What if God is horrifying?

[dr. locrian]

Great piece over at Matt's excellent site, The Teeming Brain:

What if God is horrifying

H.P. Lovecraft and Ridley Scott's Prometheus, among other things, are discussed.

[Revenant]

If?

[Michael]

Schopenhauer was the first one I read who made me seriously think about this. If the phenomenal is familiar and obvious, by definition the noumenal or "Divine" must be utterly alien, strange, and nightmarish. Matt does an outstanding job exploring the darker side of the concept of the divine.

I have to admit that, reading the full article in the Baffler by Barbara Ehrenreich, linked to on Matt's website, I expected something more substantial.

The whole tone of her piece sets her up as not only the judge of belief in a benevolent God, but the jury and executioner too. In her column, “The Missionary Position”, she doesn't even establish a coherent statement of first principles by defining what she means by “God”, who, she says, could easily just be “an alternative life-form or alien species”. In short, she seriously maintains God could be nothing more than the equivalent of a cosmic Ming the Merciless. It is really silly not to acknowledge that a creature of the cosmos cannot have created the cosmos, or to put it another way, that a part of something cannot be greater than the whole.

When she seems to want to raise the intellectual bar (though thereby she contradicts her previous “possible” definition) and deal with the idea of the Absolute Mystery, or ultimate ground of being, the thing becomes even more confusing. She contradicts her own argument. In advancing the idea that the supreme being must be perfect goodness or as she puts it “unimaginably perfect” she criticises the idea, not on intrinsic philosophical validity, but on psychological grounds of supposed “human vanity” or an “infantile sense of entitlement.”

She obviously does not think that God is supreme perfection, i.e. total goodness in Himself, but cannot bring herself to use the word “evil” instead since she knows it would lay her open to refutation by turning her own argument back against her, so has to use the Orwellian word “un-good”. A horrifying God is an evil God. A loving God is a good God. I admit there may be a case for arguing that human-beings, when faced directly with ultimate goodness itself, may find it horrifying from our perspective, but only in the sense that all secrets of the heart are laid bare, all motives to be accounted for, and all wrongs to be righted.

This example of “un-good” waffle makes her case fall down like a house of cards. Athiests are always very reluctant to use the word “evil”. It's very amusing to see the idea of a supreme being drawing applause from some atheists (who otherwise bang on about the non-existence of God) because, if his nature is theorised as “un-good”, they can then accept the basic proposition of an absolute being without any qualms. Indeed, it shows their position is nonsensical and all about, not the actual existence, but the nature of God. A God that is ultimate goodness? Intolerable monotheistic delusion! But a God that is wicked and horrifying? Why yes! Now they can believe there's something to be said for this idea of monotheism!

“If anything undermines the notion of a benevolent deity, it has to be the ubiquity of predation in the human and non-human animal worlds.” In other words, were all the jackals not jackals but instead little lambs all would be right with the world and belief in God would then be acceptable. But Man is a free moral agent. He can choose between doing good or evil. This is the mystery of freewill. Moreover the exercise of freewill requires a morally neutral universe. A universe wherein doing wrong was made impossible would mean there was no way of determining the good from the bad. But for animals, their instincts are inseparable from our morally neutral universe. They are not at all like human beings in their spiritual capabilities.

She goes on to lament the decline of belief in the goddesses (which I suppose one could caricature as manifestations of the clichéd “Earth-Mother”). Whether the Earth-Mother is yet another possible (matriarchal) manifestation of a horrifying supreme being, in Ms. Ehrenreich's worldview, is a matter for speculation, since she says “the unforgivable crime of the post-axial religions is to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of hierarchy and justice.” I do not quite see how those who hold authority cannot recognise, except where their moral compass is off, that their very position entails the responsibility to be benevolent. A father or mother have a duty of care to their children which is intrinsic to propagation. Then, again, Ms. Ehrenreich is a vocal supporter of abortion on purely economic grounds, so her moral compass is alien to mine. Furthermore, those secular tyrants in history who have claimed to be against all hierarchical authority, and act only in the name of the people or (more often) the proletariat, have been even more bloodthirsty and much less restrained by ( what Ms. Ehrenreich would term, I suppose, “bourgeois”) religious morality.

Indeed, it's the very idea of a goodness not determined by herself and her socialism that Ms. Ehrenreich cannot stomach. Her praise of the Axial theory because it is “refreshingly free of sweetness and optimism” is hardly grounds for an impartial analysis of historical fact.

She says “Why should a Being whose purview encompasses the entire universe share the tribal values of a particular group of terrestrial primates?” This is the equivalent of saying the Incarnation was really one chimp trying to improve the manners of some other chimps at an absurd tea-party. We are not mere “primates”, except biologically, but spiritual human-beings and demonstrably exceptional compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Really, the answer to her question is simple: God is not an invention of Man. Our distinctiveness comes from God. We alone partake of the measure of his glory. Evolution is wholly beside the point. Where our bodies came from does not affect what our souls were made for.

It is logically consistent that humanity, which is not outside space and time, would not be able to discern all the ways of God. Moreover, it is also true that the Bible is a historical series of progressive revelations to humanity and not dictated directly by God.

Obviously orthodoxy would contend that Jesus Christ is the final revelation of God's mercy to humanity. Christ did not exist to bring men to a supreme God of terror. Certainly he went through the Passion, with all its doubt and suffering, but this was an act of self-sacrifice for others; the Creator crucified.

Ms. Ehrenreich's recent book about her mystical experience at the age of seventeen (she finally concludes I understand, it was not just “all in her head”) and which she has only recently decided to talk about (she is a fourth-generation atheist apparently) forms an interesting sidelight to her spiritual views as expressed in her Baffler article. At no point does she consider her mystical experience, which is described vividly and movingly in terms like “ineffable” and “transcendent” as well as “the world flamed into life”, as indicative of a religious epiphany. However, she does use it as a plea for science (excuse my eyebrows raising at a category error) to undertake an investigation of the phenomena, one which she regards as being indicative of interaction with another kind of mind outside her own. Quite how this positive and powerful mystical experience of hers factors into her insistence she also “knows that there is no such thing as a monotheistic benevolent God” is not clear, except where she says her other experiences (those that are non-mystical presumably) inform her it is so. What I cannot understand is why her mystical experience was not one of terror, loathing and disgust, in short, the sort of “revelation” one would expect from a “horrifying God” or some other supreme demoniacal trickster?

Mark S.

Links:

The Missionary Position - The Baffler

Barbara Ehrenreich Interview on Living With a Wild God | The New Republic

[ChildofOldLeech]

"I think we're property." - Charles Fort

"A man who was afflicted with a terrible disease complained to Rabbi Israel that his suffering interfered with his learning and praying. The Rabbi put his hand on his shoulder and said: "How do you know, friend, which is more pleasing to God, your studying or your suffering?" - Jewish Proverb

"My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’." - Richard Attenborough

"It's not a bug, it's a feature." - Programmer Saying

". . . Look at it this way: if you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then it would have nothing to cry about. That's like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it's our tears, Stan, that give God his great power." - South Park

"It was terrible; it blasted him with its awareness. As it moved it drained the life from each person in turn; it ate the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate more with an endless appetite. It hated; he felt its hate. It loathed; he felt its loathing for everyone present -- in fact he shared its loathing. All at once he and everyone else in the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen slug carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the time coming directly toward him. . . He saw the trail of stepped-on, mashed men and women remnants behind it; he saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies; he heard them attempting speech.
I know who you are, Tung Chien thought to himself. You, the supreme head of the worldwide Party structure. You, who destroy whatever living object you touch; I see that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to eat them -- I see you astride the plain which to you is Earth, plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear any time, devour anything; you engineer life and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that.
He thought, You are God." - 'Faith of Our Fathers', Philip K. Dick

[ChildofOldLeech]

Also:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton

". . . The only thing an advanced species would want from us would be our meat and bones.” - 'Mysterium Tremendum', Laird Barron

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”
- King Lear, William Shakespeare

Quote Originally Posted by ChildofOldLeech

". . . The only thing an advanced species would want from us would be our meat and bones.” - 'Mysterium Tremendum', Laird Barron

A Laird Barron quote! I am confounded. My knees are wobbling at the thought of his potential intellectual and cultural magnificence. Move aside ye lowly Barbara Ehrenreich.



Mark S.

[ChildofOldLeech]

On the Possibility of the Deus Deceptor:
"Thus I will suppose not a supremely good God, the source of truth, but rather an Evil Genius, as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me. I will regard the heavens, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things as nothing but the deceptive games of my dreams, with which he lays snares for my credulity. I will regard myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, no senses, but as nevertheless falsely believing I possess all these things." - Descartes

"Duck Amuck":

Bugs Bunny Episode 112 | Cartoon Full Episode - YouTube

[Druidic]

There's an amusing Tom Waits line, "There ain't no Devil, just God when he's drunk." Don't know if that's an original Waits line or an old saying.

[Stu]

Just this week I had a short story accepted that explores the question of how to reconcile an all-loving God with the idea that God might actually be horrifying. I was quite pleased with what I'd written until I read this thread, now I feel as if I barely scratched the surface of the issues involved.