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The Living-Dead and the Existence of God

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The Living-Dead and the Existence of God Danish YearbookofPhilosophy, Vol. 47(2012),65-86 THE LIVING-DEAD AND THE EXISTENCE OF GOD ANDREAS MELSON GREGERSEN AND S0REN Rns Roskilde University Abstract The authors claim that Bruno Latour's re-definition of scientific practices as ontological construction processes enables an alternative understanding of the existence and reality of God. As a consequence a Latourian inspired God breaks down the a/theism-dichotomy by denying that belief is central to the God question. In this process Nietzsche is transformed into a new church father just as a polytheistic space opens up in so far as gods can be constructed differ­ ently. The second part of the paper demonstrates how a Latourian God can be said to be religious, and how our understanding of religious practices changes accordingly. This part draws on the thoughts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose views on God as suffering makes it possible to claim that a Latourian God comes to life in death. As a living-dead, a Latourian God is capable of re-ori­ enting the religious towards this life and creating what the authors call a 'broth­ erhood of actors' . - "God is dead" is not the same thing as "God does not exist." It is even the total opposite. (Paul Ricoeur). - ... that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, who said, "He Him­ self took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses." (Matt 8: 17). The twenty-first century has seen the God question returning with what Rich­ ard Kearney calls "a new sense ofurgency" (Kearney 2011, xi). A new wave of atheists - including scientists and scholars like Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and Daniel Dennett - are vehemently (and with great public interest) attacking the traditional religious notion of a metaphysical, transcendent, Om­ ni-God, thus fermenting the ground for yet another vital debate between athe­ ists and theists. However, the question still remains: does the successful critic ofthe existence ofa transcendental Omni-God amount to the death ofGod? Or, to the death ofreligion?l 66 ANDREAS MELSON GREGERSEN AND S0REN Rns When Nietzsche, for instance, famously proclaimed that 'God is dead' he was, after all, as Heidegger has shown, only proclaiming the death of meta­ physics, which means that he was proclaiming the death of the unchangeable suprasensory world up there, understood as the real world compared to the changeable sensory world down here (Heidegger 1977, 61). We might even say that the 'death of God', as stated by Nietzsche, is a withdrawal from any notion of the absolute. That is certainly a critic of the theistic notion of God as an absolute authority, as a higher reality, as verum esse, but it is not, according to Gianni Vattimo, a dismissal of the potential existence of god or gods alto­ gether (Vattimo 2002, 86-87). It is only the metaphysical God, the causa sui, which is history. It is only the God, as Heidegger said, before whom you can neither dance nor pray to that dies (Heidegger 1969, 72). Instead of being a purely negative endeavour -like the new atheists - Nietzsche's announcement can be read as installing a positive project as weIl; he leaves us with the chal­ lenge of thinking about God in a post-metaphysical way - and to this we may add a post-metaphysical way that can still be taken as religious. If this chal­ lenge is somewhat implicit in Nietzsche's thought, it is taken up amongst Christian philosophers and theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wit­ nessed the blatant cruelty ofWorld War II at first-hand (Bonhoeffer was exe­ cuted in a German prison camp by the Nazis in 1945). The injustice ofWW II made it impossible for Bonhoeffer to uphold the conventional theistic notion of the transcendental Omni-God (Kearney 2011, 65-66). That however did not amount to a total rejection ofGod, for Bonhoeffer it only meant that we needed to find a worldly interpretation (i.e. post-metaphysical interpretation) of God (Bonhoeffer 2001, l34). Only by doing that, would we return to "the God of the Bible" (l34). Returning to Bonhoeffer's own answer later, the thesis ofthis paper is that Bruno Latour can be read as introducing a post-metaphysical way ofunderstanding God (delimited to the Christian tradition).2 Introducing Latour, who is primarily known for his work with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), is not only in­ teresting due to the lack of attention that the Latour-reception has shown to­ wards the question of God in Latours thinking.3 It is also interesting because Latour can be read as enabling a third position towards the God question. Like the new atheists, Latour rejects the notion of a theistic Omni-God, but unlike the new atheists this does not amount to a rejection ofthe reality and existence of God. Instead, Latour's re-definition of scientific practices as ontological construction processes may be used to transform the existence of God into a .
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