The new theism in philosophy is not so new

I have been driven to a careful re-reading of the work of Paul Ricoeur to try to make sense of his relationship to Karl Jaspers - not just as philosophers, but the inner tension between the thinking of Jaspers and the hermeneutics of Ricoeur.

Ricoeur's clear preference for an open interlocutor - an interlocutor worth mentioning - has been Heidegger.  This has also been the case in the quasi-herneneutical defense of tradition in the social and political thought of Charles Taylor.  Heidegger remains the touchstone of profundity.

What I am beginning to discern in Ricoeur is that the common thread in his philosophy is simply his scarcely disguised Protestant faith - ultimately we come back to teaching the gospels and culture whose principal touchstone is the Bible.  This is not unlike the views of moderate Egyptians.  It is very clear to me that in the case of Charles Taylor, it is his abiding Catholic faith that informs his views. But in Taylor's case a return to the gospels and the Bible would first require an ecumenical development where by the churches return to the teachings of the Church.  While many imagine that they see American Lutherans merging with Episcopalians and Anglicans returning to Rome, these are now religious denominations with little growth potential in the third world in non-Catholic nations.  The vision is simply implausible.  Even if Christian, Moslem and Jew all accept their one common God, it will remain to answer to the millions in a new China why that God should be thought of as intervening in human affairs, wrecking vengeance or heeding individual prayers.  I leave the case of Hindu India aside - likely to be the most populous nation over a long period of time.

The present interest in the good prospects for confident theism and a non-theism on the defensive seems to me to be no more than a temporary set-back for secular science.  Temporary might mean decades or longer. Ultimately the the attack on science in the guise of an attack on unbridled technical intrusions into social life, the natural world and personal life will have to give way: science is not technology.  Regardless of whether we can show social progress, we will not succeed in utterly stultifying advances in mathematics, space-time theories, micro-particle theories and cosmology - not to mention genetic/molecular biology and neurology.

Even if a new wave of Ludites prevent the development of nanotech within neurology and neuro-psychology, radical change in science will be difficult to postpone.

Part of the challenge is that we have only science history at the moment - we lack sufficiently advanced simulations.  One such simulation would be one in which the telescope would be developed before any helio-centric hypothesis or any experimental methodology.  At the moment we only have one history which we can consider with regard to the development of optics.  One fascinating case is that of the discovery of the polarization of light and the technical challenge of producing quality glass.  Whether the current generation of social simulation software is moving us anywhere near being able to simulate alternative sequences of "discovery" without assumptions of either progress or the domination of nature, I leave for comment.

The shift to a non-human-centric viewpoint may be inescapable in a multiple-species animal world.  Perhaps if humans had eliminated all but plant species before the emergence of science, we could hope to avoid the species-centric challenge.  But what - in a simulation - will prevent the discovery of the octopus eye and then the discovery that some species are sensitive to polarization of light?

It is very unclear to me that observations of lunar libration and nutation could prevent the emergence of helio-centrism.  The dogma that we were taught was theoretical equivalence against like data. This has been seriously undermined in the mathematical physics of space-time - undecidability between theories will not likely be explained as a feature of fundamental science determined from first principles (empirically equivalent space-time metrics which are determined by incompatible physical theories.)  No such candidates have appeared and none should be expected.  Science remains tied to confirmation and disconfirmation of hypotheses as much as grand simplifying theoretical syntheses.  Simulations may establish that any culture which allows debate of the causes of the peculiarities of our views of the crescent moon, is a culture where geo-centrism is doomed as much as a culture which permitted the long-term Gravity Probe B experiment on frame-twisting in GTR.

Theism is of course doomed by the eventual recognition of the fate of the sun.  If our species persists, it cannot forever live in denial of the fate of the planet.  Even the strongest suppression of science is not likely to sustain academically-respectable theism indefinitely (no doubt there are theists with an indefinite eschatology or no eschatology but it would seem that barring divine intervention, their theism evntually is doomed to irrelevancy.)

The new  theists repeatedly advise us that the secular world is doomed to recognize its own meaningless divergence from genuine human culture (religion-based, naturally).  This is a mere variant on the doctrine of our tiny world once astronomy had made clear the size of this galaxy and  the numbers of the galactic clusters.  Why our tiny insignificance -if accepted as such - should or could be rescued deux ex machina is not clear to me.  I cannot see that any reflective consideration that was not already presupposing a definite theology could take any solace in the announced fate of the secular world.  I cannot see how a defense of theism is reassuring to anyone who is not already a Catholic or a Protestant or of some other definite faith.  Perhaps a new theist can explain to us the leap to Methodist rather than Presbyterian -Sunni rather than Shiite.  Buddhists of course tend to be more confidant that the thoughtful theist will see the path.  But the new theist must feel something like immense alienation from this all-powerful or all-knowing or all-explaining or all-creating being or any combination of the preceding.  It is not clear to me how a god can be expected to understand your need to believe in his need to understand you - let alone your need to implicate him in human history, human evolution or the history of the present known cosmos.  Now that you have your god, what do you plan to do, to say, to legislate (we suspect the latter.)  Why the certainty the the theos is not amused by blasphemy.  Why the need for respect?  Persons need respect.  Why the need to be recognized by us?  One suspects a familiar anthropomorphism at work.  Call it our Western tradition.

Even if theists succeed in shifting the burden to atheists in matters of justification, I cannot see that considerations of evidence or warranted belief could sway non-theists in the long term.  Anyone not born into a pre-existing religious tradition would have precisley what basis for embracing Papal infallibility and virgin birth and the physical ascension of the Virgin - let alone the Mystic Marriage - or even the Trinity?  What non-theist from Kansas could be moved by argument to embrace the panoply of gods of later, degenerate, Taoism?  Will we hold new theist councils to re-visit all of the heresies of the first few hundred years of the CE?  Will we all revert to being Messianic Jews having once been restored to theism after lapsing as Baptists or Unitarians into non-theism?

The new theism in philosophy seems to me to be nothing so very new at all: it is a comfort to pre-existing belief or very little comfort at all.  The enthusiasm with which it has been greeted has very clear parallels: the argument that the sun could not be more than 5000 years old is at the head of that pack.  What is clearly irrational is how the theism which is being defended is strong enough to move anyone raised in a Jewish home to embrace Buddhism or anyone raised in a Catholic home to embrace Islam.  What I can understand is the comfort found by those who drifted away from the faith of their childhood and now feel nostalgia in their declining years.

We are repeatedly warned not to deny people hope.  But that hope can not be hope for unrestricted economic growth or unrestricted human populations or unrestricted consumption based on carbon fuels.  But those of us who hope to live to hear some significant advance in the account of dark matter and its role in the evolution of galaxies have a hope in which a minimalist theism has very little to offer.

It is of course possible that a non-theist will advance the one impregnable line of argument for theism, offer it up to the reading public, and then collapse back in defeat leaving the field of battle to theism triumphant.  Nothing in the history of science suggests that this is a reasonable expectation.  There is just not likely to be much new in any new theism.

The biggest comfort to theists is that most non-theists identify as agnostic and not as a-theists. These agnostics tend to come from familial backgrounds with religion - but not always.  If a Catholic theist philosopher brings you to theism, are you likely to become a Baptist?  Catholics find the new theism reassuring, Protestants find the new theism reassuring and in that there is nothing so very new.

Atheism and the librarians

While we don't know which books Palin wanted to ban from her town library, book banning and burning is not the only issue we may face.

Here in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in the US Midwest, my county library holds most every book in the Cambridge "Companion" Series but one: The Cambridge Companion To Atheism.  Oddly enough, the author, Michael Martin, Boston U. Professor emeritus of philosophy, Harvard Ph.D. has another book missing from the collection, his Atheism. A Philosophical Justification.

Although both of these books with "Atheism" in the title are available at Amazon or your local bookstore, the librarian with whom I spoke seemed satisfied than within the county holdings (which now include the Minneapolis Public Library) there are 136 books under that subject keyword of "atheism".

So when I got home and back on the internet I checked the Subject keyword "Christianity": 5190 titles.  That ratio alone is 0.0262 which might seem fitting if there were about 2% non-theists in our county -  if that were a valid measure.  I tried "Christian": 11106; Islam: 1268; Buddhist: 475; Judaism: 1946 - and now we are on the order of 20,000 to 100 or 200 to 1 and I am still counting ...

This is the USA, where Bertrand Russell once had trouble with permission to deliver a lecture at Columbia, as I recall - one nation under God. America where we are told that no single non-criminal epithet is so derogatory as "atheist".  What if you child married an atheist!?!

By looking for books by various authors, I think that I could bring the number of books devoted to non-theism up to the order of 300.  Let's suppose that I could bring it up to 1000.  If I add in the new wave of Christian fiction, Christian music I suspect that the 20k would creep towards another order of magnitude - and if the same criterion for non-theist were applied to classify books as theist, will this would start to look grim.

The books are available through inter-library loan from some local colleges and universities.

But one last sanity check:  astrology: 536; tarot: 164; psychic: 562 - and even supposing some overlap, we already have a discrepancy of an order of magnitude.

Not that the subject catalog keyword search is definitive, as we have Bible: 5357 but religion: 5316 but religious: 9297

Oh, and not to forget the philosopher Jesus, Himself: a mere 2319.