Review: "God Is No Thing" by Rupert Shortt – an excellent response to New Atheism [View all]

[rug]

Some high-profile atheists insist on arguing against propositions that no serious Christian writer would endorse. This is a spirited corrective, covering the origins of the universe to the use of the Bible.

Rowan Williams
Thursday 24 March 2016 03.30 EDT

In one of his letters, CS Lewis repeats the story of an earnest atheistical school teacher instructing her young charges that all forms of animal life derived from the higher apes, under the impression that she was teaching them Darwinism. The anecdote is probably too good to be true, but it is a reminder that in any decently reasonable argument it helps to know what exactly it is that is being attacked or defended. Anyone writing off Darwinism on the grounds that the unfortunate teacher’s nonsense was what Darwinists “really” believed would not even begin to engage with Darwin’s views; there has to be some genuine attention to what is being said and to what it is like to hold it to be true – not what it feels like (though that may help) but how it “works”, what connections it sets up, what new twists it may give to familiar vocabulary, what new words and patterns of concepts it actually generates.

And this is what Rupert Shortt demands for Christian theology. He is not the first to note with exasperation that some high-profile atheists insist on arguing against propositions that no serious Christian writer would endorse. But he has provided in this brief book one of the most concise and sophisticated of recent protests against this tendency. He patiently explains, for example, what’s wrong with at least one argument still advanced as a clincher by anti-religious polemicists. Everything must have a cause and the cause of everything must be God: so the atheist paraphrases the religious case. But, the atheist continues, if everything has a cause, so must God. Argument over: the idea of God cannot function so as to avoid an infinite regress, so the religious case falls to the ground.

But Shortt points out that, whether or not you accept the argument in anything like this form (and he notes that recent analytical philosophers of religion have found some plausible ways of restating it), the secular advocate has misunderstood a basic point. Whatever can be said of God, God cannot by definition be another item in any series, another “thing” (hence the book’s title). The claim made by religious philosophers of a certain kind is not that God can be invoked to plug a gap, but that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being.

This latter may be an arguable position but it is not self-evidently the only or the best mode of talking about the origins of the universe out of “nothing”. And Shortt is rightly merciless towards those who wriggle out of difficulties by slipping disguised constants into the “nothingness” out of which the universe comes – primitive electrical charges, quantum fields, timeless laws or whatever. He quotes the British scholar Denys Turner to good effect on the fact that “nothing” ought to mean what it says – “no process … no random fluctuations … no explanatory law of emergence”. The problem of origins cannot be defined out of existence, and the highly complex notion of creation by an act that (unlike finite agency) is not triggered or conditioned needs to be argued with in its own terms, not reduced to the mythical picture of a Very Large Person doing something a bit like what we normally do, only bigger.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/24/god-no-thing-rupert-shortt-review-response-new-atheism