Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and god knows there is no justice in the world. --Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments not convinced that there is a god, and following my own logic, all I can really say is that if these proofs alone are the only source of my knowledge of god, I am tending towards an atheist position. However, because I say that these arguments don’t hold water is not to say that god does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal--my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgement of Evil as moving them closer to believing in god. I am going to call this exploration “stories that we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” They claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness as well as their coherence also depends on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment we can set this aside, and simply say that we have experience of evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent god, this presents a problem, but is it also an opportunity to prove the existence of god?

The relationship between evil and the existence of god is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity, The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency back to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic host. The existence of Evil should convince us that god exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all powerful Jehovah. In the myth I learned, before he fell Satan was called Lucifer, or light-bearer, a name which indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appear much in the Hebrew Bible with the major exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels as well as Revelations, it was Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) who put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the god-in-the-sky myth is that god creates an existential problem by allowing evil--a la Job--why do the bad prosper while good people suffer. For the pious this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: god only wants to make us better, and this requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also on some very real level entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it--a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. Not a minor flirtation with some new age religion. However, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably I need to look no farther for the reason why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in god is acknowledgement that god exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. She says this myth contains the roots of the long horrendous history of antisemitism. Pagles says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I am going to use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of god’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion::Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extend this odd belief to Lucifer extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself, ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I am calling “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you, and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she further compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and delivered an unredeemable rag? That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

Angelina, according to the Psalmist (8.5), is fashioned after the image of god, “a little less than the angels” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined that you, Angelina and the dry cleaner were standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Certainly the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Perhaps Judge Judy, even though not Solomon, she is Jewish and has a no nonsense tone, could set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt really violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of personal investment in that little black dress, but I am going to use it to examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We also know from experience that the verbal tongue lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum 5,000 dollar fine and you are able to collect it, is not really sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that given similar circumstances almost everyone except the super rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings and that’s really just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help increase the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I really think. There really are bad people. The only justice in the human realm has been devised by us humans to order ourselves and create some space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we might even entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world that humans inhabit. There is no god. He/She/It disappeared with that little black dress.

A Buddhist addresses arguments for the existence of god.

During our last meeting Avery Dulles said to me: “I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course he knew the answer—most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in the realm of Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm, and for Avery the existence of a godhead, a personal deity, was central along with expressing or “confessing” your assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of that bond, I felt as though Avery was trying to pry out an answer that would undermine my Buddhist “beliefs.” His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was nonetheless serious. He may have been trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because for him, as for most serious Christians, assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because honestly I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations.

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or to return to my original thoughts about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions about God that Jesuits liked to argue about, for example with M. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists.

In a way this inquiry is a belated response to my friend. I am calling it “A Buddhist looks at the arguments for the existence of god.” In my view, examining the question of God's existence can only be done in terms of the question as posed and not in some universal ontological context of “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” We’re back to questions and answers. Spoiler alert: I will be arguing in favor of what I take to be the basic Buddhist non-theistic response.


“Why is there something?” (Hint: The question is itself un canard, French slang for "a hoax" or "a fabrication")

Firstly let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something (as opposed to nothing)?” is a religious question. It is not scientific or psychological. It might be philosophical, but I will need to set some parameters. My characterization is not going to win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some even call it “the Big Question,’ encompassing questions of belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers say that it deserves, even demands an answer. There is “Something” but we are going to define exactly what that something is. Or get as close as we can.

I am going to argue that it is not a good question. It is concocted, and deserves hair splitting questions directed at the disambiguation of all possible answers. It is poorly formulated which skews any answer. It’s really just a canard designed to introduce the question of god into ordinary discourse and untimely leads us down a rabbit hole. Any answer is at best an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. (See Ed MacKinnon’s paper: the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics).

If we examine the way that a child learns about the world, his or her first question might be “what is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask “why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic.”1 In our case “Something” becomes “identified meanings,” vaguely about god. This is much like the neo-Platonists identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues in order to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “something” as ontology and demand justification for its existence.

And because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Why “why is something?” is not a good question. We can begin with the concept of negation. It posits “not-Nothing.” However, there is no definition of “nothing” other than it is not all that presents itself to our minds, and even that is just my extrapolation or inference. (And it serves no purpose in the argument other than to get god in the door).

“Something rather than nothing” is not ordinary language. The way we normally speak does not include the inherent logical claim that we cannot know that something is something unless we posit its negation. We have to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is of course absurd, and certainly not the ordinary turn of words. Joni Mitchell teaches us that “you don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “what’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Nothing?”

Ms. Mitchell is pointing to a strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, another problem to which he will return later). At this point it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg et al blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blank with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again I would point to the neo-platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

I hesitate to use this analogy but why not, we are all adults. When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress (and I hung on every word) if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said that this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” to bridge the gap between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be.” And I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is what we are doing--parsing the verb “to be.” There has “to be” something out there or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s go back to our little Freddy or Frederica learning that Fido is a dog, and that there are some useful ways of behaving that will help avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding and training and learning to gauge Fido’s moods, as well as how to get him into his dog house if need be. But the question for me remains how do we get from there to “why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?”

How did this become the religious question and why is it so important to get the correct answer? And to lay out the direction of my paper. I’m going to ask a Buddhist before Thomas Aquinas though I might use him as my reference point when I try to describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. My intention is to just see if I can hold them as an object of meditation, in a good Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.


1 Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Foggy Father Ed McKinnon

When I was in the Jesuit Philosophate (1968-1969/70), which just meant fulfilling some canonical requirement for Thomistic philosophy, I lived with five other young Jesuits in a small house near Boston College. After being locked down in Shadowbrook for a bit more than two years with strict rules covering every aspect of life every hour of the day, we were enjoying some freedom. From time to time we’d sneak out to a well known art house in Kenmore Square near the Boston Red Socks ball park. I think it was called Kenmore Square but it might have been The Fine Arts Theater.. 

The reason that I mention art house movies is a very funny story that popped up about one of my Jesuit Philosophy teachers, Ed MacKinnon, or as we used to call him affectionately Foggy MacKinnon. 

One night we went to a forbidden movie, Pasolinin’s Teorema. It became the inspiration for Nick Nolte’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” another wonderful film. In Pasolini’s film a mysterious character shows up at an upper class family villa in Milan and begins by sleeping with the maid, then the son, then the mother, then the father. He was of course a Jesus figure. It was Pasolini, what do you expect? Anyway it was long enough for an intermission, and when we went for popcorn, there was Foggy MacKinnon standing in the lobby looking rather bemused.. Rather than a rebuke for sneaking out, he just said, “Thank God they don’t have any pets.”

https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6460

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teorema

Ed MacKinnon, whom we affectionately called “Foggy,” was one of the promising young philosophy professors at Weston and Boston College. After my novitiate at Shadowbrook, I went to Philosophy and for reasons not altogether clear to me, I was also ready to pick a fight. Imagine. Ed had a Ph.D in physics from Saint Louis University, and had done several years of postdoc work at Yale in philosophy. He was supposed to form a bridge between science and faith. I had no idea what he was talking about. Of course I wouldn't admit it--actually was too busy doing art to spend enough time in class to ask any useful questions. So I missed that boat entirely. My loss

Once Ed went to the minister at Weston and asked for a car to drive to a conference, I think at McGill. What would be better preparation for delivering an important paper than a relaxing drive through the Adirondacks to Canada. He arrived, parked the car, delivered the paper, answered questions and then left quickly, grabbed a cab to the airport and boarded a flight back to Logan. The minister came to his room when he heard that Ed had returned to get the keys for the car. Ed said “What car?” I may have some of the details wrong but I think the story is basically correct. 

When I was in California I heard that Ed had gone to another conference about resolving the conflicting claims of science and theology, or as he says, “examines an influential argument that the intelligibility of the universe requires a creator.” (Why is There Something? Philosophia 51 (2): 835-855. 2023. He is still dealing with the problem today). We were told that he laid out the positions carefully, and then announced that after studying the problem for a number of years, he found the agnostic position persuasive and was going to leave the Jesuits.

I do not know if this story is correct, but it’s a great story. I did meet up with him one more time. I think it was at an event that Fred Tollini organized for New Englanders and Jesuit friends who had lived together at Virgil Barber House near the Yale campus. Ed had just taken a new position at Cal Hayward where he spent his entire career after BC. And he’d married. I am pretty sure that I asked about his current position regarding the Church, as I had just left and publicly said that I’d tossed out the whole shebang. He demurred, but offered that he was now very happy. He’d met a woman who had been a nun at a support group for former religious. He called it a “Religious Lonely Hearts Club.” I didn’t say that I had met one or two former Jesuits in gay bars so maybe I could borrow the designation. Maybe he was not so hung up on the conundrum between faith and science. Maybe he was just lonely and decided that he wanted to marry. 

End of story. Retelling them is how I pass long lonely nights in a remote Indian village.

https://philpeople.org/profiles/edward-mackinnon

Allen and Phil's last conversation

I can’t say that I had a front row seat, but I got as close as he allowed, even to his friends. I was present at all their meetings when Allen came to Hartford Street during the years that I lived with Phil. Perhaps a few others acted as his amanuensis, but I picked up the task whenever I could, knowing that it was a rare privilege. I answered the door and made the tea. It happened in what were our public room so it was appropriate to be there, but I was polite, kept my mouth shut and listened carefully. 

They were giants and yet in some ways they acted like kids on a sandlot. Of course they were older so the shouting was replaced with lots of pauses, keywords that brought a chuckle, “do you remember…” followed by the briefest notation said more than enough. They were old friends who never had enough time together, old friends at the end of their lives who realized that there was never enough time but what did remain was precious and had to be enough. They always seemed to pick up exactly where they left off. I sat trying to hear where there was perhaps new insight, but their love for one another, the appreciation and respect between them was so thick it didn’t matter.

Their meetings were like clockwork. Phil was always getting ready to go to the zendo as he did twice every day, and that took at least an hour. Allen would arrive at 3:30, 4 at the latest. It never went much past 5:30. Allen would always politely excuse himself saying that other friends were waiting. Allen was a creature of the night, and Phil only operated in daylight where he had a fighting chance of avoiding the sharp edges of furniture and the unexpected drop of steps. Dinner or lunch for some reason were never included. Perhaps it was the noise of a restaurant, or that they wanted to get to the part that mattered, being with one another.

Allen had become what he always wanted, a public figure whose opinion was sought after, a poet whose work was respected, a firebrand who fought for things he really believed in, even if it was Nambla. I cannot say if Phil was happy being a Zen monk with the same certainty. I never got the sense that he had really found a true vocation, but it was a job he relished, and he did it so thoroughly and thoughtfully that he appeared happy though there was always some dogged anger that would appear when you least expected it. There were other rewards for him, like really discovering his true nature which is not an insignificant prize. 

Phil had a small circle of devoted friends, and they were faithful. He was a great raconteur and lively companion. They would come and visit, Lou Hartman, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure,

but I only saw Phil cry twice. By the time that Issan took his last breath, it was the end of such a long difficult process that there were not many tears. Our breathing, all of us had been as hard as his as we sat by his bed. We were too worn out to cry. No tears.

But when Phil  told me the story of the search party for Lew; how Gary had organized a posse looking and hoping that he was not lost, his eyes filled with tears. He loved the guy. 

He loved the way he used words, and they had the same mistress, all words in the English dictionary. Phil is the only man I know who actually read the whole thing, page after page, line after line. 

There was no trace of Lew”s body. Maybe he’d jumped into a hidden car and escaped to Mexico. No, that was just wishful thinking  He had killed himself or fallen into a deep ravine. He and Gary had both known he was depressed. No words could help.

Tears. Just the memory and tears. It was still raw.

I was with Phil when Allen phoned to say that he was going to die. My memory says that we were sitting in the living room at Hartford Street, but I actually think we were in Phil’s small apartment in the basement of the hospice, in the small room that opened onto the garden. That is where Phil’s phone was, and I am certain that Allen used that number. Phil had been expecting a call. Allen was due to visit and Phil would have known the exact dates. Allen would have also known when was the best time to reach Phil whose schedule was almost set in stone. He smiled broadly when he said hello and then fell silent. His face lost all expression.

There were very few words, “”I’m so sorry. Yes I understand that you won’t be able to travel to the West Coast again. Give my love to Gregory. I love you. Good bye.” There are times when even words fail. They were both poets and both Buddhists so they’d pushed words’ limits. 

He put the receiver down and told me that Allen was going to die, that he had cancer and there was no hope. Then he started to cry and asked to be left alone. I knew that there were tears on both ends of the call. I told him that I was available to get anything he needed and shifted into the Maitri’s office which was in the adjacent room. At 5:30 he emerged from his bedroom in his robes and silently began up the stairs towards the zendo. Sitting was at 6.