Am I Actually a Theist?

God forbid! Well, I shouldn't have thought so, but Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long has me thinking again. Or, to be more precise, he again has me thinking that the theist/atheist dichotomy is false, like so many hoary philosophical dichotomies (e.g., realism versus nominalism), in that it can be transcended or synthesized. (See his paper "God and Human Attitudes: 33 Years Later".)

Long's paper is a look at James Rachels's "God and Human Attitudes" (1971), in which Rachels argued that God by definition would have to be worthy of worship, yet "[n]o being could possibly be a fitting object of worship" because that would require us to subordinate our moral agency and our consciences. Yet, Long argues, medieval Scholastics regarded God as

identical with truth, being, and goodness; these were not merely properties that God possessed, they were what God was.... 

God is something like the logical structure of reality. On this view, the requirements of morality, as well as of logic, are neither the products of an arbitrary divine will nor external constraints on such a will, but are simply part of God’s nature. So when the conscientious moral agent tries to figure out what morality requires, this is the same thing as trying to figure out what God requires; thus no division arises between acting from duty and acting from worship.

So, given that God is the logical structure of reality, Long writes:

[W]hile there is a sense in which there exists just the sort of thing the theists believe in, there is another sense in which, as the atheists claim, this thing is nothing at all. It’s customary to think of theism and atheism as contradictories; but once we see, as Rachels’ argument shows us, that God can only be the logical structure of reality, then the most defensible version of theism and the most defensible version of atheism turn out not to contradict each other at all--turn out, in fact, to be one and the same position. 

Imagine that!

If God is just the logical structure of reality (I'm thinking Spinoza), where does that leave us logical atheists? Philosophers have argued about the status of the phrase logical structure of reality. Wittgenstein, who took logic very seriously, thought statements about logic were actually empty. He wrote:

A statement cannot be concerned with the logical structure of the world, for in order for a statement to be possible at all, in order for a proposition to be CAPABLE of making SENSE, the world must already have just the logical structure it has. The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

I think he meant that we can't step outside of our logic-saturated language and examine the logical structure of the world independently; any statements we make are going to be tautological ("empty"), but we can't help that. Anything else we might try to say about the logical structure will make no sense. Long writes:

Since neither talk of an illogical world nor talk of illogical thought can be made sense of, the whole question [of logic conceived as a constraint on either the world or our minds] cannot be meaningfully asked and so may be dismissed in good conscience.

Thus it’s true that, in one sense, the logical structure of reality is nothing at all--and it’s in that sense that the position I’ve defended counts as a kind of atheism. But in another sense the logical structure of reality is a very peculiar sort of nothing-at-all. 

Then he writes:

What Rachels’ argument proves, then, is that logical truth, and only logical truth, is worthy of worship. But we’ve also seen that logical truth possesses all the other attributes requisite to Godhood--it is the highest and best being, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and so on. What else can we infer from Rachels’ argument, then, but that logical truth is indeed God, and so (since we cannot doubt the existence of logical truth) that God exists?

He goes on to conclude, "33 years ago, James Rachels set out to show that nothing is worthy of worship. He succeeded in showing that nothing but moral principle is worthy of worship. He thereby called us to the worship of something that is not a something, but not a nothing either."

Albert Einstein comes to mind. In 1929 Einstein responded to a telegram from a perhaps querulous Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, "I believe in Spinoza’s god, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." (The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza famously equated God with nature, yet insisted on speaking of God.)

Atheists and theists will immediately come up with a host of objections to Long's case--all of which he's anticipated. So check out the paper. It's quite a lot of fun.