This really continues monday’s post…Here’s one more response to Stephen Prothero’s book God is Not One. The story he’s referring to is the Blind Men and the Elephant, which I discussed a couple weeks ago. First the selection from the book, and then my response:
For me, this story is a reminder not of the unity of the world’s religions (as Ramakrishna and the perennialists would have us believe), or of their shared stupidity (as Saxe and the New Atheists would argue), but of the limits of human knowledge. …One function of the transcendent is to humble us, remind us that our thoughts are not the thoughts of God or the Great Goddess – to remind us that, at least for the time being, we see through a glass, darkly. Yes, religious people offer solutions to the human predicament as they see it. Yet these solutions inevitably open up more questions than they close down. This is definitely true of Confucius and Hillel, who, perhaps more than any of the figures discussed in this book, followed Rilke’s admonition to ‘love the questions themselves.’ But it is also true of Muhammad, who once said, ‘Asking good questions is half of learning,’ and of Jesus, whose parables seem designed less to teach us a lesson than to move us to scratch our heads.
When it comes to safeguarding the world from the evils of religion, including violence by proxy from the hand of God, the claim that all religions are one is no more effective than the claim that all religions are poison. Far more powerful is the reminder that any genuine belief in what we call God should humble us, remind us that, if there really is a god or goddess worthy of the name, He or She or It must surely know more than we do about the things that matter most. This much, at least, is shared across the great religions.
Prothero’s main claim in the bolded passages is that God is too far beyond us for us to know Him or describe Him in any meaningful way. This is another very common claim about God which floats around. But can we examine it?
Here are some pertinent questions:
- How does Prothero know that God is transcendent? And how does he know what, exactly, the “transcendence” of God is, or means?
- On what basis does he refer to Isaiah 55:8 (“our thoughts are not the thoughts of God or the Great Goddess”)? Is he saying Isaiah is a reliable guide to knowledge of God? If so, does he adhere to the rest of the prophet’s writings? (And has he grappled with the reaction Isaiah would have to inserting “the Great Goddess” into the verse?)
- Similarly, why does he quote 1 Corinthians 13:12? Does he trust Paul as a witness to God?
- When he states the true intention of Jesus’ parables, is he claiming an understanding of Jesus’ motives? If so, where does he come by such knowledge? Jesus Himself seems to have expressed other kinds of intentions for His parables in passages like Matthew 13:10-17.
- How does he claim to know what a “genuine belief” in God would produce in a believer? What if God were a proud, violent God, who wanted proud, violent followers? Or is Prothero certain that God is not like this? How does He know this?
- Why is the fact that God must know more than we do relevant to the discussion as to whether we can know God at all? (This is where we’ll go next Monday night, by the way…)
- Finally, if “He or She or It” knows “the things that matter most,” is He or She or It unable to communicate which things those are? (This takes us back to last week’s study…)
What we need to see here is that Dr. Prothero is claiming to know certain things about God–specifically, that God can’t really be known or described. And all we need to ask is, how does this author come by this knowledge? Implicitly, he’s asking us to trust his mind over any other source of information. He stands above any other claim to knowledge about God to tell us what we can really know about Him. It is as if we are asked to believe that the bible may not be infallible, but Dr. Prothero is.