In Defense of Enlightenment

Forming a pantheistic treaty between reason and religion

By Joseph Wright of Derby - National Gallery, London, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

It has become fashionable to talk about the New Atheist movement of the early 2000s as an embarrassing failure. It overreached, failed both to recognize the philosophical arguments for God and the overwhelming fact that God supplies us with an essential sense of meaning and purpose.

I’ve seen this in my personal life—I’ve felt it myself—but it certainly seems in the air these days almost everywhere, and a decent counterpoint to it doesn’t seem to have really emerged yet. In a recent discussion held by UnHerd, Alex O’Connor, the last and probably best warrior of the New Atheists (a title I’m sure he would reject, but which sticks to him nonetheless), could barely manage to say a single critical thing about the Christian revival which seems to have appeared in our midst, except that it may not be as compatible with liberal, Enlightenment values as (some of) its adherents claim.

If even O’Connor admits that he wants to be a Christian, I think it’s safe to say Christianity has certainly caught secularism on the back foot, and surely the claims that non-belief in God doesn’t offer necessary meaning or place individuals into a comprehensible world are all true.

And yet, I’m not a Christian. I’m a pantheist.

I’ve always hated that word. I think the “pa-” sound just makes it sound like some species of paganism, and suggests that I’m a guy with a long beard and weird tattoos which signal my attempt to reclaim some pre-Roman heritage, LARPing as a viking or druid in my spare time. I’m embarrassed to admit I avoided the term for a lot longer than I should have solely to avoid that association. If someone knows of a prettier word, please let me know.

But of course, paganism is the idea that there are many Gods; pantheism is more or less the complete opposite of this position. There are not many Gods. There’s God and nothing other than God. This is a problem for Christians, who believe there’s God, and also something else. It’s a problem for atheists, who believe there’s no God.

But the truth is, if what our newly minted Christian friends want is to preserve a sense of meaning in the world, and also to morally ground the principles of liberalism—of tolerance, freedom of speech, rule of law, and mixed government—then it’s not Christianity they need. We need the synthesis achieved in the Enlightenment between the spiritual power of religious faith, and the secular power of reason. In other words, we need pantheism.¹

On the Issue of God

On God’s existence, the atheists are barely right at all; the Christians are almost right. God is the unmoved mover, that which is self-caused and exists by virtue of His own nature. If such a thing doesn’t exist, nothing can exist. Nothing, of course, can’t exist. So, God² exists. Up to this point, the Christians are winning the argument, and the atheists need to admit it.

This is so ridiculously obvious that it feels like it barely bears mentioning when stated aloud. How much ink has been spilled in trying to deny and defend what is simply a definition? That which necessarily exists, necessarily exists. So why on earth would anyone reject it? If you’re still trying to deny this, please stop. You’re missing the point.

The real reason the atheists reject God, as conceived by Christians, is not by virtue of its definition. It’s in virtue of the supposed difference between God and the world. Atheists accept that the world exists. What they reject is that something which is of a fundamentally different nature from the world, also exists. Christians, in other words, haven’t considered the full implications of what a necessary being must actually be. (To be fair, the atheists haven’t either.)

If God is supposed to be an eternal, purely actual being, infinite, omniscient, and perfectly good, and we are supposed to be something other than a manifestation of this Being, we have a problem: how, if this Being exists (as He surely does), could there possibly be room for anything else? The atheists mostly don’t realize that this is the problem, but I believe this is where the intuition that there is a problem stems.

To be concrete: The problem isn’t how we know that God exists, it’s how we know that something other than God exists. What is God’s nature, such that we are not a part of it, and what are we, anyway? The real debate which needs to be had is not between atheism vs. theism; it is between monism and pluralism, between the belief in one³ and the belief in many. The revival of this debate—which is, in fact, the oldest and perhaps the only debate, since all follows from it—is long overdue.

The surprising thing that emerges, as we work our way through the arguments for God, is that insofar as these arguments make sense and are irrefutable, they are irrefutable proof of a monist God. Insofar as they are confused and difficult to grasp, they are proof of a God which is everything, minus the world and some other stuff.

On the Issue of Faith

Suppose I’m right on the God point. What about faith? What if I feel, in the deepest recesses of my mind, that the God of the Bible is the one true God, that Jesus literally rose from the dead, and that he truly sits at this moment at the right hand of the Father? What if this is far more satisfying to me, gives my life meaning, gives me a window into the sacred, and the afterlife, and explains to me the difference between right and wrong?

If it does these things for you, that’s wonderful, and I have no interest in tearing away your faith, forcing you into a logical corner where you’re forced to renounce a beautiful truth for a hard-nosed, brutal reality. People who want to do this usually haven’t the faintest idea how horrible of a request they’re making. Rather, I want to invite you to the possibility that there is a larger, greater truth, and that this old cannard about how faith and reason are incompatible with each other is simply a premature admission of defeat. Follow either as far as it will go, and you will arrive at the same destination. Don’t lay down just yet: consider that you may have further to go.

Indeed, Christian reader, I believe you are already right on the most important point: that there is one God, infinite and all-knowing, and absolutely perfect in all aspects. You believe that from the nature of this God follows the difference between right and wrong, and that through knowing God, we can know how to live blessed lives, oriented towards the transcendent. I believe this as well.

But before we get too carried away, let’s not neglect the atheists. You believe the only thing that exists is the world. Most of you think the only things that exist are bodies, which is, well, kind of right. Either way, one thing you certainly don’t believe in is the idea that there is a God which speaks to man, performs miracles which violate the laws of nature, and which decrees moral laws which are true by virtue of His command. You do not believe anyone died and then came back to life, and you do not believe that the world was created ex nihilo. We are also on the same page here.

Both of you seem to have to make a sacrifice in this treaty, but I believe this is only a seeming. The Christian cannot believe it possible that the laws of nature, which are in fact the laws of God’s infinite and eternal nature, could be violated-that a body which died could come back to life. The atheist must accept that the world, which she has known and which seems entirely ordinary and unremarkable, and often even horrible, is in fact utterly perfect and divine in all aspects.

Really, what seems to both of you to have been opposite problems is in fact the same one: the Christian believes that God is manifested in the violation of the laws of nature. The atheist believes that God, if He existed, would have to be manifested in the violation of the laws of nature.

But if God’s nature is always manifested in the eternal and immutable laws of nature, and by them proven beyond all doubt, the problem evaporates. God’s existence and infinite power is proven by the very absence of miracles in both cases, and every moment of nature’s uninhibited perfection is proof of God. The miracles by which the Christian seeks to prove God are not needed to attain this end; the self-sufficiency and immutability of nature’s laws which the atheist sought to preserve are preserved as well.

But the Christian obviously wants to believe in the miracles. She wants to believe that God manipulates the world in accordance with his divine will, and does so to correct for the world’s inherent ugliness and imperfection, which it manifests by deviating from His will. But I believe this is derived from the belief that the world, by not bending itself to our own desires, reveals its imperfection, and that God is needed to correct it, to bend it into shape. This is one and the same as claiming that God’s creation is imperfect, a belief which could only follow from an imperfection or absence in His nature. This is a perilous contradiction, accusing God of an imperfection which compels him to periodically repair his work.

So, I claim, the desire to affirm miracles is one with the desire to claim that God is imperfect, and the Christian cannot do this. Her view must ascend beyond the belief in imperfection, or the belief in nothing acting upon something, to one wherein God is perfect, and thus all that follows from God’s nature is perfect as well. The Christian and the atheist must find a common ground in pantheism, where no divide exists between God and the world.

On the Issue of Politics

I have begun to touch the question of how the pantheist conception of God conditions the nature of morals, and consequently of politics. I have claimed that the world is everywhere and always perfect, that it in fact expresses the eternal and immutable nature of God, and that its apparent imperfection stems only from a difference between the course of the laws of nature, and our desires as individuals.

This seems unacceptable to a moral realist position, in which there is good and bad, right and wrong, some things that should happen and others that should not, and in which the uninterrupted course of nature, therefore, sometimes involves things which are wrong. If nature is perfect, this suggests, we should not be able to say anything in it is wrong, evil, or other than good. I wish to show that this is not true, and that in an importantly qualified and moderating way, we can make strong moral claims under this view. Indeed, we have no choice. Again, I seek a compromise between the apparent moral realism of Christianity, and the moral relativism (or even the much-feared nihilism) of atheism.

This will yield an argument for the desirability of liberal democracy and the values of tolerance, free expression, rule of law, and mixed government. I hope this is a view which both Christians and atheists (from whom I’m sure I lost any allegiances in the last section, despite my attempts at reconciliation) will at least find intriguing and worth considering.

God’s nature is immutable, and this means that every expression of His nature is also immutable. All of nature, therefore, expresses God’s essence, which is a single unbroken act of existence. This existence is expressed in absolutely infinite ways (since God is Being, and there is no other Being to negate it).

Each individual is thus God’s being, affirming its own existence. But for God each expression is part of an indivisible infinity of expressions, and no one is any better or worse than any other, as “better” and “worse” are concepts that exist only in relation to our goals, referring to a movement from a lesser to a greater perfection or vice versa. God, being absolutely perfect, is indifferent, and “better” or “worse”, “good” or “bad,” exist in God only in relation to our own striving to persist as a particular expression of God’s nature. Each individual, in other words, is self-interested—the essence of each individual is a desire to preserve his or her being, to enact his or her or its own “good.”

The cornerstone of the pantheist view of morals, then, is to accept first and foremost that every individual is fundamentally self-interested—that each individual is God acting as a particular expression of Himself, and that each expression is an affirmation of God’s nature, which can never be negated.

Difficult mereological questions emerge here: are we parts of God, then?⁴ My answer is, it’s complicated, and the final answer is probably no, but the easiest way to conceive my view is, yes—we are parts of God, and each part of God expresses God’s essence. Since each part of God is bumping up against and constricting every other part of God, only God as a whole is absolutely free to express His essence perfectly uninhibited, since there is nothing apart from God. The parts are only free in degrees, and always strive to be freer than they are. Thus, for the parts, there is a good—to move from a lesser to a greater freedom. For God, there is no constraint upon His freedom, and therefore no “good” to pursue. God wants for nothing and is subordinate to nothing.

Does this not constitute a war of all against all? Absolutely, yes—all individuals are, in a manner, in a state of conflict with each other to maximize their freedom at the expense of others, and so we kill, dominate, overthrow, and consume each other. We have children to bring something more of ourselves into the world, and they too come to kill, dominate, overthrow, and consume one another. This process is, as we all know, enormously painful and constricting.

How, then, am I advocating the values of the Enlightenment, of liberal democracy and civil order, and not the most salient alternative—the nihilistic will to power of Friedrich Nietzsche?

The most important reason, I believe, is that the boundaries between individuals are simply false. They are predicated on an idea of negation, or non-Being, which is literally inconceivable. Our love for ourselves (which is precisely the joy we feel at the thought of our own persistence) is in fact a partly conceived love of God itself, and this love, rationally understood, in fact extends to all Being. We can express this love to a small number of people in its emotive form, and to ourselves, but can express it to a far greater extent when we recognize the identity between God and ourselves, and between God and the world, and thus foster an intellectual love for God and for the world, recognizing that reason dictates we love the world as we love ourselves, that what is good for our concept of the world is good for ourselves. Our hate, therefore, is not a result of a true antipathy between one expression of God and another, but of a lack of understanding of the unity of one expression of God and another which follows from our finite nature. Hate is mere confusion. Because all humans are to a great degree similar, we all share similar passions and are enslaved by them in similar ways. Thus, similar virtues—of temperance, curiosity, high-mindedness, obedience to reason, courage, good humor, and so forth—are delineated which more or less apply to all of us, allowing us to gain control over our emotions and regulate our behavior towards ourselves and others with the common aim of maximizing our freedom. Virtue, in other words, is freedom, because it is one and the same with fulfilling our ultimate desire, and is pursued for itself, not for fear of punishment. Such virtues allow us to form societies, which are the necessary precondition for the greatest happiness, and to sensibly identify the conditions under which it would be permissible either to die or to kill to defend that society.

This is a practical as well as a philosophical reality—to destroy another person is to destroy the means to our greatest happiness, because we are of the greatest utility to one another, allowing one another to achieve greater degrees of virtue and power. But if a person threatens to pose a net decrease to our freedom, as if he is, for example, invading a nation of our friends, it is virtuous to restrain and, if necessary, to kill him—not out of hate, but out of love for what he seeks to destroy. Through understanding one another, and one another’s ideas, and being able to unite as one body if needed, we accumulate power (of which our technology is the most obvious product), and this power allows us to eradicate diseases, eliminate child mortality, grow inconceivable quantities of food, construct convenient means of transportation, reduce the need for war, etc.

History shows that we can only do this through the formation of states with the power to enforce laws and defend us from tyrants. In states, we sacrifice the freedom to destroy each other in favor of the otherwise unattainable freedom to build together, and to attain a greater and greater understanding of nature, and therefore of God.

But this system is only a good (“good” understood in relation to each individual’s self-interest) insofar as it affords a net increase of freedom to its constituents. For the greatest possible part of society to receive this increase and for the social contract to thereby remain rational, a mixed government is needed, which simultaneously allows the people to influence the passage of laws while having those laws independently enforced both upon them, and upon the enforcers.

Are the political and ethical values I have explained here “Christian”? In a sense. Christianity was surely a movement towards the truth—from the idea of many finite Gods to one infinite God—and those who argue society improved greatly due to Christianity are surely correct. But it was the Enlightenment which refined the Christian dogma through the critique of Thomistic philosophy and brought it into reconciliation with reason. It, through providing a rational explanation of human rights, made both slavery and monarchy indefensible. It is no coincidence that all those charts of once inconceivable human progress that Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling point to start, not with the Catholic Church, but with the Enlightement, and kicking into high gear after World War 2, following the ascendancy of liberal democracy to the position of a global hegemony. If your response is “well, that’s just when we started collecting the data,” my reply is that that’s the fucking point. We started using reason to solve our problems, and magically, one after another, our problems have diminished. Consider this the next time someone gives you a diatribe about the need to make our decisions based on our feelings and not the “cold, unfeeling” bar of reason.

It would be a great shame, I believe, if we were to forsake this progress, and the true, pantheistic religion that underlies it, for a return to the near universal poverty and ignorance, the unquestionable rule of kings, catastrophic plagues, and constant wars between competing Abrahamic faiths that characterized the Pre-Enlightenment world. Make no mistake—we are teetering on the edge of this precipice. It’s time to get serious about which side of it you want to stand on.

Indeed, I don’t need you to believe what I’ve written here—I have no illusions that the conclusions I’ve outlined are obvious or self-evident—because I don’t need you to change your mind. I have the unique privilege of endorsing a society which values religious tolerance and the preservation of freedom to believe as one likes. My view is all encompassing: I don’t have to believe that anyone is wrong, only differing degrees of right. Nor do I have to meekly accept illiberal ideas and ideologies that threaten the human rights they enshrine—if I haven’t made it clear, we can wage war against those who seek to take away our freedom without hating them. Maybe something in this view is unsatisfying to you. That’s okay! But consider the examples of history, and ask yourself if this doesn’t make enough sense to be worth all the wonderful things that have come with it.

1. As my argument unfolds, it will be clear to those who know their philosophy that my position is almost wholly derived from Spinoza. Am I simply a Spinozist?

Really, I think I’m a monist, and Spinoza (particularly as interpreted by Michael Della Rocca) goes further than anyone else to make monism a comprehensible position. At the time of this writing, I would say Spinoza is probably the single most important philosopher to understand, but that his work raises extremely difficult mereological questions—questions having to do with parts and wholes—that need further development. My own suspicion is that if there is an answer to them, it lies in Transcendental Idealism, and the final say on the matter (as if there could ever be such a thing) will involve a synthesis of these two philosophies. Given that both are hundreds of years old, I imagine someone has already done this and I just haven’t read it yet. As it is, this essay simply reflects my feeling that Spinoza desperately needs to re-enter the conversation as an ambassador of the Enlightenment—an alternative to crude atheism on the one hand, and illiberal religious dogmatism on the other.

2. For the squeamish atheist who doesn’t like all my God-talk, you can substitute the word “Being” in your mind whenever I use the word “God.” But I think God is a much better word for what I’m describing, for we are far too prone to think of “Being” as some inert thing that is acted upon. What I am talking about is pure action, indescribably massive, absolutely perfect, and at once infinitely simple and complex. I use the term “God” to convey that this is something we ought to love and stand in reverence towards, something we should seek every moment of our lives to understand. I am not just using the term as a ploy to win theists over to atheism.

3. The talk of “one” is problematic, but used for convenience—what I am really getting at is not something bounded, as “one” would seem to be. What I am talking about is something absolutely infinite and undifferentiated, which cannot even in principle be bounded by anything else. My central claim is Parmenidean—since “nothing” can neither be nor be conceived, there is no ground to assert any absence of Being. There is “only Being” gets closer, but the real point is that the concept cannot be represented, because the finite cannot truly comprehend the infinite. The best resource I’m aware of to understand the strict monism I’m drawing upon here is Michael Della Rocca’s The Parmenidean Ascent.

4. For the technical-minded, the best pass at explaining these mereological problems I’m aware of is the SEOP entry on Spinoza’s Modal Metaphysics. For those who are understandably unconvinced (myself included), I have recourse to the further problem that this issue of parts and wholes is very much one which the Christian God of Aquinas is no less saddled with than Spinoza’s. And, for atheists who think they can use this as an escape into a godless pluralism: while these problems are avoided by simply insisting upon the existence of discrete objects or substances, this only works for as long as we ask whether a part of a substance is also a substance with parts. “Substancehood,” if there are to be a plurality of them, seems inescapably perspectival and unstable. Again, I refer to The Parmenidean Ascent, as well as to Part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics.