The historical truth is that we created God. say, briefly, that it is not science but history that has been the main reason for the breakdown of the old Christian world-view. By the sixteenth century our knowledge of ourselves, our world and our own history was growing too fast to be held within the old framework. It was inevitable that there would be a great effort to reorganise everything around human beings as themselves the builders and testers of all the language, the knowledge, the values and the world-view that they live by.
Which is the universal creator whose activity forms us and our world: is it the God of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam; or is it the ceaseless flow of human language, within which we are all the time building, criticising and rebuilding our pictures of ourselves and of our world? Is the world a fixed stage on which we live, or a temporary human consensus by which we live? Do we see the world as having been fixed from the beginning by the language of God, or do we see it as continually growing and developing within human language?
If we think of the creator as God, we will presumably hold a strongly realistic and metaphysical view both of God and of the world of finite creatures – creatures that he first made at the beginning of time, and still by his almighty power and wisdom maintains in being, guiding them towards the future consummation that he has from all eternity planned for them. God is Infinite Spirit: he is self-existent Being, absolute, necessary, simple and eternal. He is unlimited in his power, perfection, wisdom and goodness, and like an infinite computer he has pre-calculated the entire course of world history from beginning to end.
He is the Author and the Lord of all history.
So, on this classical view, which is still held by a largish portion of humankind, God is out there, an Infinite Spirit and the absolute world-Ground, and there is also a ready-made cosmos, or created world, out there for us to live in. God is the playwright, and the whole of human history is the play. He has scripted the entire thing, and he alone actually stages, runs through, and watches over the definitive performance. (There is of course only one actual performance of the whole drama: only one is needed).
As for us, we find ourselves born into and growing up within the play. The world is like a furnished house that runs according to rules that we find have been already built into it by its Creator: we call them the laws of nature and the moral law. Fortunately God not only made the world by his creative utterance, but also gave his own language to the first humans. He created us with minds that are little images of his own, so that by using our God-given reason and conscience aright we can come to understand the world in which we find ourselves, and can tell how to live in a way that pleases our creator. Eventually, after death, we may hope to live forever in his presence.
This fully-developed monotheistic doctrine of God and Creation is well sketched out in the later chapters of the book of the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, and seven centuries or so later was sealed into Western Christian thought by St Augustine of Hippo, especially in his book The City of God, written between A.D. 413 and 426. The last great Western philosopher to take it all seriously was Leibniz, in the writings of his later years around A.D. 1690-1716. But a number of theologians and Christian intellectuals continued to defend something like Augustine’s world-view until as late as the 1950s, and even the early 1960s. Today, fully-orthodox realistic theism, with its classical philosophy of history, is confined to people who are very consciously neo-conservative and militantly ‘anti-liberal’ (which means anti-intellectual).
Why has this happened? One reason is the difficulty of trying to reconcile the self-revealing, human-language-using, personal God of the biblical tradition and popular religion with the infinite, timeless World Ground of the philosophical tradition.
Another reason is that we have come to think of language as human, with a human history. If indeed God was the only original inventor and user of language, if God himself thinks in language, why did he build into his language so much reference to gender, to space and time, to the senses and to the body? Language is for communication, but God is One: so who did he have to talk to from all eternity?
Not to mention the further problem that language presupposes time.
Another reason for the decay of the old philosophical theology is that it makes God in effect the only historical agent, whereas in the modern period ideas of human agency and of historical development and evolution have become very widespread. You could God: Creator or Created?
Don Cupitt believes that the future of religion will be a purely this-worldly religion of commitment to life.
From what I have been saying you will gather that I think we are today in transition. The last vestiges of the great Augustinian synthesis, which still captivated a man like C.S.Lewis, are now breaking down. Just for the present many people still declare themselves to be realistic theists, but they may not realise how much that commits them to, and how much things have to change when the old world view finally passes away.
The main point is that in the classic scheme of thought the objective reality, the order and the motion of things in the created world entirely depended upon the objective reality and the power of God. If there’s no real God out there giving to everything its existence, its order and its motion, then there is no real world out there either. Nor indeed are we ourselves real. So if God is not making the world, ordering it and empowering it all the time, who is?
The answer given by Kant in 1771 makes him the greatest figure in the history of Western philosophy. If God doesn’t make the world real, who does? We do.
Kant tried to show that if we believe that we have, not just sense experience, but more than that, namely an objective world around us, we must do so because we ourselves see the world as being structured by space and time, and as ordered in terms of things and their qualities, interacting causally with each other, and so on. What we have about us is not a world ready-made for us by God, but a world that we form by the way we see it. We are the legislators: we order the world. Our minds organise the chaos of experience into a negotiable, intelligible world, and Kant tried to prove rigorously that our minds must do this in the way they do in order for us to have a world at all.
We cannot live without forming the chaos of experience into a manageable world, and being what we are we must build our world in the way we do.
To recapitulate, in the old days, when people really believed in an objective God out there, they also believed that they already had an objective real world laid on for them by God. It was the world, the fixed stage on which all human life was lived; and notice here that because physical law and the moral law were built into the creation by God from the first, the laws of Nature and of morality remained unchanged over the millennia. The old world-picture was not historical. But then during the Enlightenment there was an explosion of new man-made knowledge, and people began to get ideas about cultural difference, about historical change and development, and about progress. They began to see themselves as the makers of their own language, their own cultures, and their own history. They began to see their world, not as an unchanging God-made cosmos, but as a human world, our world, that is constantly evolving through our own human action. We made our world, and we change it. In short, the creation of the world is ceasing to be something that God did once and for all long ago, and is instead becoming something that we are doing all the time, through our own everchanging conversation. In the words of the English Romantic poets, our world is partly perceived, and partly imagined, by us.
Christ Pantocrator God-Man, Cefalù Cathedral, Sicily People used to think that God was the first speaker of language. A series of short sharp commands from God changed the primal Chaos into an ordered Cosmos, and in due course God passed on his own language – be it Hebrew or Arabic – to the first humans. But now people begin to think that we humans have ourselves developed all our own languages. Languages evolve and diversify over time, very much as animals and plants do. We humans have ourselves coined every word in our vocabulary, including the word ‘God’. We have invented all our own cultures, religions, moralities and pictures of the world, and what used to be an objective and fixed Cosmos is now just a provisional human consensus.
Instead of the old unchanging godmade world, we now have only our own ever-changing and developing world-picture, about which we are constantly arguing.
So on this account there isn’t a fixed real world any more, but only an endlessly-developing human argument. If you want to give an exact date for the moment when the death of God occurred, I’d say it was the moment in the later seventeenth century when the mathematics of probability, and tools such as Tables of Mortality, led to the establishment in places like London and Amsterdam of the new Insurance industry. At that moment the course of human life and of world-events effectively ceased to be a single invariable sequence predestined from all eternity by God, and became instead a purely secular matter of calculating relative probabilities. The old view was that there was only one way your life could go, namely the way God had decreed. God alone had pre-ordained and knew the moments of your birth and your death and the whole course of events in between. God owned your life, and had already fixed everything in it. You didn’t trust insurance cover to protect you: you simply had faith in God – whereas in today’s society various forms of insurance cover are in effect legally compulsory.1 The world is no longer divinely governed: it is merely statistical.
Now notice an interesting corollary of all this.
When God created the world, God was supremely real and God guaranteed the objective reality of the world. Your whole life was predestined, and you never needed to consider other possibilities.
Everything could be left in God’s hands, everything was under control, and God’s eternal Will would certainly be done. But in the new post-God world nothing is objectively real and nothing is certain. On the contrary, at every moment there is a jostling crowd of possibilities. Science may assign to many of them various degrees of probability. One of them becomes actual, and the others lapse. When we look back later, we see in retrospect the contingently-actual course of events up to now surrounded by a forest of unfulfilled and now-lapsed possibilities. All of us begin to wonder about those many other lives we might have lived, other loves we might have pursued and won, and other selves we might have become, had things only turned out a bit differently. The objective world and the course of our own lives are nowadays very much less real and destined than they used to be. We now have a much more vivid sense of contingency than people used to have, and we spend much more of our time in thinking about the other selves we might have been, and the other lives we might have lived.
I have now taken the discussion far enough to draw two conclusions. First, in answer to the question I have been set, the historical truth is that we created God. We are all of us happy to regard other people’s religions as human products, so why shouldn’t we admit that our own faith is so, too? The idea of God developed very slowly during the Neolithic period and the Iron Age, but its grandest form was the great Christian philosophy of God, the world, and human history that dominated Western culture from Augustine to Milton. While it lasted it seemed immensely strong, because it gave us a real God and a real world, and the confidence that we could please the one and make sense of the other. It enabled us to see our life as a pilgrimage through time to our last home in the eternal world. But over the years the old world picture gradually broke down. We began to see ourselves and the whole world in terms of ideas of historical and evolutionary development. A new sort of manmade and critically-tested knowledge grew and grew until it made us aware that we ourselves have evolved all our languages, our cultures, our moral codes and our religious systems. We made our world, and we made God. God did a great job while he lasted, but inevitably he has now faded.
For a decade or so I proposed a view intermediate between theism and atheism, saying that we can continue to have faith in God and live with the help of God if only we recognise that God is not an The religious wouldn’t buy non-realism.They wanted fundamentalism. actually existent Being, but rather a guiding spiritual ideal. This ‘non-realist’ idea of God has a long history in Christianity, starting with the Johannine equation of God with Love in the First Epistle of St John. So I tried to keep the idea of God, and assigned an important role to it in the religious life, because I thought that the idea of God was still a good idea.
God was a unifying symbol of the goal of the religious life, and brought with him an excellent and well-understood vocabulary in which we could debate a great range of vital matters, such as the problem of evil.
So I claimed. But the religious wouldn’t buy nonrealism. They wanted fundamentalism; and the way the politics of religion has been developing in the past twenty years has gradually persuaded me, and millions of others, that the idea of God is increasingly coming to look like a very bad idea indeed – the worst and most destructive of all our ideas, and the hardest to get rid of. I now increasingly think that politicised, fundamentalist, militant religion is a serious threat to our future human wellbeing. It is even more objectionable and ugly than a malign political ideology, and we need to break with it before it seizes power over us. In fact, we may need to go further, and break altogether with the historic ‘world religions’ that we have inherited. In the age of globalisation and the Internet, none of them is anywhere near global enough. Their various vocabularies and histories tie them to one or another of the half-dozen or so major world culture-areas, and in a multi-faith, scrambled world of mass population movements every one of them battles to preserve its own distinct ‘identity’ intact and undiminished. The result is that each one of the surviving ancient world faiths has in recent years largely lost its own liberal and universalising traditions, and has instead become localist, sectarian and militant. The existing world faiths no longer unite humankind: increasingly, they divide us. They have quite forgotten their old, gentle religious values, and have become hysterically, ruthlessly self-concerned.
Accordingly, although I am still ready to see in the great religious traditions that we have inherited much evidence of human creativity in the face of the obvious human need for religion, and evidence indeed, of past human greatness, I now believe that we must start thinking about the quite new form that religion must take in a future fully-globalised world.
The whole of humankind is now joined up in a single great humming web of communication. In this worldwide web of talk, as also in such institutions as schools, universities, banks, hospitals and airlines, there is already to a startling degree a single common world culture. The language of everyday life, of science and technology, of industry and commerce, and even of individual human rights and freedoms (including especially expressive freedom) is equally well understood almost everywhere. It is within this universal language of the whole race that we should be looking for the seeds of the religion of the future. I believe that it will be a purely this-worldly religion of commitment to life.
A century ago many notable figures would argue that the universal language of humanity does include, and must continue to include, the word ‘God’. Such people very often came from the Indian subcontinent: they included the leading Sikhs and Bahais, Hindus such as Radhakrishnan and Vivekananda, and world figures like Tagore and Gandhi. But there is no such figure today, because God has gone ‘localist’, or ethnocentric. In the end, people see God as thinking and speaking in just one language, the language of my people, to whom he has given his final and definitive revelation of himself – and so on. In the end, it seems, God is always a national God, whose job is to justify and to personify the most extreme ethnocentrism. It seems therefore that God now has no future at the universal level, which is why even John Hick, the most eminent multi-faith monotheist of the generation above mine, now thinks that God will have to be dropped – at least for a while. 1 The old belief in God strictly entailed predestination. But if you believe in predestination the whole of the reasoning on which the insurance industry is based must appear to you impious and irrational. The insurance industry presupposes the Death of God.
Don Cupitt made the original Sea of FaithTV series in 1984 (now reissued on DVD).He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College,Cambridge and his 34 books include After God.His latest book,The Old Creed and the New,has just appeared from SCM Press.