, awarding all with “spiritual bodies” since nothing as corrupt as flesh could enter God’s kingdom in any event.

Certainly, a twenty-first century theologian who cites approvingly that ad hoc Pauline defense of the seemingly already-falsified predictions of the world’s end that was supposed to have occurred in the first or second century must be perpetrating a farce rather than interpreting or arguing in good faith. (The defense is ad hoc despite the superficial plausibility of saying that flesh couldn’t be expected to enter Heaven, because if matter can’t enter the kingdom of God, it’s not literally a kingdom either and we’re led to a mystical disavowal of any theological specificity. Likewise, “spiritual body” is oxymoronic: if God’s domain is ghostly, what makes the resurrected self a body distinct from anything else? How is the personal self retained without anything analogous to a brain? Of course the matter must be entirely mysterious, which means Paul’s apology to his readers—who had had their hopes up about the imminent end of the world, only to watch some of their fellows die before the saviour had returned—amounts to brazen hand-waving, whereas Paul might have admitted he’d been wrong and recommended that his readers shouldn’t waste their life on his nonsense.) The breezy New Testament prediction along with the apologetic epicycles and rigmarole are presently fictions that can’t be enjoyed with a suspension of disbelief unless they’re read as somehow factual despite all rational appearances to the contrary. So theology must now be akin to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or to any other massive fraud in which certain insiders, such as cynical televangelists or church officials cook the books and pull the levers behind the curtain to preserve an illusion for the multitude of victims.

In short, those who are currently religious have the benefits of enjoying their myths as socially meaningful and as objectively correct, even though these folks take upon themselves none of the responsibilities of literary critics or of philosophers or scientists. No need to deal with the cognitive dissonance involved in suspending disbelief in a story that isn’t supposed to be merely fictional, as you go back and forth in your experience between the real world and what is secretly just an imaginary one. No need to base your cherished belief on logic and on empirical evidence, when statements about gods and miracles can be interpreted as being so hallowed as to deter open-ended scrutiny from those who are thusly misled. You can engage in literary analysis of the Bible as though it were just a work of fiction, citing contexts to support your interpretations of passages, and you can credit theological statements as being backed by fallacious arguments, ensuring the superficial facticity of some such statements even while retreating to faith, dogma, church authority, or private religious experience whenever the rational going gets tough, and even while simultaneously treating scripture as if it were just poetic fiction subject to infinite and unfalsifiable, personal interpretations. It’s a shell game, a fraud of sustaining the illusion that theology has a viable intermediate position between literary critique and rational investigation of the real world. For moderns living in disenchanted nature, the way to mythopoeic reverie is lost, just as the adult can no longer experience truly childish glee—not without a fraud like theology or the secular enterprise of creating technological substitutes for gods, miracles, and the spirit world. 

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The Gods are our Imaginary Friends

What are gods, assuming they don’t exist? They have many social functions as well as aesthetic values. They're tools for subjugating gullible hordes of uncritical thinkers; mirrors reflecting our vanity or perhaps harbingers of what we expect to become; fictions that inure us to the inevitability of our bodily demise. One aspect of the gods, though, that should be better understood follows when we reflect on two unsettling facts.

The High Likelihood of our Cosmic Aloneness

The first is that the probability is extremely low that any human will encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life, and that’s so even if the universe is teeming with life beyond the solar system. This is because the universe is so mind-bogglingly vast that the time needed to travel between galaxies or stars would make even a light speed journey unfeasible. Some parts of the universe are more star-dense than others, such as the areas closer to the center of a spiral galaxy, but our solar system happens not to be in such an area. The nearest stars to the sun are in the Alpha Centauri system and are about 4.3 light years away. Travel there by conventional rocket would take tens of thousands of years, and unconventional means such as warp drive are highly speculative. Moreover, by the time aliens could travel here or we could reach them, both their civilization and ours would likely have become extinct. That is, technologically-advanced civilizations likely don’t survive for the tens or hundreds of thousands of years needed to travel between stars, because power is naturally corrupting, corruption detaches the powerful from reality, but reality always has the last word and so the deluded are effectively punished by their downfall. Thus, just as creatures throughout the universe would be separated in space, they would also be divided by time: the chance that two species originating from different stars would be near enough that they could reach each other, while also evolving at roughly the same time is extremely remote, because the natural duration of each species must be infinitesimal compared to the life of each star. That is, a star lasts hundreds of millions or billions of years, while a technologically-advanced species probably lasts no more than some thousands of years, so species from planets orbiting different stars will more likely evolve before or after each other rather than in the same era.

In summary, we may be the only intelligent creatures to have evolved in any part of the universe that we could realistically reach throughout the lifespan of our species. But even if there are others, we will likely never communicate with them, both because of the vast distances between stars and the barrier of light speed, and because of the self-destructiveness of the technologically-advanced societies needed to undertake the venture of interstellar travel in the first place, which makes for the relative narrowness of the window of opportunity for communicating with alien life.

The second curious fact is that the average human brain prefers social contact to total isolation, and copes with solitary confinement by undergoing forms of mental derangement rather than suffering outright anxiety and despair. Mountaineers, solo explorers, marooned sailors, and prisoners who are isolated for most of the day in a maximum security facility cope by hallucinating, anthropomorphizing their indifferent environment, or by devising obscure problems to occupy the rational side of their mind; otherwise, they can succumb to psychosis. “Without social interaction, supermax prisoners have no way to test the appropriateness of their emotions or their fantastical thinking,” and so their interpretations become distorted. Lone adventurers attempt to transcend their situation by treating the natural environment itself as a surrogate for a companion, wondering at its grandeur instead of dwelling on their preference for social interaction. “A similar psychological mechanism could explain why shipwrecked mariners marooned on islands have been known to anthropomorphise inanimate objects, in some cases creating a cabal of imaginary companions with whom to share the solitude.” 

Putting these two facts together, I’m led to wonder whether theistic religion is a form of mass derangement that allows us to cope with our collective isolation in the cold, dark universe. While it would be fallacious to assume that what’s true of a group’s member must be true of the group as a whole, there is clearly an analogy between the lone individual’s tendencies to talk to imaginary friends or to projections of herself and to analyze fictions at great lengths to hone her reason when deprived of real stimuli, on the one hand, and the universal phenomenon of theistic religion, which involves the positing of extraterrestrial beings with whom we can socialize, and the theological elaboration of supernatural social hierarchies. So while the collective needn’t duplicate what occurs at the level of individual members, such duplication appears to have actually happened for the obvious reason that just as some individuals find themselves permanently isolated from the group, our whole species isn’t in genuine contact with any society that’s independent of the animal kingdom that we dominate on this planet.

Theoretically, we might turn to animal species instead of imagining aliens and gods, angels and demons, or ghosts and goblins to pretend our species isn’t perfectly friendless. Most wild species, however, aren’t fit companions, since their intelligence is limited to conceiving of means of directly preserving their genes, as opposed to grasping their greater, existential situation. More specifically, they have no such situation because their intelligence isn’t powerful enough to liberate themselves from natural forces and cycles. Most wild animals, then, are more like machines than self-aware, enlightened beings. As such, we’ve dealt with most wild animals the same way we’ve dealt with the rest of hostile nature, by extinguishing them and replacing them with tamed versions to suit our social needs. Thus, we’ve demolished many wild places and replaced them with artificial worlds (with cities, machines, cultures), and we’ve hunted most wild species to extinction and repopulated the earth with livestock and with pets. The relationship between humans and domesticated animals, though, is as limited as that between master and slave. Just as the dictator who is surrounded by sycophants lacks the social challenge to keep himself from going mad, whole human societies couldn’t be satisfied with their subordination of the likes of horses, cows, camels, dogs, or cats. We would prefer for our society to relate to equals or even to superiors, so that we might learn and grow from the exchange. We have no such equals or superiors and so we’ve had to invent them in our religious myths.  

The point is that while theistic religions also ward off our fear of death, as Freud explained, we shouldn’t overlook their role in helping us cope with our collective loneliness. We need gods to grant us the miracle of eternal life and happiness, but we also need them to give us an excuse not to feel as though we’ve been abandoned forever in an uncaring cosmic wilderness.

Is the Religious Coping Mechanism an Embarrassment?

Let’s turn to the question of whether, in so far as it has that role, theistic religion is respectable.By hypothesis, there’s no relevant nonhuman life, so the question is only whether we can or should respect ourselvesfor living as though there were extraterrestrial intelligent life that presently socializes with us (by hearing our prayers, by rewarding and punishing us, and so on). This is to say that it’s not worth asking whether anyone looking down on our species should respect what we’re doing. There’s no one in that overseer position. Evidently, though, most theists not only do respect themselves, they condescend to nonbelievers and so-called atheists (the latter being existential realists or gauche speakers of the obvious). The reason for this is that the alternative of universal atheism should be as detrimental as harsh realism would be for the marooned sailor or for the prisoner in solitary confinement. If the choices are to be immersed in a fantasy world or to wallow in dread and angst, the instrumentally-rational option is the former, assuming the fantasy can be sustained and the overriding goal is to be happy.

If the sailor is rescued or the prisoner is released, after having carried on conversations for many months with invisible persons, she may become ashamed of the childlike state to which she’d been reduced to survive. But by hypothesis, there is no salvation from our collective predicament; our species will never be turned over to an everlasting community of angelic beings. Again, we will likely kill ourselves off or be wiped out by a natural catastrophe before we could communicate with any alien intelligence, assuming there is any such intelligence in the first place. So we will have no period of hindsight during which to feel ashamed of our former mental coping mechanisms. The individual’s resort to the imagination to flee from unforgiving reality is spared from being a mark of insanity because that flight is temporary and escape for her isn’t hopeless. Talk with imaginary friends may be a necessary evil in certain individual cases. But suppose there’s no chance of the individual’s redemption, as in the scenario of the last survivor on earth after an apocalyptic scything of humankind. Should that survivor resort to anthropomorphizing trees and stones, with no hope of a return to genuine social interaction, because everyone else is dead, the fantasy wouldn’t be rational or sane as a means of preserving hope in the interim, because there would be no return to normality and thus no interim. Still, although the individual couldn’t rationally hope for a recreation of society, she could speak to imaginary friends to avoid the unpleasant feelings that accompany a realistic reckoning of her dire situation. Nevertheless, although her strategy might be rational and thus understandable, it wouldn’t be heroic or admirable, because she would have broken from reality into madness. Her madness would be useful to her but it would also be an irredeemable defeat. Whether she goes on to loath or respect herself would be a function of her fantasy, and so its justification would be arbitrary since it would follow only from the gratuitous rules of her fiction.

As a species our position is similar to that of the last person left alive on earth. The madness of theistic religion can be mitigated only by the fiction’s utility in preventing an outbreak of mass terror or nausea. The fiction isn’t temporary, which is to say there likely won’t be a universal recognition that almost all of reality is impersonal; we won’t awaken from our fanciful dream and so even if we respect ourselves as children of some deity, that self-estimation is grounded in the fantasy and thus it begs the question. Of course the fantasy respects itself, as it were. But whether the fantasy is respectable as a way of dealing with reality is another matter. In our better moments, we may or may not be prone to feeling shame for surrendering to lunacy, rather than inviting the cosmicist awe and giving up on the ideal of happiness.

You may be thinking of the European Enlightenment as a period in which millions did emerge from a fog of unknowing and acknowledged the nature’s inhumanity. Indeed, there was such a reckoning, but secular cultures came to appeal to substitute fantasies such as the American Dream that personal freedom is noble and worth fighting for. Instead, that freedom might as well be part of a devil’s bargain. In the limit case, personal freedom is autonomy, the powers to resist external forces and to control your future. Such a liberated and thus necessarily solitary mind would immediately be crushed by the existential weight of its responsibility for deciding its course with no cultural guidance. Only individuals who have been excluded from society would be alienated or “liberated” in that respect, and the price, of course, would be that the objectivity and lack of guidance would prevent them from being happy in the sense of being socially fulfilled. Certainly, such a free person could have no family, for instance, since a love bond would be coercive. Likewise, such an autonomous agent could be no patriot, since love of country would likewise impinge on her sovereignty. In any case, the dream of this freedom turns into the familiar nightmare of the capitalistic struggle for social dominance, which leads to mass infantilization due to overconsumption, and millions of foreigners must be impoverished and enslaved to preserve the golden lands of opportunity, just as the ecosystem must be polluted beyond repair for that purpose.

In secular, rationalist, “modern” terms, progress was nevertheless made in the eighteenth century CE, when scientists and skeptics overturned theistic dogmas and revealed the horrific extent of our material nature. Instead of positing invisible friends in the heavens, early modern atheists dealt with the fear of the chaos that should unfold after God’s death, with their rosy, utopian fantasies of the perfectibility of our societies using science-centered, technocratic means. It was as if we were that prisoner in solitary confinement and instead of creating a fictional world to occupy our attention, we would get to work mopping the floor and ironing the bed sheets. If our prison cell didn’t favour us with a mop or an iron, we would invent them. We could immerse ourselves in the work of discovering how nature operates, and use that knowledge to our advantage.

Nietzsche foresaw how these utopias clash with the reality of the grim wilderness, as they did throughout the horrors of the twentieth century, including the sinking of the Titanic and the downing of the Hindenburg, the Great Depression and the world wars, the holocaust and the genocides. Nietzsche and David Hume before him emphasized our animal irrationality, which ran contrary to the sort of optimistic rationalism you find in Kant or Mill. If only we had an algorithm to calculate how to avoid practical contradictions or how to balance pleasure and pain, we could carry out our moral duty or maximize happiness. Instead, because scientists showed we have no immaterial spirit, we seek power, being fundamentally animal thingsalongside the many other physical objects, and so we channel nature’s monstrous lack of empathy in our social dealings. As biologists and cognitive scientists confirmed the unpleasant truth, we found ourselves in the “postmodern” era in which the postindustrial masses no longer trust in either the traditional religions or in science-centered fantasies. Only briefly after the Second World War did the authentic reaction to the philosophical implications of the Scientific Revolution gain traction when the cries of the existential philosophers, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Sartre and Camus enjoyed trendy popularity. Currently, though, instead of dwelling on the existential problem and when we're not succumbing to a naturalistic version of theism such as the UFO subculture, we pretend to be above it, indulging in a hip form of cynicism such as is largely responsible for the anarchical and treasonous rise of the far right in Europe and the United States.

But let’s lay aside the substitute fantasies and return to the question whether the more childlike original fantasy of theism does us credit. Again, even if our religions dictate that we should be proud of our status as spirits destined to be united with God, we can at least contemplate the hypothetical scenario of how the religious crowd would look to the outsider who doesn’t share in the fantasy. While there is no superhuman tribunal, we can objectively examine our culture for signs of mass insanity or depravity, and infer what we ought to feel in response to our association with it. Most theists are proud or at least comfortable in their childlike reversions, and some are even sanctimonious. But those are the attitudes needed to live well in an old-fashioned culture, not those needed to be prepared to oppose that culture if necessary, after critically examining how most people get by. Those outsiders who do take radical criticism seriously should think of the goal of living well to be as bizarre as an adult’s resort to childish fantasies, since the latter is a precondition of the former. There is no happiness without delusion, because the real world is a horror, philosophically speaking, and perhaps the most surreal delusion of all is the oldest and most widespread, the practice of socializing with plainly nonexistent persons, to endure the lifelessness of outer space and of most events in astronomical timeframes.  

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New Atheism and Edward Feser’s Thomistic Gambit

Imagine living in a country that’s been run by a dictator for decades. The dictator’s removed from power by progressive rebels, then humiliated and imprisoned. Instead of using his time in prison to reflect on the error of his ways and to repent, the dictator becomes bitter: holding the bars of his prison cell door, he excoriates the new administration’s progressive ideals and accuses his people of being fools for not allowing him to reign over them once more.

That’s an analogy for the uppity Catholic’s chutzpah. If you think the species of pompous, haughty Catholics is extinct, having been killed off in the last few centuries by skeptical hunters of dogmas, take a look at Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of New Atheism. To be sure, Feser, a philosophy professor, likely fills that book with disdain because he’s guided by the lex talionis, the principle that what goes around should come around: new atheists have sneered at and ridiculed Christians for long enough, so proud Christians should respond in kind. But this doesn’t entirely explain the tone of that book or of Feser’s blog in which he celebrates the absoluteness of scholastic theology. The question is how Christians today can find it in them to be proud of their faith, given that, like the dictator, the Church has lost its totalitarian control over Western life. How can a Catholic, in particular, examine Western history from the classical period to the modern one, and conclude not just that modern philosophy has been a farcical blunder but that the only solution is to return to the medieval way of thinking perfected by Thomas Aquinas?

The question is rhetorical, but this is exactly what Feser’s done and it accounts for the uncanny match between the style of his response to the current popularity of atheism, and the stereotype of modern Catholic apologetics as being mainly an expression of pretensions mixed with bitterness. In this respect, the Catholic polemicist is rather like a conservative Briton, exemplified by Niall Ferguson who admires the old British Empire. Not chastened but passive aggressive, these conservatives have the gall to side with the bully even after the bully’s disgraced himself. But whereas Ferguson does so for pragmatic rather than moralistic or philosophical reasons (Ferguson says the British Empire pioneered free trade and globalization, maintained global peace, and stood against the much worse empires of Germany and Japan in the last century), Feser argues that Thomism annihilates the philosophy of New Atheism.

You see, Feser isn’t merely playing a role, taking revenge against atheistic screeds for their hostility towards Christianity, or pursuing a marketing strategy. He seems genuinely furious because he thinks that New Atheism is so obviously false to those who know how to reason, that atheists are clueless about that fact, and that few recognize that Thomism is the supremely rational worldview. He’s thus very much like a resentful devotee to the imprisoned dictator, who labours under the delusion that his master was born to rule. The downfall of such a smug, sanctimonious institution as the Catholic Church is sublime, meaning that when the members of an institution become so powerful and thus naturally deluded and corrupt that an infinite abyss emerges between their inflated self-image and the reality of what they’ve become, their sudden fall echoes in that abyss like a mighty thunderclap heard around the world. Pride goes before the fall, but this is a secret recipe for the most exquisite comedy, because the greater the pride, the more monstrous the dupe who sets herself up for a pratfall, and we’d rather laugh at than be terrified by monsters. Not that all supervillains get their comeuppance, but when they do the comedy is poetically just. However, when the supervillains or their henchmen continue to curse those who’ve engineered their demise, vowing revenge even while wriggling beneath the superhero’s boot heel, there comes a moment when the impulse to pity them overtakes the urge to laugh at them.

Thomism’s Bastardization of the Perennial Philosophy

But let’s prepare ourselves to look at how Feser sees the world. Mind the lightshow now as we travel back in time to periods governed by strange, obsolete mindsets. According to Feser, the new atheist is hardly a superhero because she’s utterly blind to the nature of the conflict at hand. Often unwittingly, the new atheist subscribes to scientism, which is a form of idolatry in which science is regarded as the only source of knowledge. Thus, the new atheist mistakes all scientific progress for an intellectual development away from religion, whereas there’s no conflict between religion and science itself. Science is neutral on religious questions, because the terms of those questions are philosophical and theological. Science is only one kind of Reason, another being the philosophical evaluation of ideas which was developed long ago in the West by Plato and Aristotle and perfected by Augustine and Aquinas.

So while science itself is silent on whether theism or atheism is true, Reason turns out to favour theism. This is because the modern philosophical interpretation of science, which the new atheist confuses with the scientific picture itself, is only the self-defeating mechanistic (materialistic or naturalistic) one that reduces rationality and morality themselves to illusions. In this way, the mere powerof advanced industrial societies can be mistaken for a sign of the truth of the science-centered, materialistic philosophy shared by new atheists. Materialism is a universal acid that eats away the very ideas of truth, freewill, and morality, so that the atheist is left with rationalizations of libertinism, the beastliness of postmodern culture, and the farce of scientistic idolatry. Far from the light of Reason turning back savage Christians and their theistic superstitions, the classical philosophy overturns all idols so that we can behold the light of God. All of nature testifies to God’s glory, as shown by Thomistic philosophy which is the synthesis of Aristotle’s metaphysics (his hylomorphism and teleology) and Aquinas’s systematic elaboration of the Catholic worldview.   

There’s some truth in this critique of New Atheism. Scientism is indeed a scourge in new atheistic havens on the internet, because the science-centered dismissal of philosophy for being too close to theology entails a dreary sort of Philistinism which befits those being groomed as drudges in our kleptocracies. Alas, Feser is in no position to tout Thomism or the classical or perennial philosophies on which it’s based. Before I explain why, here are the rudiments of the philosophy in question. Perennialism is the idea that the world’s major religions share an essential spiritual message. In the West, this message started with Plato’s formulation of the secrets of the Mystery cults which later were elaborated by Gnostic religions and which found their way into orthodox Christianity through Aquinas’s incorporation of Aristotle’s naturalized version of Platonism. (The perennial philosophy has independent origins in the East, based ultimately as it is, I believe, on speculative assimilations of universal psychedelic experiences that began with the earliest, shamanic religions.) Rather than perfecting perennialism, though, as Feser says, Aquinas bastardized it so it could serve the purposes of Catholic theocracy, since the philosophical perspective in question is subversive and thus had been reserved for esoteric circles, such as for the marginalized shamans or the underground Eleusinian Mysteries.

As for the philosophy’s content, it’s superficially dualistic and normative, but ultimately monistic and mystical: the present, material world is regarded as a shadow of hidden, transcendent reality, the latter being in all ways better than the former. Epistemically, enlightenment is possible but burdensome, because the material world acts as a prison, distracting us so that we tend to lose our chance to be liberated from our bodies and to gain access to the Supreme Being that reposes in a supernatural domain. The seeker must be physically and mentally purified before she’s able to perceive the final truth, which is that ultimately only God exists and so each of us is inwardly divine. Plato crystalized all of this in his Cave analogy, while Aristotle started the adulteration that Aquinas would complete, by naturalizing the abstract, immaterial Forms as well as draining God of his vitality, turning him into a loveless, do-nothing intellectual. Nevertheless, Aristotle was no materialist in the modern sense, since he preserved perennialism’s normative framework: God, the prime mover, exercises a kind of magnetic force of goodness, like the Force in Star Wars or the Way in Daoism, so that all things in nature try to fulfill their purpose. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth and people don’t see it; likewise, Aristotle would say that the heavenly forms aren’t transcendent or alien since they’re manifest as the endpoints of all natural processes in which potentials are actualized. Seeds tend to grow into trees, and that’s a natural purpose and thus a good that’s achieved. Even when rain falls downward from clouds rather than flying in all directions, that’s also the achievement of a good, indicating the equivalent of a virtue that might have been otherwise in a more chaotic world in which things didn’t gravitate towards God’s perfection.

For Aristotle, God’s immateriality removes him from the material plane and he’s preoccupied with abstract, intellectual matters, following again from his incorporeality, so that God is supposed to retain just enough alienness to motivate the Gnostic disgust for the material world. But there’s really little such motivation for Aristotle, who evidently loved nature. The essence of the perennial philosophy is the subversive and ego-destroying suspicion that the entire natural universe is fallen and perverse compared to a secret, supernatural world that’s mostly beyond our comprehension. Aristotle wanted a compromise between, on the one hand, Gnosticism and Platonism, not to mention the exoteric versions of that spirituality in mass Greek religions, as codified by Hesiod and Homer, and on the other the atheistic materialism of most classical Greek philosophy, as in Democritus’s atomism. Aristotle replaced a fully personal God with a more abstract, philosophical ideal, as Plato had done, and he posited a means by which the heavenly Forms—that is, the Universals of which all embodied things are instances and imperfect copies—nevertheless participate in the fallen world. The means are the dynamic of potentiality and actuality, along with the force that binds things fulfilling their potential with the ultimate good. But his reason for thinking that the First Cause is perfect is little more than an elitist preference for philosophical contemplation, which is, of course, also nakedly anthropocentric. If it could care about anything, why would a seed or a raindrop care to be in alignment with an aloof, narcissistic Intellectual who can merely cogitate rather than do anything? Without such alignment, though, the First Cause’s alleged perfection doesn’t transfer to any normative status of the fulfillment of natural functions, and so Aristotle’s compromise fails. Nature would remain full of morally neutral processes, the end states of which being neither objectively good nor bad.

Plato, too, had trouble explaining why the Forms are better than their material copies. The Forms are eternal and changeless, but that doesn’t exactly make them good—terrifyingly alien in their death-like finality, perhaps, but not necessarily better than being copies in the changeable, material realm. We betray our preference for that supposedly fallen realm when we imagine ourselves in heaven as having “spiritual bodies” capable of pseudo-motion and change. Perhaps Plato anticipated the modern obsession with originality, since he seemed to despise material things just for being secondary. More precisely, though, Plato’s idea was that the immaterial, transcendent world is better because it’s more real than the material world. The visible cosmos is like a parade of shadows on a cave wall cast by things outside that are struck by rays from the sun. Enlightened philosophers see natural things for the illusory shadows they are and want to know the truth of the abstract Forms that interact more closely with the equivalent of sunlight. But Plato has little to say about Goodness itself, about the mystical analogue of the sun that sets out these metaphysical dimensions and relations. For Plato, the metaphysical truth aligns with goodness and beauty, and so the latter two properties increase as we approach the highest reality, which we do through rational contemplation. To the extent that we’re preoccupied with the pleasures of sense experience, we’re liable to be misled into thinking that only the impermanent copies are real, in which case we live as animals rather than potentially illuminated humans.  

Aquinas, of course, adds much to God’s biography, informing us as to how exactly nature is consummated in supernature. God is indeed the supreme intellect but he’s not aloof from the world. Aquinas is a theist, not a deist: his god isn’t just a philosopher but a creator, and so God designs and produces everything, assigning them their functions and thus the natural laws that have prescriptive force. Nature is defined by the functions which all things tend to fulfill according to their essential capacities, which are all established by God’s intentions, and natural law is the extent to which the material world participates in the divine reality that’s run by eternal law and that’s known imperfectly by means of our rational capacity. The natural world is good because it was created by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity, but this world is also imperfect and fallen, because it’s currently in the process of fulfilling God’s plan. Only in the end times will natural and eternal law align and God’s intentions for creating a world be fully revealed.

As I said, Aquinas’s theism represents a step towards vulgarization and away from the esoteric insight at the heart of perennialism. This is because Aquinas derives the normativity of natural functions from his personification of God, which merely moralizes the value of natural tendencies. Thomists err in thinking of natural moral laws as being objective, and so Feser evidently believes he can hide his disgust for homosexuality, for example, behind an alleged rational judgment that homosexuality is unnatural and thus bad as a matter of fact. If natural (rather than legal or human social) laws carry prescriptive rather than just descriptive weight, that is, if they tell us what ought to be done, because they’re determined by God’s design so that everything becomes artificial, the laws are still only subjectively good, depending on whether you agree with the designer’s reason for implementing them. In exactly the same way, we can approve or disapprove of the purpose behind creating some piece of technology, and there’s nothing more to the technology’s value than that evaluation of the purpose. Just because the design is objectively implemented in a material thing that tends to achieve its function doesn’t mean the function itself is normatively praiseworthy. If a scientist creates a doomsday weapon that would wipe out all life on the planet, the mere fact that the device would naturally work wouldn’t make its use good rather than bad. Obviously, the normative evaluation depends on an evaluation of the designer’s purpose; only if all life deserved to be wiped out, for example, might the weapon’s ability to fulfill its function be justly praised as akin to a virtue. But that praise would be subjective in that it wouldn’t follow merely from any set of facts. That’s the price of dealing with prescriptions and not just with descriptions: subjectivity—not that Aquinas, the theist, could afford to keep the difference straight. In any case, not even Aquinas’s theism accounts for the alleged teleological dimension of nature, since he leaves God’s intention for creating the world a mystery, put off until the end of days. The best we can do now is trust in scriptural revelation that God is good and that he has his reasons, but that’s where scholastic philosophy ends in a fallacious appeal to authority.

Here a Thomist might point out that Aquinas was no naïve literalist, since he agreed with mystics that we can know God only by way of negative theology. As Aquinas said, “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not.” But Aquinas added positive to negative theology, so he wasn’t simply a mystic, which is to say a true perennialist. He argued that analogies can tell us about God’s essence and character, since the similarities hold as long as we understand that God has none of the limitations present in nature. Moreover, Aquinas believed the Bible is inerrant revelation and he defended the traditional Catholic interpretations of scripture. For example, he says God is a Trinity of persons. Like Aristotle, then, Aquinas was caught between the elitist mystical, philosophical conception of God and the vulgar, literalistic, personal conception. Unlike Aristotle, though, Aquinas was part of a vast institution that had to cater to naïve ideas about God to please its supporters. Thus, Aquinas wasn’t seeking a compromise so much as neutralizing the mystical, depersonalized conception by showing that it’s consistent with Christian revelation which obviously depicts God as a person, not as abstract Being itself. In the same way, scholasticism as a whole is meant to show that classical Reason doesn’t discredit Church dogmas, but complements Christian faith. 

To return, though, to how Aquinas bastardizes rather than perfects the perennial philosophy, keep in mind that the perennial way of reconciling the apparent duality of mind and matter with their hidden unity depends on mysticism, and so you lose the insight as soon as you personify the Great Beyond, as Aquinas did. Doing so is Aquinas’s gambit for explaining how reason supports the Christian faith, since we should have no trouble understanding the goodness of artifacts; after all, we who are supposedly made in God’s image design and build many things of which we approve, and so we can imagine how much more wise must be the whole world’s creator. But the price of that analogy is a loss of any mystical basis for ecstasy, and perennialism’s recipe for achieving that altered state of consciousness is the true source of its mystique. True perennialists aren’t interested in mere moral goodness, since that value is all-too human and thus a symptom of our fallenness or mythical imprisonment. Perennialists are seekers after transcendence, bored by the familiar and allured by the strange; they’re not interested in worshipping a personal deity, since worship for them consists not in mouthing platitudes or performing empty ceremonies, but in an authentic religious experience, as in sheer ecstasy which is an encounter with that which can’t be fathomed. Not the mere stale goodness of God, but the holy terror of his alienness is what motivates worship of him in the perennial tradition. Those who blather on about divine morality are evidently in the service of an orthodoxy that has an ulterior, typically political agenda besides any spiritual one. As Aristotle brought Plato’s Forms down to earth, so too Aquinas trivializes the Sun’s analogue in the Cave analogy, taming the perennial philosophy so that it could serve the Roman Catholic Empire that Jews rightly saw as wholly idolatrous in identifying a particular crucified man with God. Perennial worship of God was supposed to lead to ascetic withdrawal or at least to disgust with natural processes, since the perennialist is mesmerized by God’s mysteriousness, by the tantalizing promise of a strange world beyond the present one. Genuine ascetics don’t set up earthly empires or ally themselves with any such thing.

The transcendence of the supernatural, that is, its alienness to knowable forms of matter and energy, inspires the perennial value system. The primary value is amoral since this value is mind-altering horror, an obsession with unsettling hints of understanding the bizarreness of that which is metaphysically primary and thus miraculously freestanding. Aquinas maintains that God is simple rather than complex, meaning that God has no parts. In that case, the entire theistic explanation of the relation between the natural and the supernatural is lost, since God is denied his personhood, including his abilities to think, design, and create. To get around that implication, Aquinas engages in empty word games such as saying that God doesn’t have love as an attribute but is love, just as he is goodness and wisdom and power and so forth. Indeed, in the perennial philosophy God is simple, if only because this philosophy is mystical and so doesn’t allow us to say anything definite or coherent about the transcendent being. God would be as simple as the silence brought on by awe during a mystical encounter with the supernatural.

In this regard, Lovecraft’s cosmicism and the existential philosophies that prioritize the emotions of angst and dread are true inheritors of perennialism. The horror of perennial metaphysics is just the horror for the Other and for the loss of personal identity in our realization that everything is fundamentally one. Thomism tames the source of that horror to make perennialism fit for mass consumption, because that’s Catholicism’s modus operandi, meaning that that’s what Catholics have done ever since their New Testament scapegoated Jews and Hellenized Judaism to make some Jewish scriptures suitable for adoption by the Roman Empire: if they couldn’t wipe out heresies by force, Catholics incorporated the opposing ideas and practices by sleight of hand. Thus, the Eucharist ceremony co-opts the fertility rites of Dionysus and Osiris, the adoration of Mother Mary co-opts the worship of Isis, the celebration of Jesus’s birthday on December 25 co-opts sun worship, and so on and so forth. Augustine incorporated Plato into the Catholic ideology and Aquinas did the same for Aristotle, thus giving pagans all the less reason to resist converting to Christianity.

Catholicism became universal by bastardizing everything in sight, becoming all things to all people. Meanwhile, the actual perennial philosophy went underground in Gnostic and other mystical heresies, including eventually Protestant ones. Perennialism is subversive because the whole point is to have contempt for all earthly constructions, once your eye is set on the alien Beyond. Indeed, militant fundamentalists of all stripes, including the radical Islamists who behead people and thrive in political chaos are likewise genuine heirs to the perennial philosophy, although their dream of a Caliphate runs counter to their mysticism: the fundamentalists are metaphysical dualists who regard the present world as nothing compared to supernature; they consider themselves enlightened elites and dismiss the masses for being captivated by illusions. So when Feser lauds the classical philosophy, he ends up with strange bedfellows—as least until the fundamentalists kick him out as a Thomistic adulterer.

Why, then, is Feser in no position to stand for classical philosophy? Partly, because he’s wrong about Aquinas: Aquinas vulgarized rather than perfected the world’s basic religious teachings. Indeed, Aquinas’s systematic format in Summa Theologicabetrays his non-mystical agenda, since no mystic would pretend to have any such exhaustive understanding of spiritual matters. The whole scholastic method of arguing about intellectual issues with excruciating thoroughness is beside the point of perennialism, since the goal is religious experience and the means of achieving it isn’t just the training of the intellect but the purification of the whole person. An authentic perennialist would have to regard systematic theology as an obscenity and a sign of the theologian’s woeful arrogance which is the opposite of the humility needed to fulfill our spiritual purpose. In fact, from the perennial viewpoint, it’s very telling that according to Catholic tradition, Aquinas left the Summaunfinished precisely because he had a mystical experience which led him to think of all his writings as “mere straw” by comparison. So much for Aquinas’s alleged perfecting of classical wisdom.

Aristotle’s Teleology as Bloodless Animism

But there’s another problem, which is that Feser’s anti-scientistic account of Reason is all wrong. To make room for theological knowledge, given science’s branching off from armchair philosophy, Feser thinks he has to show that what we’d now think of as mere metaphysical speculation can be more or less rationally responsible. As the philosopher E. A. Burtt says in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, metaphysics is inevitable as soon as you start thinking deeply about anything. Positivism is the laziness involved just in not paying attention to your nonscientific assumptions, whereas the task of metaphysics is to make them explicit. Scientific experimentation is one kind of reason, producing objective knowledge, while metaphysical argumentation is another kind producing knowledge that’s equally secure. The question, though, is about the nature of knowledge. Feser likely agrees with the tripartite platonic conception, according to which knowledge is justified, veridical or true belief. Thus, a scientist arrives at a justified, true belief about, say, the mechanics of rainfall, by observing the phenomenon and testing a hypothesis, while a philosopher like Aristotle arrives at a justified, true belief about rain’s having a purpose in addition to some immediate causes. Both beliefs are supported by reasons, such as evidence or logic, and both are true in that the symbols comprising the beliefs stand in a relation of agreeing with certain facts. Philosophical reflection generates knowledge and thus we can know on that basis rather than just on faith or scripture that nature’s potential to transcend itself is in the process of being fulfilled.

To see what’s wrong with this traditional conception, consider Aristotle’s analysis of causality and Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence. Aristotle distinguishes between material, formal, efficient, and final causes, using the famous example of the cause of a sculpture’s coming into being. If you want to understand what causes the sculpture, you can ask four questions. (1) Out of what does the sculpture come, the answer being, let’s say, bronze. (2) What is the statue’s shape, or what attributes does the material take on in becoming an instance of some type, the answer being, say, that the statue is caused or formed to look like a man. (3) What is the source of change or rest that leads to the sculpture, the answer being the artisan or the art of bronze-casting. (4) What is the sculpture’s purpose, or what good is the sculpture which accounts for why the sculpture comes to exist, the answer being, say, the addition of some beauty to the world or the demonstration of the artisan’s excellence in his craft, which inspires virtue in others.

The limitations of that fourth question are obvious from the example Aristotle chooses. Sculptures are artificial, not entirely natural, meaning that they’re made by sculptors who are creatures that happen to have ideas about the goodness or badness of events. Why assume that natural processes in general have purposes, given that natural as opposed to artificial or intelligently designed causes have no intentions, neither directly nor indirectly, as Aristotle (but not Aquinas) concedes? Aristotle begins with the sculpture to illustrate the difference between the four causes, but there’s apparently a leap involved in extending this analysis of causality to all of nature, given the rarity of artifacts in the universe. Nevertheless, Aristotle contends not just that final causes are found in nature (e.g. in the growth of teeth or the falling of rain) and not merely in artifacts, but that they’re explanatorily primary whenever they’re found, which means that they’re what we mainly want to know when we ask why some event happens. The reason for this is supposed to be that the other three causes don’t explain regularity, which is the essence of causation. For example, an efficient, which is to say a mechanistic cause can explain why rain falls at a particular time, but not why rain tends to fall, or why it generally does so under certain conditions. The teleological answer that events unconsciously conspire to bring about that end because that end is good is supposed to provide just the answer that’s otherwise lacking.

However, Aristotle’s nontheistic teleology does no such thing, since his teleology is just hollowed-out, demystified and thus vacuous animism. If rainclouds were embodiments of gods, as the Greek masses would have assumed, then of course rain might fall literally for some reason, because the reason would be found in the purpose that’s mentally represented in the god. Animism leaves no room for a metaphysical distinction between the natural and the artificial, between something like rain and something like a statue. But when you banish the gods and maintain that natural events nevertheless happen for the good, you’re offering no explanation of such unconscious, unintentional purpose. In particular, there’s no mechanism by means of which rain might naturally fall for the good or to achieve some purpose, for example, once the rain god is eliminated from the picture. Rainclouds have no way to strive towards the good even were there such a thing as objective goodness, given that they have no thoughts or desires.

To his credit, Aristotle appreciated this, as I said, which is why he adds the unmoved mover to his metaphysics of natural substances and purposes. This prime mover would have to be immortal, immaterial, beautiful, intellectual, and unchanging to be the source of all natural motions. With respect to teleology, the prime mover’s most important feature is its beauty, since this supplies the ultimate good to which everything aims, drawn as they are by something like the power of magnetism. The first cause doesn’t directly involve itself in the lower order of beings but merely provides a model for those beings to emulate as best they can. Rain does this by falling instead of rising, because the actual result that tends to happen has as its ultimate final cause the fact that rain strives to achieve the perfection represented by the prime mover, and rain falling is better than rain rising. Again, as to the mechanism of this emulation, given that rain has no perception or conception of anything whatsoever, Aristotle posits a kind of magnetism uniting everything to the prime mover. This magnetic force is merely the ghost of animism past, though, a placeholder to make for Aristotle’s compromise between the mass religion and what he regarded as the absurdity of the purely mechanistic view of most of his contemporary intellectuals. The pseudomagnetism would be a means by which goodness itself draws everything towards its own good.

Probably the deepest problem with this quasi-theological basis of Aristotle’s teleology is that the prime mover seems ideal only to those of a philosophical persuasion. This prime mover is entirely self-absorbed and powerless, having no body but only an intellect which traps itself in its cogitations for eternity. This bloodless god is oblivious to the universe since it’s absorbed in its speculations. The problem is that even if philosophers would seek to emulate such a being, why suppose that everyone would, let alone that material events should be drawn to this ultimate intellect? If rain could speak, why would rain praise Aristotle’s prime mover? What has the one to do with the other? This raises Moore’s Open Question Argument. Even were there a magnetic force joining everything to the prime mover and compelling them to emulate the latter, why infer that the emulation would be good?

If God is alien to us, why assume he’s a higher, better sort of being? Why not a worse one?—a possibility entertained by Gnostics who distinguish the creator god (and architect of natural evil) from the true, transcendent deity that wouldn’t stoop to build anything (rather like Aristotle’s prime mover). How can we compare things that are perfectly alien to each other? If the prime mover is so removed from our plane of existence, why think there’s any normative continuity between nature and that loftiest of intellectuals? And of course, if the prime mover doesn’t transcend nature, because he’s a thinker, after all, Aristotle’s metaphysics becomes absurdly anthropocentric and is refuted by the flood of modern scientific findings of nature’s alienness and indifference to us, and of the parochialism of our intuitions and moral judgments. To the extent that Aristotle’s metaphysics is culturally elitist, he’s left with the question of whether the prime mover is objectively or only subjectively supreme. The activity of thinking deeply may not be good in itself, but only deemed ideal to those with a fitting sort of character. There’s no reason at all, beyond the archaic anthropocentric prejudice, to think that what’s best for all of us, let alone just for some of us, is best also for everything in the universe.

What I’ve shown is that Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics requires theism or animism for it to make sense. Without the prime mover, the goodness of natural tendencies would be inexplicable and gratuitous. But once the anthropocentrism is added, Aristotle’s metaphysics suffers from the familiar embarrassments of mass religion.

The Anthropocentrism of Aquinas’s Principle of Sufficient Reason

Now consider Aquinas’s Five Ways. Feser thinks new atheists ignore these theistic proofs, because they’re scared of facing up to the emptiness of atheistic philosophy. But instead, atheists might appeal to Lewis Mumford’s assessment in The Condition of Man:

[Aquinas’s] Summa Theologica is not a book; it is not even an encyclopedia. One cannot treat it as a literary achievement in the degree that one might refer in this fashion to the work of Aristotle, who is a model for academic exposition: the Summa is rather to be considered a work of engineering, conceived on a cyclopean scale, by one of the ablest technical minds of any age. Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, dreamed of motor-driven carriages and airships; but Thomas Aquinas erected a fabric that had nothing to equal it in technical organization until the great textile mills of the nineteenth century were designed and built. Even works of engineering may show imagination and esthetic command; but those are the last qualities to look for in the Summa. An immense textile factory, with a thousand looms, each bringing forth a uniform product—that is the closest image. (131-2)

Again, the Summa is a “complete museum of the medieval mind” (426), which is naturally why those with modern minds usually ignore it. “Only one proof is missing,” Mumford goes on to say. “Unfortunately, it is that on which every other part depends for both its function and its end: the proof of God’s existence…All Thomas Aquinas’s care is devoted to the superstructure, and that, accordingly, is solid and tight; it is the foundations that remain shaky” (133).

Feser contends that Aquinas does prove that God exists and that Christian theism supports Aristotelian teleology, by supplying the divine intentions that govern natural regularities. As in animism, the difference between the natural and the artificial is rendered illusory at best, since God creates everything else and assigns created things their functions, which is why they can work more or less well. As for the theistic proofs, the Oxford Jesuit Frederick Copleston summarizes them in his History of Philosophy:

St. Thomas gives five proofs, and among these five proofs he gives a certain preference to the first, to the extent at least of calling it the via manifestior. However, whatever we may think of this assertion, the fundamental proof is really the third proof or ‘way’, that from contingency. In the first proof the argument from contingency is applied to the special fact of motion or change, in the second proof to the order of causality or causal production, in the fourth proof to degrees of perfection and in the fifth proof to finality, to the co-operation of inorganic objects in the attainment of cosmic order. The argument from contingency itself is based on the fact that everything must have its sufficient reason, the reason why it exists[my emphasis]. Change or motion must have its sufficient reason in an unmoved mover, the series of secondary causes and effects in an uncaused cause, limited perfection in absolute perfection, and finality and order in nature in an Intelligence or Designer. (345-6, vol. II)

Indeed, this interpretation agrees, for the most part, with Mumford’s:

“Every part of the work is directed toward a single goal: life perfected in the sight of God, consummated in Eternity…In Thomism, the Catholic Church found a logical doctrine of evolution from nature to supernature: from the potentialities of this world of flux and change and imperfection to the actualities of complete realization in a state of rest and immobility in another world. This philosophy allowed for the fact of change within the temporal process: it accepted the imperfections and shortcomings of biography and history. But it transferred the ultimate meaning of life to an eternal realm in which the historic process was both consummated and rationally justified in terms that transcended mere human reason (my emphasis). (132)

Copleston goes on to raise the famous worry about whether Aquinas’s necessary being need be the same as the personal deity worshipped by Christians. It might seem “rather cavalier behaviour on St. Thomas’s part,” says Copleston, “to assume that the unmoved mover or the first cause or the necessary being is what we call God. Obviously if anything exists at all, there must be a necessary Being: thought must arrive at this conclusion, unless metaphysics is rejected altogether; but it is not so obvious that the necessary being must be the personal Being whom we call God” (342, my emphasis). I think we can ignore that question and focus on Copleston’s revealing off-hand remark about the principle of sufficient reason. You see, one feature of the medieval mind which Mumford speaks of is the scholastic presumption that metaphysics in general requires everything to have an ultimate reason why it exists. This is why Aquinas’s proofs ban the possibility of an infinite series of this or of that, since such a series would leave us without an ultimate metaphysical explanation of the whole hierarchy. But the principle of sufficient reason is itself anthropocentric, which is why Copleston is strictly correct when he says that “thought must arrive at this conclusion,” not that the rest of the world must give a damn what we think. To assume, on the contrary, that because we prefer not to live with doubt and we grasp at ultimate explanations even to the point of believing in myths and fairytales, the external world itself must bow to that predilection is to assume that the human search for reasons is objectively fundamental to the universe. The obvious reason why that dubious implication would be so, of course, is that God arranged for the symmetry. And so the scholastic understanding of metaphysics practically begs the theistic question at issue.

Metaphysics: Between Mythopoeic Fiction and Technoscientific Power

I’ve shown, then, that Aristotle’s teleological metaphysics and Aquinas’s philosophical proofs of God’s existence venture into anthropocentric territory. This is because they’re vestiges of the primordial mythopoeic worldview. That is, metaphysical speculation is an adult form of play with symbols that approximates the full-time childhood likely experienced by the Paleolithic people, before agriculture led to civilization and decadence which required sages and prophets and gurus to search their unconscious to recall the perennial spiritual outlook. Before the mystical traditions of the major religions recalled how to interpret the world as an organic unity, the mythopoeic nomads had already dissolved the distinction between subject and object, occupying a world enchanted by their childlike unleashing of the imagination.

We can define “reason” however we like, but the vast differences between scientific reason and metaphysical speculation will remain. Reason evolved not as a truth-seeking virtue, but as a Machiavellian form of calculation of hidden motives, which helps social animals outwit each other and negotiate their dominance hierarchies. Reason was a technique for overpowering competitors for resources, by extending experience in a mental map that generalizes and allows for the drawing up of elaborate plans for manipulating conditions to achieve a goal. Our ancient ancestors learned to apply that social instrumentalism to nature, so that natural processes, too, might be outwitted and technologically altered. That move from the social to the natural context was easy because the ancients tended to erase the distinction: they freely imagined that nature is entirely alive, projecting personal attributes onto natural forces and processes. So magic was a protoscientific enterprise in which early engineers sought to manipulate the gods with prayers, sacrifices, and other spells. This was protoscientific in that animism amounted to a model of the world that provided its users with some advantage over nature, if only because the personifications would have made the relatively ignorant ancients self-confident rather than terrified of the wilderness. Animism was instrumental also in that it was devised to extend the human community so that our ancestors could play their mind games on a wider field. Of course, animism is unfalsifiable and unscientific in various other ways, but it was a bold attempt to extend (social) experience to enable the ancients to understand the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.

Reason, then, began with instrumentalism, that is, with thinking of efficient means of achieving certain goals, and this holds also in the technological applications of modern science. But scientific reason includes the element of impersonality, which severs it from that prehistoric Machiavellianism. Reason now employs the imagination only by way of conceiving hypotheses so that the rational techniques can sort them in terms of their utility. An experiment tests the hypothesis, and if the experiment cheats in that it expresses its designer’s bias, the experiment is repeated by independent designers so that the psychological factor is eliminated. Next, the observations must be interpreted, and although this calls for some creativity, once again the community of scientists assesses models according to established criteria such as the model's simplicity, consistency, accuracy, fruitfulness, and so forth. Once again, truth isn’t crucial to understanding scientific rationality, since this kind of reason is thoroughly pragmatic. Scientists base their models on experience (observation) and use criticism to filter out the models that don’t work. A model that enjoys little empirical support will be deemed speculative. String theory, for example, has been harshly criticized on just this point, and its status as a scientific theory is in question. Indeed, in Mathematics: the Loss of Certainty, mathematician Morris Kline laments the fact that mathematics in general has become less and less empirical and more fragmented along with mathematized physical theories. The point is that reason, as it’s come to be defined in modern times largely by scientific progress, is supposed to be empirical and the more tenuous the connection to direct experience, the more tentative the conclusion that can be inferred, which is to say that scientific reason deals at best with probabilities, not with absolute truths. Even a model's probability is best interpreted as its utility in some instrumental endeavour, which is to say that scientific reason is more about power and control than truth in the sense of an agreement between symbols and facts.    

What, then, is rationality in metaphysics? Metaphysics deals with matters that are far beyond our experience, since metaphysical statements are the most grandiose generalizations. Nevertheless, such statements don’t seem subject to estimates of their probability, which is to say they’re not entertained as scientific models. They’re not testable hypotheses, but highly general stories we tell to round out our worldviews with a bid to making them ultimately coherent. For example, naturalists say there’s no such thing as miracles, ghosts, or gods that operate without any mechanism made of efficient causes. This generalization is philosophical, at best, because it can’t be scientifically tested. We can induce its probability based on accumulated experience, but the issue couldn’t be so easily decided, because what might seem miraculous might instead be the work of advanced technology that uses unknown mechanisms. Whether something counts as natural or as supernatural, then, is largely a definitional matter, which should be compared to the question of whether a new character fits into an established fictional universe. When Frank Herbert died, his son took on the role of adding to the science fictional universe of Dune, just as the task of continuing the Star Wars story in the movies has passed from George Lucas to J. J. Abrams. Whether fans welcome the later works into the fictional world that lives in their imagination isn’t a question of their rationality. What matters is whether the new story captivates them as much as the old one did. Likewise, naturalists and supernaturalists are divided not primarily by successes or failures in exercising reason, but by existential and aesthetic judgments about which story makes for the best backdrop for a person’s life.

Metaphysical generalizations are more like myths or artworks (abstract fictions or poems) than like scientific models. As such, they’re more like projections of the free-flowing imagination than like rigorous works of airtight logic. True, metaphysical systems can be more or less coherent as well as externally consistent with data, but the more such a system resembles a scientific model, the more likely it’s a piece of pseudoscience, that is, an untestable model that camouflages its fallacies of hastiness with a rigorous-sounding vocabulary. Metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy is clearly artistic, the project being a game in which pretentious adults can convince themselves they’re engaging in high-brow evaluation of prose poetry even though their art is more like a child’s finger painting than a civilized exercise in austere rationality. Can the metaphysician write her gibberish without laughing like a gleeful child?—that’s always the unknown in the case of postmodern metaphysics. As for the analytic tradition, which is presently naturalistic, here we veer in the other direction towards positivistic pseudoscience, or as Feser puts it, towards scientism. All that naturalistic metaphysics adds to the scientific theories themselves is an opportunity to speculate about how we’d interpret the naturalness of something in a bizarre, counterfactual scenario dreamed up in a so-called thought experiment. Could minds be zombies? Could AIs be minds? Could water exist on a Twin Earth? These sorts of entertaining questions are rather like debating whether King Kong could defeat Godzilla. Either way, metaphysics has become more like a game as it’s diverged from science.

But scholastic metaphysics enjoyed its heyday well before that branching occurred, so Aquinas and his followers can be excused for regarding their disputes with the utmost seriousness—as though they weren’t just making stuff up or concocting ad hocrationalizations at will for dogmas they were enjoined to believe anyway on the basis of faith in the Church’s authority and tradition. Feser has no such excuse. Aristotle’s teleology is a desiccated form of mass animism while Aquinas’s rational case for theism appeals to the anthropocentric principle of sufficient reason, treating metaphysics as absolute, as though the world were forced to pay attention to our stories. The proper evaluation of Thomism is therefore aesthetic, in which case the worldview’s antiquity counts decisively against it, since the fiction’s metaphors have become stale and clichéd. I say this without being facetious, since the scientismist indeed errs in thinking that scientific rationality is the only part of knowledge—assuming we can construe cognition broadly as the entire worldview that supports our rationally justified beliefs. We need stories and even religions to fill in the blanks, because we’re not purely rational animals. But not all stories or religions are created equal, and if Catholics pride themselves on their scholastic tradition’s pseudorationality, that’s all the more reason to think their religion fails to tell a satisfying story—just as we should be suspicious of a science fiction novel that reads more like a physics textbook than like a character-driven narrative. When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he meant that theism is no longer compelling as fiction in the modern world, so that we need a new grand narrative even though it’s hard to see how any could top the whopper of supernaturalism.

This is why I’m genuinely uninterested in determining whether Aquinas’s theistic proofs are sound, for example. Deductive arguments are most useful as conceptual analyses or as algorithms that reliably sort through a list of alternatives. But the more the premises refer to abstract entities that are beyond our experience, the less the logical connections between the statements are relevant. The argument won’t be refuted so much as rendered inconclusive by way of meaninglessness; that is, the issue of whether the logic rationally justifies the conclusion will itself be due to a category error. Aquinas’s arguments may be logically valid, but whether the premises are true is anyone’s guess because they’re abstruse. They can be interpreted in many different ways and have been so. That’s because these arguments are works of art for a rarefied audience, properly speaking.

For example, his arguments speak of the possibility of there being nothing in existence. Pure nonbeing is no part of anyone’s experience, so we can only speculate about how nothingness might relate to natural beings. Again, Aquinas speaks of the possibility of an infinite hierarchy of beings. But no one understands the nature of an actually infinite entity as opposed to a potential infinity like the process of counting the natural numbers. Finally, Aquinas refers to the need to speak of “some being having of itself its own necessity,” which everyone allegedly calls God even though most people think of God as a very old man with a white beard. How should we interpret the idea of something that just has to exist? Maybe this is merely a roundabout way of saying that if God didn’t exist, lots of people would be very, very sad, so that we can’t even tolerate the supposition of atheism; that is, atheism would be taboo. Again, necessary being is no part of ordinary human experience, so arguing about these metaphysical matters is like being a fanboy about whether you have to destroy a zombie’s brain to kill it for good. The entities in question are fictional, albeit abstract rather than concrete. Thus, you can define the terms however you like just as, when confronted by a blank canvas, you can paint whatever you can imagine. Unfortunately for Feser, imagination outstrips our understanding. Just because you can imagine something or write down a series of words, doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about. Thus, the entire question of Thomism’s rationality is beside the point.

The Superiority of Cosmicist Fiction

The upshot is that Feser is in no position to stand for Thomism, because the fictional universe in which that tradition counts as wisdom calls for an alien, virtually mythopoeic mindset. Pockets of that mindset remain in fundamentalist preserves, but modernists have stolen the fundamentalist's thunder, because those myths inspired modernists to build the colossus of democratic, capitalistic, free-thinking society. True, the Scholastics took themselves to be engaged in a rational activity. Indeed, they loved to debate, but their debate took place within the confines of Catholicism. They presupposed that rational discoveries would agree with the faith-based Christian creed, and they never had to test that assumption because their metaphysical disputes were just games. If a line of argument appeared to lead towards heresy, the terms could always be redefined because their religious universe of discourse was perfectly imaginary. Even were we to favour perennialism, we postmodernists (hypermodernists) who are more cynical than the medievalists would have to do so by treating the Thomistic domestication of classical wisdom as compelling fiction, not as quasi-science. 

But Feser wants it both ways: he wants Thomistic philosophy to have the dignity of science even though that philosophy is supposed to be nonscientific, which is what falsifies scientism for him. Instead, scientism is false because the platonic conception of knowledge is naïve; in particular, Truth has little to do with rationality, because reason is pragmatic and so we should speak of technoscience, not of purely theoretical science as the search for inapplicable discoveries. That latter sort of “science” is in danger of being no such thing, as in mathematized physics, as Lee Smolin and other physicists are coming to appreciate. So knowledge requires a useful set of beliefs that empowers us, and philosophy and religion are free to add coherence to the supporting worldview. That’s why scientism is dubious. But Feser is wrong to want metaphysics to be more like a science than an art, a kind of rational reflection rather than a comforting tall tale. Ultimately, the trouble is that Catholicism itself is by now hollow, like Aristotle’s teleology so that the elite Catholic has little conception of the pleasure to be derived from treating a myth as a mesmerizing work of fiction. This Catholic is something of a nihilist, while the mobs of more fervent “Catholics” are the impoverished and often illiterate folks in Central and South America, Africa, and Mexico whose actual religious beliefs are only nominally Catholic.  

In any case, as I said, the postmodern alternative to Thomism which does more justice to perennialism is something like Lovecraft’s cosmicism, which explicitly denies that there’s perfect agreement between what there can be in the world and what we can think—in short, between ontology and epistemology. Our capacity to understand things may not overlap with what can exist; moreover, that point can be generalized so that the universe can include dark zones that are necessarily unfathomable to all possible creatures. As implied by Mumford’s summary of Thomistic philosophy, the world’s consummation in Eternity should surpass reason and require faith, since the next life would transcend our cognitive capacities.

Is speaking of such dark zones, then, pointless? No, since we could suspect or even know that there are such zones, although we obviously couldn’t know more than that. This proof of the cosmicist concept moots the scholastic principle of sufficient reason. Moreover, science has shown not just that cosmicism is possible but that it’s probable, since the deeper we look into nature, the more alien it seems. Think of quantum mechanics, dark matter and energy, black holes, the Big Bang singularity, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and so on and so forth. Also, the probability of the world’s indifference to the human demand for sufficient (ultimate) reason has an ethical implication, which is that if we wish to grow out of our childish phase in which we overcome the world’s alienness by projecting human nature onto it, we should be humbled as well as horrified. Humility and a proper horror for what it now means to speak of the natural as opposed to the artificial—those are hallmarks of enlightenment.

Most new atheists are not cosmicists and so they’re not so enlightened. Instead, they’re liberal secular humanists, which means they too, like Aquinas and Feser, glorify human beings. The Thomist does so by presupposing that the world must be as small as our understanding, while the humanist does so by affirming the supreme value of human animals. Thomism has been reduced to an obsolete fiction, while liberal humanism is undermined by the fact that the humanist’s commitment to science and to rationality obliges her to suffer also the horror of cosmicism, which negates the liberal’s feel-good values. Few postmodern atheists discharge that obligation, since they undertake the quest for earthly happiness through wealth, power, popularity, sex, and the like. That quest is as grotesque as Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills, in view of the zeitgeist that decenters us. Our happiness is as unbecoming as the soldiers’ stopping in the middle of WWI to celebrate a birthday even as they’re shot to pieces, as depicted in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. All atheists should be on a permanent war footing with the monstrous natural universe. The infamous atheist bus ad encourages everyone to “stop worrying and enjoy your life,” but atheists who best understand the difference between the natural and the artificial should ascetically resist at least some of their natural impulses, so as to avoid being contaminated by the world’s undead drive towards oblivion. At least, that would amount to an existentially authentic life inspired by a worthy and fitting grand narrative.

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