Revising God

The atheists, theists, and agnostics are wrong

In 1882, a German man said something that resonated with people of his era. It’s a sentence so over-quoted that I’m almost embarrassed to mention it. But here I am.

Nietzsche’s statement on God captured a spirit dominating the modern period—an age characterized by industrialized slaughter, nation-states of ever-increasing power, and boundless trust in the powers of science. But we are no longer in modernity. And, as of recently it seems, we are not in postmodernity either.

So how do Nietzsche’s words land if you proclaim them at the beginning of our yet-to-be-named days? I’m sure we all have our opinions on that. As for myself, I keep asking a question I didn’t consider before: which God was it that died?

I don’t understand why I didn’t demand an answer to this question earlier. Clearly, humanity has had many different conceptions of gods over the ages. Why did I readily accept that there is a canonical notion of God that I can substitute in Nietzsche’s statement? Is it possible that, in the future, we realize that only a particular conception of God has acquired mortal wounds? A conception from antiquity with no right to eternal dominance.

Given this, why did I never consider that our view of God can be revised in light of two millennia’s worth of accumulated knowledge—and, equally important, in light of a refined understanding of what knowledge can and cannot be?

I used to be a hardcore atheist. These days I jokingly say that theists, atheists, and agnostics are all wrong. But it’s only a half-joke. Theists say that “God exists” is a True statement; atheists say it’s False; agnostics say that it’s either True or False, but we don’t have good evidence either way. But the problem is that “God exists” is neither True nor False. Or, at least, it isn’t when operating with the conception that most of us have for these words. These conceptions demand correspondences with the world of logical propositions—correspondences that, crucially, only sometimes work. And even then, the correspondence rules between reality and propositions are approximate. In God is NaN is lay out in detail what the problem is

There’s an intimidating philosophical name established for the position I, at first glance, appear to have adopted: theological noncognitivism. It is described by Wikipedia as follows:

Theological noncognitivism is the non-theist position that religious language, particularly theological terminology such as 'God', is not intelligible or meaningful, and thus sentences like 'God exists' are cognitively meaningless. This would also imply that sentences like the negation of 'God exists' or 'God does not exist' are likewise meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false.

While I am sympathetic, and complain about these things in God is NaN, I’m worried we make a second mistake if we declare ourselves proud theological noncognitivists. The problem lies here:

… are meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false.

The equating of meaning with truth or falsity, when operating with a notion of True and False coming from logic, is a mistake. So at present, while sympathetic to the position that statements about the gods using logic and Bayesian reasoning are futile, I am starting to believe that the gods are real in the only sense of real that I am able to find any meaning in—the one of the pragmatists. You just gotta be sure not to fool yourself into thinking you have some kind of neat absolute mathematical proposition whose mapping onto the real world can be constructed in a way where we all agree, so that the mathematical notions of True and False are applicable.

William James, one of the great pragmatists, expresses the attitude that is driving my current thinking better than anyone. Referring to pragmatism as “she”, he says in is famous lectures Pragmatism given in Boston in 1906

You see by this what I meant when I called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler and said, borrowing the word from Papini, that he unstiffens our theories. She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence. It follows that in the religious field she is at a great advantage both over positivistic empiricism, with its anti-theological bias, and over religious rationalism, with its exclusive interest in the remote, the noble, the simple, and the abstract in the way of conception.

In short, she widens the field of search for God. Rationalism sticks to logic and the empyrean. Empiricism sticks to the external senses. Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses, and to count the humblest and most personal experiences. She will count mystical experiences if they have practical consequences. She will take a God who lives in the very dirt of private fact-if that should seem a likely place to find him.

Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God's existence? She could see no meaning in treating as 'not true' a notion that was pragmatically so successful. What other kind of truth could there be, for her, than all this agreement with concrete reality?

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