The interesting idea, which is hardly new, is that one's concept of God changes and that these changes aren't best explained by God changing but, rather, by the various social, political and economic forces which shape the way we think. As much as a Christian may want to resist the idea that the concept of God changes, it's hardly possible for anyone who has seriously read the Bible. Sometimes Christians like to try to draw a distinction between the Old and New Testament, with the intended result being a distancing oneself from the (admittedly) strange and sometimes downright immoral aspects of the Old Testament. But as far as I can tell this distinction is unprincipled and doesn't really explain why there should be such a radical dichotomy between the two. Moreover, if such a distinction is admitted then Christians are already accepting an evolution since Christianity did, after all, come from Judaism. And the crisp distinction between the New and Old Testaments (or covenants) is surely more messy than some Christians would like to have it. (I see those such as N. T. Wright as a significant influence here in noting the important continuities between Judaism and early Christian thought.)
So it seems to me as if we must admit that our concept of God evolves. The question is: What best accounts for that evolution? I think there are two main kinds of response. 1) Socio-politico-economic forces determine our concept of God. 2) Our concept of God is being brought into alignment with how God truly is by revelation from God.
I submit that the two responses are compatible in a certain sense. Accepting the first response does not commit one to the denial of the existence of God. Rather, one can admit that our concepts are culturally conditioned (which seems the side of good sense) while also maintaining that God works within religious traditions to create more tolerant, morally good people. The revelation, however, would be limited. God wouldn't so much reveal his own nature except in the fact that he reveals what is good and helps to bring about the will towards the good. Wright (Robert, not Tom) argues that we do, in fact, see this kind of moral progress within the different religions and that because of it our concept of God changes to match our more enlightened moral beliefs. I say yes, yes, but that this doesn't exclude that part of what is involved in this process of moral transformation is God himself. This too is something that he is friendly to, as far as I can tell, although he is squirmish about God because of the connotations that terms brings. He does use the word "transcendent" which is a word that John Hick uses to basically the same end. The position briefly suggested here is basically what Hick defends in his An Interpretation of Religion.
Silentio—
ReplyDeleteI think this idea of God evolving, or the evolution of the idea of God, makes a lot of sense. It seems obvious to me that our moral standards have changed over recorded history, and the religious conception of what God is, and does, has changed accordingly. At least for Christianity this is true, and it’s definitely a sore spot for fundamentalist evangelicals. For instance, the famous genocide of the Canaanites is sometimes defended by evangelicals by saying that the Canaanites were into really bad stuff, like child sacrifice, so God was judging them. But, of course, this is an absurd defense. A ‘good’ God would order the killing of every man, woman, and *child* to punish the killing of children? Either, 1) this ‘good’ God never did any such thing [in which case inerrancy goes out the window], or 2) this God was in a young, adolescent like state of moral development, and has now matured ethically [along with human civilizations], or 3) this is no ‘good’ God.
I think Wright also has a good point about the presence of ‘primitive religion’ in the Old Testament. He defines ‘primitive religion’ as “the religion of nonliterate people broadly, whether hunter-gatherer or agrarian…[which has a] deep reverence for raw superstition.” His examples in the OT are Saul going to a medium to talk to the spirit of Samuel, Elisha’s preparation of King Joash for battle against the Arameans (there’s a strange numerology thing going on there), and the polytheistic flavor of the deities in Genesis that come down and have sex with attractive females. But the most interesting point Wright makes about primitive religion is that it basically solves the problem of evil. Or, more accurately, the problem of evil doesn’t arise until monotheism shows up, where there’s supposed to be an all powerful *and* all good God. In primitive religion, you just have the spirits in the trees and earth and wind, and when they act up they act up. All you can do is try to appease them. These spirits and gods aren’t supposed to be good or make any sense. Which, of course, is what Yahweh acts like sometimes…
Wright’s book has some interesting things to say about our question, how much are we historically indebted to religion for our morality? In order to speculate about primitive religions (which are by definition pre-historic: taking place before the written record) Wright assumes that our analysis of present hunter-gatherer societies will give us the best clues about what primeval human religion was like and how it developed. Wright builds on the work of 19th and 20th century anthropologists to back up the suggestion that belief in spirits and gods arose out of a need to understand the world. Prehistoric humans developed an animistic belief system which ascribed the attributes of life to stuff that wasn’t alive, like trees and rivers and clouds and stars. And, according to Wright, this fairly comprehensive set of supernatural beliefs about the world probably didn’t have a moral dimension.
ReplyDeletePg. 23-24 “[I]n hunter-gatherer societies, gods by and large don’t help solve moral problems that would exist in their absence…Edward Tylor noted in 1874 that the religions of ‘savage’ societies were ‘almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainstream of practical religion.’ Tylor wasn’t saying that savages lack morality. He stressed that the moral standards of savages are generally ‘well-defined and praiseworthy.’ It’s just that ‘these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion,’ rather than on a religious foundation. As the ethnographer Lorna Marshall wrote in 1962, after observing the relationship between the !Kung and the great god Gaona: ‘Man’s wrong-doings against man is not left to Gao!na’s punishment nor is it considered to be his concern. Man corrects or avenges such wrong-doings himself in his social context. Gao!na punishes people for his own reasons, which are sometimes quite obscure.’”
Wright suggests this is because hunter-gatherers are living in the environment and social structure that our ancestors lived in when language and culture and morality arose. There is no anonymity. There is no need to have an invisible eye to judge your actions morally—the village will do that.
So, it seems that our moral sense and our concepts of god may have separate origins historically. Wright is saying that religions have been getting closer to moral and spiritual truths. To me, this means we have the ability/obligation to hold religions to high standards (because they are asking for it, right?), and it also means that religion isn’t necessary to have access to, and to live out, moral and ‘spiritual’ truths.
[Also, I don’t think this is in contradiction to the Anscombe essay that Silentio referenced: http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SzCMT/mmp.html. As far as I can tell, anyway.]