Gods and Gopniks

Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance intoexecrable prose. At least, that is its purest and most minimal essence. Thereare, of course, practitioners of the trade who possess talents of a higherorder—the rare ability, say, to produce complex sentences and coherentparagraphs—and they tend to occupy the more elevated caste of “intellectualjournalists.” These, however, are rather like “whores with hearts of gold”:more misty figments of tender fantasy than concrete objects of empiricalexperience. Most journalism of ideas is little more than a form of emptygarrulousness, incessant gossip about half-heard rumors and half-formedopinions, an intense specialization in diffuse generalizations. It is somethingwe all do at social gatherings—creating ephemeral connections with strangers bychattering vacuously about things of which we know nothing—miraculouslytransformed into a vocation.

All right, I suppose that all sounds a little spiteful. Itake it back. I am perfectly aware that there are quite a few men and women ofconsiderable gifts laboring in the fields of journalism, and that some figuresof genuine literary eminence have risen from the ranks of the profession. Myaffection for H. L. Mencken verges on the idolatrous. I can think of ahalf-dozen writers I admire who began (and in some cases ended) their careerswriting for the popular press. And, after all, I am not entirely certain how Ishould classify what I am doing in writing a regular column. Still, it seemsfair to me to note that what a journalist does for a living does not, initself, require him or her to be a scholar, an artist, a philosopher, or evenparticularly good at sorting through abstract ideas. And, really, it is hardboth to meet a regular deadline and also to pause long enough to learn anythingnew, or waste much time even following one’s own arguments.

Which brings me to Adam Gopnik, and specifically his NewYorker article of February 17, “Bigger Than Phil”—the immediate occasion ofall the rude remarks that went coursing through my mind and spilling out ontothe page overhead. Ostensibly a survey of recently published books on (vaguelyspeaking) theism and atheism, it is actually an almost perfect distillation ofeverything most depressingly vapid about the cogitatively indolent secularismof late modern society. This is no particular reflection on Gopnik’sintelligence—he is bright enough, surely—but only on that atmosphere ofcomplacent ignorance that seems to be the native element of so many of today’scultured unbelievers. The article is intellectually trivial, but perhapsculturally portentous.

Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western historywhen, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief andunbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understandwhat the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do notunderstand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammarsof belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheistsand skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questionsof the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind ofhabitual intellectual listlessness.

For full disclosure’s sake, I should note that my mostrecent book is among those Gopnik discusses (sort of). He obviously did notread it—at least not as far as, say, the introduction—given the bizarredescription he provides of its argument. “As the explanations get moredesperately minute, the apologies get ever vaster,” he writes. “David BentleyHart’s recent ‘The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss’ (Yale)doesn’t even attempt to make God the unmoved mover, the Big Banger who got theparty started; instead, it roots the proof of his existence in theexistence of the universe itself. Since you can explain the universe only bymeans of some other bit of the universe, why is there a universe (or many ofthem)? The answer to this unanswerable question is God. He stands outsideeverything, ‘the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing cansubtract,’ the ultimate ground of being. This notion, maximalist in conception,is minimalist in effect. . . . A God who communicates with no one andcauses nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology.”

Excuse the sigh of vexation; I cannot help it. Setting asidethe nonsense about desperately minute explanations, which cannot possibly berelevant to any argument of mine, the God described in my book is the creatorof everything, who communicates with all persons in a constant and general way,and with many individuals in an episodic and special way. Whatever originalityI might claim for certain aspects of my argument, its metaphysical content isentirely and ecstatically derivative: pure “classical theism,” as found in theCappadocians, Augustine, Denys, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Mulla Sadra, IbnArabi, Shankara, Ramanuja, Philo, Moses Maimonides . . . well,basically, just about every significant theistic philosopher in human history.(Not to get too recherché here, but one can find most of it in the RomanCatholic catechism.)

Then again, reading the book would not necessarily havehelped Gopnik much. Anyone who imagines that the propositions “God is thesource of all existence” and “God creates everything” are antitheses, or thatdivine transcendence involves God simply standing “outside everything,” or thatdefining God as the Absolute precludes defining him as the Unmoved Mover,enjoys an understanding of philosophical tradition that is something less thanluxuriant. Fair enough. He is in another line of work, and probably should haveavoided these issues altogether. The real problem with his article is not itsdialectical deficiencies so much as its casual inanities. The dazzling momentof truth comes when Gopnik claims that what unbelievers “really have now” is

amonopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They havethis monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge overcrystal-ball makers. . . . We know that men were not invented. . .; that the earth is not the center of the universe. . .; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’sexistence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with thelaws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that thereis none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.

Did Gopnik bother to read what he was writing there? I askonly because it is so colossally silly. If my dog were to utter such words, Ishould be deeply disappointed in my dog’s powers of reasoning. If my salad atlunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such an opinion, my only thought wouldbe “What a very stupid salad.” Before all else, there is the preposteroustemerity of the proprietary claim; it is like some fugitive from a local asylumappearing at the door to tell you that “all this realm” is his inalienablefeudal appanage and that you must evacuate the premises forthwith. Preciselyhow does materialism (which is just a metaphysical postulate, of extremelydubious logical coherence) entail exclusive ownership of scientific knowledge?Does Gopnik think he can assert rights here denied to Galileo, Kepler, andNewton? Or to Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, ErwinSchrödinger, Paul Dirac, Anthony Zee, John Barrow, Freeman Dyson, OwenGingerich, John Polkinghorne, Paul Davies, Stephen Barr, Francis Collins, SimonConway Morris, and (yes) Albert Einstein?

The tiny, thwarted blastema of a thought that seems to belurking in Gopnik’s words is the notion that we have only lately discoveredthat God cannot be found as a discrete physical object or force within themanifold of nature, and that this is somehow a staggering blow to “thathypothesis”—though, curiously enough, Augustine or Philo or Ramanuja (and soon) could have told him as much: God is not a natural phenomenon. Is it reallyso difficult to grasp that the classical concept of God has always occupied alogical space that cannot be approached from the necessarily limitedperspective of natural science?

It does not matter. Nothing is happening here. Theconversation has never begun. The current vogue in atheism is probablyreducible to three rather sordidly ordinary realities: the mechanisticmetaphysics inherited from the seventeenth century, the banal voluntarism thatis the inevitable concomitant of late capitalist consumerism, and the quietfascism of Western cultural supremacism (that is, the assumption that allcultures that do not consent to the late modern Western vision of reality aremerely retrograde, unenlightened, and in need of intellectual correction andmany more Blu-ray players). Everything else is idle chatter—and we live in anage of idle chatter. Lay the blame where you will: the internet, 940 televisionchannels, social media, the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup, whatever youlike. Almost all public discourse is now instantaneous, fluently aimless,deeply uninformed, and immune to logical rigor. What I find so dismal aboutGopnik’s article is the thought that it represents not the worst of popularsecularist thinking, but the best. Principled unbelief was once a philosophicalpassion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now,perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say,gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice. Perhaps this really is the waythe argument ends—not with a bang but a whimper.