There is a tradition stretching back to the Greek Presocratic philosopher Thales of supposed proofs of God’s existence expressed in philosophical and logical language independent of any doctrine or personal confession of faith, even though these, explicitly in some cases and in others presumably, motivated at some level the enterprise involved in setting forth such proofs. This constitutes the body of what is known as philosophical theism, a term ripe for refining and recontextualising in light of philosophical, scientific, anthropological and sociological developments in the past century.
Notable historical contributors of such proofs include Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas (building on Aristotelian categories), St Anselm of Canterbury and his Ontological Argument, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and in the twentieth century the logician Kurt Gödel. Many other philosophers, scientific and artistic luminaries, such as Kant, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein have contributed ideas about the nature and existence of God based on the insights of their own professions, in which their acknowledged brilliance has ensured their opinions have had an airing.
Probably the most famous of the proofs is Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which Anselm was clear was not a reason for faith, but an explication based on his conviction in the truth of the biblical account of divine providence. His reasoning was as follows:
- For something to exist in reality is more perfect than simply to be conceived only in the mind
- Since God is the most perfect thing imaginable, He must exist in reality, for if He was limited to the imagination, He would not be the most perfect thing to be conceived.
From the time of its formulation there have been criticisms of Anselm’s logic, while recognising the form of the argument as being a particularly powerful one. Two attempts to improve upon it have been Leibniz’ and Gödel’s ontological arguments. Leibniz’ argument was based on the necessary existence of God:
- God is possible (meaning it is logically coherent to conceive of God).
- If God is possible and God is a being of perfection (possessing all perfections), then God exists.
- Therefore, God exists.
Gödel updated Leibniz’ proof linking the concepts of ‘positive properties’ (perfections), ‘God-likeness’ and ‘necessary existence’ arguing that “It is necessarily true (true in all possible worlds) that a God-like object exists”.
Bertrand Russell argued that that problem with ontological arguments was that, even if they provided a logical “proof” of the existence of God, the issue remained of empirical instantiation of the existence of such a being. To challenge this criticism, a number of years ago I offered a phenomenological argument that what consciousness intends must be explicable in terms of modes of existence, and these are given properly in a definition of intentional objects that includes appropriate means of validation of existence. For instance, the consciousness of chairs, sorrow, entropy and centaurs while considered equally valid in phenomenological terms are differentiated not only obviously in meaning but in modes of apperception given in a full definition as, respectively, physical object, emotional state, theoretical concept and mythical creature. On this account, to define the existence of God as the same mode of existence as objects in the physical universe would be considered a category error. What would be more reasonable, and something that would concur with the experience of religious believers everywhere, would be to define God (or a god in a polytheistic religion) minimally as an object of faith and veneration, meaning that outside of this mode of apperception the term is likely to remain at best conceptual and at worst meaningless.
This is, of course, not a proof of the existence of God; what it is meant to be is at least a partial but meaningful description of a deity, outside of which instantiation or validation of existence is unlikely to occur, as is also the case with the four examples previously mentioned. For example, to define a centaur as anything other than a mythical creature would be to erroneously site the context in which it can be apperceived. Similarly, “proof” of the existence of any deity is held in the eyes of the individual believer, through cultural appropriation of a doctrine and rituals of worship, to which – on the basis of historical evidence – must be added an intense personal search and commitment.
I think, though, that what the rejoinder to empiricist critiques of rationalist proofs within philosophical theism implies is that there is a broader sociological context that encompasses equally those who think of themselves as believers, agnostics and atheists, which is the idea of contending with God. The source of this idea is biblical and found in the Judeo-Christian traditions. Whether it exists in other traditions I am unsure, although I suspect there are currents in those traditions in which it does.
The concept is best explored initially by looking at some biblical examples, with which the Old Testament, in particular, is replete. The paradigmatic cases are found in the stories around Moses: Moses demands to know to whom he is speaking when called to the burning bush (Gen 3:14), to which the enigmatic but philosophically profound reply comes, “I am that I am” (יהוה YHWH, usually transliterated as ‘Yahweh’); Moses demands signs to show the power of God and ten plagues are brought down upon Egypt (Ex 7-11), the Red Sea parts to allow the Hebrews to escape and then closes in on the pursuing Egyptians (Ex 14); Moses begs forgiveness for the Israelites idolatry (De 9: 22-25); Moses is not a simple messenger but rather a negotiator with Yahweh.
There are many other stories from the Bible with a similar motif: Abraham begs God to spare the lives of the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah and bargains with God three times to deliver the city if a successively smaller group of righteous citizens can be found; Jacob wrestles with an angel and is given the name of Israel (meaning ‘he who overcomes’); Jesus does not accept the infirmity of the sick as just punishment for sins but demonstrates the power to forgive sins and heal the sick; even on the cross he begs God for forgiveness of those who are complicit in his execution.
In citing these stories, I am making no claim about their veracity or the historical accuracy of the documents that contain them. What I am claiming is that within the traditions of the West, of which the Judeo-Christian roots are a very significant part, there is an important element of contending with God, rather than simply one of submission to God. I want to view this idea through a consideration of the ideas of one of the important atheist philosophers of the modern period, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). In his book The Essence of Christianity he propounded the idea that rather than God creating man, man has created the idea of God. Though a non-believer, Feuerbach had a nuanced and largely sympathetic view of Christianity, and he saw in its teachings and, in particular, its view of God, a projection of the best qualities and aspirations of the human spirit. Feuerbach not only influenced his contemporaries – socialist thinkers like Karl Marx, who famously considered religion as the “opiate of the masses” and Sigmund Freud, who thought of religion as a collective neurosis, but more positively theologians like Karl Barth and Martin Buber, and the Frankfurt School psychologist Erich Fromm.
An extract from the concluding chapter of The Essence of Christianity gives some sense of why Feuerbach remains such a tantalising thinker:
“But love . . . is nothing else than . . . the realisation of the unity of the race. . . . The species is not an abstraction; it exists . . . in the moral sentiment in the energy of love. . . . A loving heart is the heart of the species throbbing in the individual. Thus Christ, as the consciousness of love, is the consciousness of the species. We are all one in Christ. Christ is the consciousness of our identity. He therefore who loves man for the sake of man, who rises to the love of the species, to universal love, . . . he is a Christian, is Christ himself. He does what Christ did, what made Christ Christ. Thus, where there arises the consciousness of the species as a species, . . . Christ disappears, without, however, his true nature disappearing; for he was the substitute for the consciousness of the species, the image under which it was made present to the people and became the law of the popular life.”
Feuerbach is wrestling with our deep predilection to spirituality – what the mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal referred to as the God-shaped hole in human nature – and shaping it in a humanistic and ultimately atheistic frame, but one that has inspired both non-believers and believers. Karl Barth, unusually for a theologian, encouraged Christians to read him. Though disagreeing with Feuerbach’s conclusions, he agreed that there cannot be an anthropological path to Christian belief; for Barth God was “wholly other” and the teachings of Christianity were revealed in the person of Christ, not deduced by human reason. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber more affirmingly saw in Feuerbach the revelation of a holistic view of man as a social being (expressed theologically as the I-Thou relationship), rather than a disembodied reason.
This subtlety in Feuerbach is in contrast to the contemporary New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Ayan Hirsi Ali who have evinced a fundamentalist certainty and actively proselytised their antipathy to religion, though their influence has dissipated of late, as they have failed to promote a cohesive alternative, have died, have moderated their views or even found religion. In their place has emerged a breed of more moderate atheists, such as Jonathan Haidt, who emphasise the idea of transcendence and encourage aspects of religions such as rituals and proscriptions to be transferred into a humanistic context, particularly of education. But even hostility to God and religion as the free expression of ideas I consider part of contending with God.
Transcendence is an idea that converges neatly with the idea of contending with God. Transcendence is an awareness and experience of an ‘otherness’ and a ‘beyond’ to our daily, workaday and humdrum existence in a secular society, something that challenges our settled opinion or values, and often involves an effortful task. It is experienced in the awe of boundless space and deep time, the diversity and interconnectedness of nature, the beauty of the natural world, arts and of the unsurpassed acts of the human spirit. It is experienced in religious experience, in human love, in scientific insight and in the accomplishments of human endeavour in sport and adventure. To contend with God can then be understood as bending the divine to the needs of the human frame for transcendence in particular moments of our lives. That might involve disbelief, skepticism, agnosticism, mysticism or participation in communal worship as the needs arrive in our life. It is the essence of human flourishing and the only basis upon which a vibrant democratic form of life can be sustained.
It might be objected that the religions of submission find a place for the transcendent. To the degree, though, that they live by the idea of submission of the individual will to the collective, this is impossible, as a paradox arises. Whether one believes that we are shaped in the image of God or that we shape God in our image, the transcendent emerges from the experience of the individual, the tolerance of others’ difference of perspective and the willingness to learn from others in the realisation one one’s finitude and propensity for error. Religions of submission logically have no concept of incompleteness as it is in the very notion of perfection that they are able to demand submission. An unwillingness to submit, therefore, is evidence of enmity to perfection. The paradox lies in the fact that the idea of doctrinal perfection and the collective will to which one must submit is held individually by persons who differ to a lesser or greater degree in their understanding. Therefore, the propensity for hostility to others over whom one has no direct power is virtually guaranteed in a zero-sum scenario. Such religions rather than fostering transcendence become this-worldly, highly politicised and conflict-ridden.
Much the same criticism should be made of those political ideologies that enforce collectivist atheism and the active suppression and elimination of religion. In doing so, like all forms of collectivism, they suppress the natural curiosity and creativity of the human spirit, the free expression of ideas and the possibility of personal and social transformation and adaptation, so although collectivist ideologies – like religions of submission – have their place in a society that permits individual choice, their dominance is an existential danger to democratic societies and their influence needs limiting in any society that wishes to remain free.
The idea of contending with God enriches humanism but also more broadly the search for meaning and transcendence, whether that is by developing arguments for the existence of God or by critiquing those arguments, by theologising on the nature of God or philosophising on the nature of humankind, by bargaining with God and bending the will of the gods to human desire or forcefully denying the existence of the supernatural, of experiencing the benefits of religion or denouncing its abuses, of reflection on the world or striving to overcome human limitations. It is as if there is, as Pascal claimed, a God-shaped hole in human nature, which needs to be addressed by embracing or resisting it. It seems to be written in our DNA, at least our cultural DNA, and cannot be unseen, unheard or unthought. But while contending with God is a relatively inclusive term, it is the exact opposite of submission to God or a religion, or a political ideology. Submission is a negation of human development, individually and culturally, and an evolutionary dead end. Religions and political ideologies that require submission to their dictates will wither, however rapidly they seem to expand in the short term, as they undermine a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human, which is to find and shape and continually redefine a space for the transcendent in our lives.
Selected Bibliography
Ayan Hirsi Ali, (2006) Infidel: My Life
Thomas Aquinas, (1225–1274) Summa Theologica
Karl Barth (1958), The Doctrine of Creation
Richard Dawkins, (2006) The God Delusion
Daniel Dennett, (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Ludwig Feuerbach, (1841) The Essence of Christianity
Erich Fromm, (1956) The Art of Loving
Jonathan Haidt (2020), The Happiness Hypothesis: Ten Ways to Find Happiness and Meaning in Life
Sam Harris, (2004) The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Christopher Hitchens, (2007) God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Blaise Pascal, (1670) Pensées
