God A Guide for the Perplexed KEITH WARD The author would like to express his gratitude to Mel Thompson and Mary Starkey for their valuable and helpful Contents suggestions regarding this book. © Keith Ward 2002 First published in hardback by Oneworld in 2002 This paperback edition published in 2013 1. A feeling for the gods 1 All rights reserved Copyright under the Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library God, literalism and poetry 1; A world full of gods 4; Descartes and the cosmic machine 7; Wordsworth and Blake: the gods and ISBN 978-1-85168-973-6 poetic imagination 9; Con¯ict among the gods 14; Friedrich ebook ISBN: 978-1-78074-122-2 Schleiermacher: a Romantic account of the gods 18; Rudolf Otto: Typeset by LaserScript, Mitcham, UK the sense of the numinous 24; Martin Buber: life as meeting 31; Printed and bound in Britain by CPI Mackays, Croydon UK Epilogue: the testimony of a secularist 33 Oneworld Publications 10 Bloomsbury Street 2. Beyond the gods 36 London WC1B 3SR Prophets and seers 36; The prophets of Israel and monotheism 39; Basil, Gregory Palamas and Maimonides: the apophatic way 44; Thomas Aquinas: the simplicity of God 50; The ®ve ways of demonstrating God 53; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 57; The doctrine of analogy 60; Three mystics 62 3. The love that moves the sun 67 The 613 commandments 67; Pigs and other animals 69; The two great commandments 71; The Ten Commandments 73; Jesus and the Law 78; Calvin and the commandments 80; Faith and Contents 1. A feeling for the gods 1 God, literalism and poetry 1; A world full of gods 4; Descartes and the cosmic machine 7; Wordsworth and Blake: the gods and poetic imagination 9; Con¯ict among the gods 14; Friedrich Schleiermacher: a Romantic account of the gods 18; Rudolf Otto: the sense of the numinous 24; Martin Buber: life as meeting 31; Epilogue: the testimony of a secularist 33 2. Beyond the gods 36 Prophets and seers 36; The prophets of Israel and monotheism 39; Basil, Gregory Palamas and Maimonides: the apophatic way 44; Thomas Aquinas: the simplicity of God 50; The ®ve ways of demonstrating God 53; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 57; The doctrine of analogy 60; Three mystics 62 3. The love that moves the sun 67 The 613 commandments 67; Pigs and other animals 69; The two great commandments 71; The Ten Commandments 73; Jesus and the Law 78; Calvin and the commandments 80; Faith and God: A Guide for the Perplexed Contents works 83; Theistic morality as ful®lling God's purpose 85; Kant, 7. The personal ground of being 219 the categorical imperative and faith 88; God as creative freedom, affective knowledge and illimitable love 96 God as omnipotent person 219; The problem of evil 223; Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: beyond good and 4. The God of the philosophers 101 evil 224; Omniscience and creative freedom 227; God: person or personal? 228; Persons as relational 231; The idea of the God and Job 101; Plato and the gods 103; The vision of the Trinity 234; The revelatory roots of religion 237; Conclusion: Good 107; Appearance and reality 110; Augustine and creation seven ways of thinking about God 241 ex nihilo 114; Aristotle and the Perfect Being 117; Augustine and Platonism 122; Anselm and Necessary Being 125; Evil, necessity Bibliography 255 and the free-will defence 129; Creation as a timeless act 133; Faith and understanding 136 Acknowledgements 257 Index 258 5. The poet of the world 140 The timeless and immutable God 140; The rejection of Platonism 144; Hegel and the philosophy of Absolute Spirit 148; Marx and the dialectic of history 152; Pantheism and panentheism 158; Time and creativity 162; The redemption of suffering 164; History and the purposive cosmos 167; Process philosophy 171; The collapse of the metaphysical vision 175 6. The darkness between stars 179 Pascal: faith and scepticism 179; A.J. Ayer: the death of metaphysics 182; Scienti®c hypotheses and existential questions 185; Kierkegaard: truth as subjectivity 188; Sartre: freedom from a repressive God 191; Heidegger and Kierkegaard: the absolute paradox 193; Tillich: religious symbols 196; Wittgenstein: pictures of human life 199; Religious language and forms of life 202; Religion and `seeing-as' 205; Spirituality without belief 209; Non-realism and God 212; The silence of the heart 215 vi vii God: A Guide for the Perplexed Contents works 83; Theistic morality as ful®lling God's purpose 85; Kant, 7. The personal ground of being 219 the categorical imperative and faith 88; God as creative freedom, affective knowledge and illimitable love 96 God as omnipotent person 219; The problem of evil 223; Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: beyond good and 4. The God of the philosophers 101 evil 224; Omniscience and creative freedom 227; God: person or personal? 228; Persons as relational 231; The idea of the God and Job 101; Plato and the gods 103; The vision of the Trinity 234; The revelatory roots of religion 237; Conclusion: Good 107; Appearance and reality 110; Augustine and creation seven ways of thinking about God 241 ex nihilo 114; Aristotle and the Perfect Being 117; Augustine and Platonism 122; Anselm and Necessary Being 125; Evil, necessity Bibliography 255 and the free-will defence 129; Creation as a timeless act 133; Faith and understanding 136 Acknowledgements 257 Index 258 5. The poet of the world 140 The timeless and immutable God 140; The rejection of Platonism 144; Hegel and the philosophy of Absolute Spirit 148; Marx and the dialectic of history 152; Pantheism and panentheism 158; Time and creativity 162; The redemption of suffering 164; History and the purposive cosmos 167; Process philosophy 171; The collapse of the metaphysical vision 175 6. The darkness between stars 179 Pascal: faith and scepticism 179; A.J. Ayer: the death of metaphysics 182; Scienti®c hypotheses and existential questions 185; Kierkegaard: truth as subjectivity 188; Sartre: freedom from a repressive God 191; Heidegger and Kierkegaard: the absolute paradox 193; Tillich: religious symbols 196; Wittgenstein: pictures of human life 199; Religious language and forms of life 202; Religion and `seeing-as' 205; Spirituality without belief 209; Non-realism and God 212; The silence of the heart 215 vi vii 1 A feeling for the gods In which the reader will discover what happened in Book One of the Iliad, will discover many curious facts about Greek gods and goddesses, will remark a strange similarity between English Romantic poets and German theologians, will come to suspect that Descartes, though he doubted everything, did not quite doubt enough, will ®nd Schleiermacher lying on the bosom of the in®nite world, will discover what terri®ed Professor Otto, and why certain German professors talk to trees, will be forced to distinguish between symbolic and literal speech, and may develop a feeling for the gods. God, literalism and poetry Traditional images of God seem to have lost their appeal in modern American and European culture. It is not that God's existence has been disproved ± philosophers continue to debate the proofs inconclusively, and no informed and honest observer of the philosophical scene really thinks a case has been established either way, or ever will be. No, God has simply become boring and irrelevant. We no longer care for big men with white beards. We no longer feel the weight of tremendous guilt that drove the Pilgrim onto his Progress. Jesus has sunk into the pages of irrecoverable history, and it seems impossible to draw him out again in a 1 1 A feeling for the gods In which the reader will discover what happened in Book One of the Iliad, will discover many curious facts about Greek gods and goddesses, will remark a strange similarity between English Romantic poets and German theologians, will come to suspect that Descartes, though he doubted everything, did not quite doubt enough, will ®nd Schleiermacher lying on the bosom of the in®nite world, will discover what terri®ed Professor Otto, and why certain German professors talk to trees, will be forced to distinguish between symbolic and literal speech, and may develop a feeling for the gods. God, literalism and poetry Traditional images of God seem to have lost their appeal in modern American and European culture. It is not that God's existence has been disproved ± philosophers continue to debate the proofs inconclusively, and no informed and honest observer of the philosophical scene really thinks a case has been established either way, or ever will be. No, God has simply become boring and irrelevant. We no longer care for big men with white beards. We no longer feel the weight of tremendous guilt that drove the Pilgrim onto his Progress. Jesus has sunk into the pages of irrecoverable history, and it seems impossible to draw him out again in a 1 God: A Guide for the Perplexed A Feeling for the Gods new resurrection which might make him a powerful image of in®nity special divine effects have ever been recorded in the laboratories of for more than a tiny handful of our contemporaries. science, and science explains the world very well without God. So that The sad thing ± and it is sad, for it is a loss of a kind of perception, God, the God who ought to be another fact that we can record and the atrophy of a distinctively human way of seeing ± is that there seems document, seems to have disappeared from the modern world. to be nothing to replace such images, to show us how `to be one with This prompts the thought that maybe what has gone wrong is the the in®nite in the midst of the ®nite and to be eternal in a moment' idea of God as a sort of literal extra fact.