Contents
Articles
- Open up to God, Anthony Freeman
- Russell and Santayana: At the Threshold of the Twentieth Century, Tom Rubens
- God: Creator or Created?, Don Cupitt
- Museum and Peace Trail: Cicely Herbert visits Bradford, City of Peace, Cicely Herbert
Reviews
- God in the Bath, Alison McRobb
- The God Delusion, John Challenor
- The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism, Michael Morton
- Fourth Witness, Stephen Mitchell
- Collected Poems 1967-2006, Christopher Hampton
Poetry
- A Compression of Distances, Daphne Gloag
Editorial
He takes the Christ of traditional Christology as his paradigm and suggests ‘just as the mind or soul is not an added ingredient to the human body, but an integral and emergent feature of it, so Christ’s divinity is not an added ingredient to his human person, but an integral emergent feature of it.’ He goes on to say that we too can share this development. Of course ordinary human beings can never attain infinite knowledge but throughout our lives we can go on becoming more conscious. God, Freeman suggests, is this quest: ‘God is altogether best understood as a high-level emergent property.’ One of the ways in which we can explore religion as a human creation is to consider what classic theological talk about God is saying about ourselves.
In his autobiography (which will be reviewed in a future issue), the New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering speaks of a ‘secular trinity: the self-creating universe, the culture-creating human species and an emerging global consciousness.’ I noticed that both numbers 2 and 3 in this trinity are about knowing.
Number 3 as ‘an emerging global consciousness’ reminded me of the Spirit whom Jesus promises to send in John 16:13, who will ‘lead you into all truth’.
So this was a distinctly ‘Johannine’ trinity. rather than an ‘Augustinian’ one. In Augustine’s version, the second person , the Son, is the Word, God’s selfknowledge; and the third person, the Spirit, is Love, the Father and Son’s ‘mutual love’, which overflows so that God also ‘so loved the world’.
Both these classic theological models of the Trinity are very suggestive when we are thinking about human potential. As well as possibly becoming more conscious and knowing more, human beings also love/hate and do things. We could also consider God as ‘emerging’ (or not) in what we love and do. We can build, weave, knit, gestate other things besides ideas (in fact, when we use those terms about thinking they are metaphors from the material world). Interestingly, the God in the Old Testament is jealous and does not want humans to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and does not want them to build a Tower or Ziggurat (like Babel) up to heaven. That invites hubris and ‘pride comes before a Fall’.
In the second article Tom Rubens, a stalwart of the Ethical Society, writes about Russell and Santayana at the threshold of the twentieth century. He notes how religious the vision of those two old atheists was, and discusses Russell’s work A Free Man’s Worship (1903) and Santayana’s A Religion of Disillusion (1900). Both of them were also very much of their time in regarding ‘man’ not as part of nature but as fighting a constant heroic battle against it, to ‘rise above’ it.
Thirdly we have the lecture Don Cupitt gave last September to SoF in Australia: God: Creator or Created?, which discusses further what could be considered SoF’s major insight: ‘The historical truth is that we created God.’ God is a fiction; he is not real. Cupitt goes on to say that ‘in the classic scheme of thought the objective reality, the order and motion of things in the created world depended entirely upon the objective reality and the power of God. If there is no real God out there… there is no real world out there either. Nor indeed are we ourselves real.’ In his article Freeman disagrees about the non-reality of the world: ‘Even if (pace Don Cupitt) we allow that the physical universe is a fact, it still does not immediately follow that God is also a fact.’ He says that the classic argument that because the world exists, God must exist as its cause, is false. This criticism of that classic argument can also be reversed: ‘to say the objective reality of the world depends on the objective reality of God is false’. Why should we think about the world in terms of a God who doesn’t exist?
In his letter to Number 66 of this magazine (July 2004) Don Cupitt pointed out that ‘non-realism is a philosophical doctrine.’ In this new lecture he distances Sofia 81,called‘Down to Us’,noted that this phrase and its apparent opposite‘Up to Us’,are both used to mean it’s our responsibility.
Appearing near Easter time,this issue 82 is called‘Up to Us’. editorial himself from the argument that the world and we are ‘non-real’ because God is ‘non-real’, by setting it within the framework of ‘the classic scheme of thought’, which he says has now been superseded.
He is illuminating on how we ‘form the chaos of experience into a manageable world’ through language – what Coleridge, in his poem Letter to Sara Hutchinson, called our ‘shaping spirit of imagination’.
Then Don Cupitt notes that ‘in the words of the English Romantic poets, our world is partly perceived and partly imagined by us.’ (In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth speaks of what we half create and half perceive.) I wondered if there was a shift taking place in Don’s thinking towards this half and half.
Coleridge seems to be right that nature gives us our ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ at birth. One of the most astonishing things about watching a two-yearold learn to talk is that metaphor, symbol and ‘let’s pretend’ (as well as joking) seem to come naturally as soon as the words are acquired. The child will go into a corner and say: ‘I’m a pony in a barn,’ and neigh.
Or: ‘I’m a naughty goblin,’ and run off with a biscuit.
Or: ‘I’m an astronaut and this is my rocket,’ (a stick).
Or the child can wave a magic wand and tell his grandfather: ‘You’re a cat.’ Grandfather is expected to miaow. The child is aware that it’s a game of ‘pretend’ and chooses when to wave the wand again and turn Grandfather back into himself. The child may throw a teddy onto the floor. His mother says, ‘Teddy’s hurt,’ and makes teddy sob. Immediately, the child can pat it and say, ‘Teddy’s better now.’ But if his mother, whom he loves with the tremendous passion of his two-year-old heart, comes home with a new baby who might supplant him and he throws the baby on the floor, he has to learn that that might really hurt the baby, and it might not be possible to say immediately: ‘Baby’s better now.’ He has to learn that he can put his hand into a picture of a fire in a book and pretend to be burnt, but if he puts his hand into a real fire, he will really be burnt.
Imagination is our birthright, but so is acquiring the ability to distinguish between the imaginary and the real, to negotiate our daily lives and not do real damage to ourselves or others. I think it is vital to acknowledge this half and halfness, respect both imagination and the dignity and reality of matter, life and death, and manual labour that, together with love, is builder of cities. It’s up to us.
Space was very tight in this packed issue, so we have had to hold over some poems until May.
Sofia Letters Editor Ken Smith, Bridleways, Haling Grove, South Croydon CR2 6DQ revkevin19@hotmail.co.uk Cardenal Points Dear Editor I found Ernesto Cardenal’s ‘Message to Berlin’ inspiring (Sofia November 2006), and was surprised by the letter in January’s edition criticising his ‘tendentious’ and damaging use of rhetoric in preference to reason.
The argument that Cardenal overstates his case in referring to all 216 American interventions in foreign states over two centuries as ‘invasions’ must not allow us to blind ourselves to the facts. Alongside interventions which can be perceived as benign in intent, and sometimes in effect, are the full-scale invasions and/or manipulation of the democratic processes in Guatemala, Cuba, Iraq (4 times), Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti: all during the last 50 years. If we find this list so disturbing that we prefer not to be reminded of its scope, how much more keenly must the ensuing destruction be felt in Latin America, which has frequently been the target of American activities abroad.
Similarly, the systematic violation of human rights in Guantánamo cannot be dismissed as negligible in comparison with the activities of the Gestapo or the Russian gulags. America prides itself on being the defender of freedom and democracy: indeed, the administration has repeatedly stated that its purpose in Iraq is to establish democracy for the good of the people.
Such claims sit uneasily beside the treatment of POWs and political enemies which we have seen in Guantánamo and in Iraq itself and which we fear is the case in various secret prisons to which suspects have been flown on ‘rendition’ flights.
Cardenal’s metaphorical comparison of Bush to Hitler has to be seen in a Latin American context: Donald Rumsfeld recently accused President Chávez of Venezuela of being ‘the new Hitler’. So the article is suggesting that, if anyone deserves the title, it’s Bush, who initiated the Iraq war, rather than Chávez, who has never invaded any country and who holds no political prisoners. Since the US does not recognise the International Court at the Hague, the suggestion that its leaders should be tried at Nuremburg is apposite because they have put themselves above international law.
It is important that SoF should not be insular and should listen to voices, not only from Britain and other English-speaking countries, but from the Third World, where they see things from another point of view. As a forum for dialogue between people from both Christian and humanist traditions, we need to respond positively to Ernesto’s rallying cry and commit ourselves to ‘defend peace and justice’ – even if this means facing up to unpalatable truths about the behaviour of our greatest ally under its present leadership.
— Mary Lloyd, Southampton
Dear Editor I have been prompted to write by Ernesto Cardenal’s letter to the PEN Congress, which was translated and reprinted in Sofia 80 under the headline Message to Berlin:
Bush is the New Hitler, and comments in the editorial about him and his message.
My initial reaction is that the comparison between Bush and Hitler is ludicrous. Whether you like him or not (in general, I don’t), George Bush is a democratically elected leader who will stand down in two years’ time in accordance with his country’s constitution. He governs a country where people are free to disagree with him and, as they have done recently, vote against him. Adolf Hitler was a dictator who attempted to systematically exterminate various groups he didn’t like. As someone whose paternal grandparents (one of whom was Jewish, both of whom were communists), fled Berlin for England in the 1930s, I find the comparison deeply offensive.
My bigger concern is that Sofia is not being true to its mandate to be ‘against fundamentalism’. Recent editions seem to be embracing a new form of fundamentalism, which may loosely be termed the ‘anti-globalisation movement’. This movement has its demons (Bush, Starbucks, etc.), its saints (Geldof, Mandela), its tenets (capitalism and free trade cause poverty, the West is in the wrong), its rituals (gathering at international summits) and so on. And it is intolerant of dissent, as I have found in several discussions.
My point is not whether the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ is right or wrong. I am simply dismayed that this editorial, and others, appear to assume that anyone wanting to explore religion as a human creation is also buying into this specific agenda. If we have learned anything from rejecting traditional ideas of religion, surely we have learned to be critical not just of organised religion but all ideologies.
— Daniel Clark, London
Dear Editor There are people who believe in evolution and don’t believe in religion (Dawkins). And there are people who believe in religion and don’t believe in evolution (Truth in Science). If this fact raises important issues the option is there for people who accept both to occupy the space between and offer an alternative: an exploration of the doctrine of creation for the third millennium.
My own last piece was published in Sofia in May and was on intelligent design. I find two major flaws in the idea. The scientific flaw is that it’s a dead end: they arrive at the so-called Intelligent Designer via negatives (the ‘it can’t be done’ defence) and when they get there they can’t define the agency, which they think can do what they say evolution cannot.
They clearly haven’t read Lee Smolin’s work, or Stu Kaufman’s or Simon Conway Morris. But there is also a theological flaw, which Nicholas Lash described as the ‘fatuous illusion that we could discover or come across god as a fact about the world’. Truth in Science should not get away with the claims that their Intelligent Designer isn’t God (it is), or that their ideas are science (they aren’t) or that there is room for an alternative to Darwinism (there isn’t).
The scientific community in USA has answered this rubbish in a collection of essays by scientists of various specialisms (Intelligent Thought, Vintage NY, 2006). Though an excellent collection, it is marred by the overt atheism of many otherwise helpful pieces and with that warning I commend it.
My proposal is that the theological interfaith community might consider doing the same. A collection entitled – say – Intelligent Faith written from various theological, philosophical and interfaith perspectives might be a useful resource in teaching both Religious Studies and Science in Sixth forms and Universities. It might help to dislodge Truth in Science from schools they have infiltrated.
Rowan Williams, to whom I mentioned this idea in passing, has let me know that he is ‘very taken’ with it and it seems to me that it is an ideal exercise for a society such as the Sea of Faith.
— John MacDonald Smith, Evesham