Atheism and Meaning

Rationality and the Limits of Reason

As long as there has been philosophy, as soon as men crawled out of caves to wonder at the stars there have been those who negate the existence of divinity.

Atheism has always existed, dominating from time to time the thoughts of philosophers. The theory of atoms and the void so beloved by modern atheists was originally espoused by Kannada thousands of years ago. He in turn was copied by the Greeks like Demosthenes and later echoed by Oppenheimer, who knew the Bhagavad-Gita.

Buddhist temple, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Every wave is favorable, even the tsunami. Atheistic opposition has often served to enhance the position of theism. In the history of philosophy were many great thinkers who began as doubters, from Paul whose conversion took place on the road to Damascus to St. Augustine, who began his career in faith by doubting the existence of a God who would promote evil in the world and ended by penning the City of God there are many such examples. Saint Francis began his career as a spoiled rich brat. He ended as an emblem of poverty and humility who had found enlightenment in his faith. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, began as a soldier and became a soldier of God. The examples are too numerous of enemies of faith whose greatness was shown in its defense. I leave you with the most famous.

The 19th Century was a time of great conflict in terms of ideas. As Darwin worked to show there was no need for a supernatural cause for the origin of the species, Marx taught that history was class struggle and that the divine right of kings was a scheme by the wealthy to deprive the rights of the poor working classes. “Religion is the opium of the masses,” wrote Marx, enraged that his 7 children who lived in squalor, deprived of earthly bread were promised “pie in the sky when we die.” He raged against religion and God, cursing his fate.

Writing later in the 19th Century, Nietzsche famously decried the “Death of God.” It may unfair to accuse him of having the blood of God on his hands. His writing on the subject is a curious lament. Here’s an excerpt from his book “The Gay Science,” called “The Parable”

Nietzsche 

The Parable of the Madman: The Death of God

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!"
As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

Head of Buddha

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this?

Ruins of pyramid, La Cañada de la Virgen, Mexico

"How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?"

Olmec head Mexico

 "Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? "

Ruins of Angkor

With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Stone heads of Angkor Wat

"It has been further related that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: "what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"

Russian Icon

As a philosopher, Nietzsche is writing at the end of the 19th Century, looking back at the accomplishments of his generation. His “parable” is a lament at the emptiness of rationalism. The great achievement of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was to exile God and even individual consciousness from rational analysis. Given the cult of rationalism, this meant that God had been banned. Banishment and exile are a form of “Death.” Shakespeare asserts as much, “What is thy sentence then but speechless death?”

Ruins of Shankar Temple, India

In Nietzsche’s time God was speechless, incapable of reason, banished from polite discussion, a mad idiot in the basement. And who condemned God to such an ignominious death? Who was the assassin? God had been bled to death over generations by minds like Newton who forwarded the idea of the clockwork universe. The mechanistic paradigm allowed God to exist but only in the remotest of senses. He set the world moving as Aristotles “prime mover.” Perhaps he had invented the laws of material nature. But since the cosmic machine had been working fine ever since that long-forgotten moment the world has had no need of God.

20th Century Atheist Bertrand Russell

Such faith as was provided by the Deism of Newton was so insipid and pale that the thinkers of the 19th century saw a gradual cultural movement away from faith, embracing rationalism and science as a substitute. But just as the conspirators of ancient Rome who plunged daggers into the heart of the despotic Caesar found their leader in Brutus, the thinkers of 19th century Europe had a champion in Immanuel Kant.

Contemporary atheists like Dawkins and Hawking rejoice in the dry ruminations of Kant. Kant’s genius was his argument. He took great care to demolish the reasons for the existence of God with sharp arguments, twisting the dagger as he probed for the heart.

21st Century Atheist Steven Hawking

Kant concludes that there are no rational proofs for the existence of God, since God, if He exists must be transcendent and outside the proofs of reason. He cannot be the “object” of our reason, if he exists at all. The words “rational” and “reason” have reference only to the world of the senses. Since God exists beyond the world of the senses, he cannot be studied through reason. From this perspective, he can neither be the subject nor the object of rational study or analysis.

Immanuel Kant

Kant felt that reason has strict limits which exclude metaphysical reality, the existence of God and communion with God through faith. Rational proofs for the existence of God are not “proofs” so much as justifications or apologetics for faith with an internal logic for their noetic conclusions.

Although Nietzsche might have had him arrested for the crime, Kant was never convicted for attempted murder of the divinity. He even made a half-hearted attempted to revive the corpse with his “moral imperative.” He argued that since the purpose of religion is morality, and since we might derive morality from his ethical system, the purpose of religion would be fulfilled by philosophy. Since God’s purpose would be fulfilled, his memory would live on after His demise.

But few theologians are satisfied by Kant’s moral imperative. The party is over. The funeral has been held. Kant’s thinking cast a pall over philosophy that has yet to be lifted. He has left us with an epistemological divide between the noumenal and the phenomenology of the spirit, a split between the named world of the senses and the ontological reality of the Super-subject, the subject who cannot be made the object of our reason.

In the original and quintessential novel, Miguel Cervantes wrote that Alonso Quijano dried his brain by too much reading. He describes the process of how the famous Hidalgo bought and read too many books filled the fantastic stories of errant knights, bankrupting himself in the process and ending by drying his brain: "Es, pues, de saber, que este sobredicho hidalgo, los ratos que estaba ocioso (que eran los más del año) se daba a leer libros de caballerías con tanta afición y gusto, que olvidó casi de todo punto el ejercicio de la caza, y aun la administración de su hacienda; y llegó a tanto su curiosidad y desatino en esto, que vendió muchas hanegas de tierra de sembradura, para comprar libros de caballerías en que leer; y así llevó a su casa todos cuantos pudo haber dellos; y de todos ningunos le parecían tan bien como los que compuso el famoso Feliciano de Silva: porque la claridad de su prosa, y aquellas intrincadas razones suyas, le parecían de perlas; y más cuando llegaba a leer aquellos requiebros y cartas de desafío, donde en muchas partes hallaba escrito: la razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura, y también cuando leía: los altos cielos que de vuestra divinidad divinamente con las estrellas se fortifican, y os hacen merecedora del merecimiento que merece la vuestra grandeza. Con estas y semejantes razones perdía el pobre caballero el juicio, y desvelábase por entenderlas, y desentrañarles el sentido, que no se lo sacara, ni las entendiera el mismo Aristóteles, si resucitara para sólo ello." (Quijote, I)

The above passage has bewildered readers for generations, just as it bewildered poor Alonso himself to the point of madness. “By reading these and similar passages the poor gentleman lost his judgment. In his mad attempt to unravel their sense (which even Aristotle would find obscure) he stayed up late at night and ended by going mad.”

I was asked to go through some of the ideas of the atheists with an eye to refuting them, and yet Kant and his disciples fill their books with statements like “la razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace...” which translates as “the reason for my irrationality that my reasoning concludes...” To spend large chunks of time studying Kant would dry anyone’s brain. Kant’s rational materialism goes to great lengths to disqualify the principle of self-consiousness on epistemological grounds. The great German transcendentalist opines that since it cannot be thought of, it doesn’t exist.

His problem is something like the dilemma of the fish who tries to philosophize about the existence of water. Since water is invisible, the fish might say that “water doesn’t exist.” Materialism wants to subordinate consciousness to matter, to hold that matter creates consciousness. This is baseless. There is no evidence that matter produces consciousness.

The next best position is to claim that the question is unimportant or stands beyond the ability of reason and therefore useless. Since we cannot know through reason and argument if God exists, therefore he doesn’t exist. This is something like saying that since we cannot perform the music of Tchaikovsky on a Coca-Cola bottle, Tchaikovsky doesn’t exist. If the instrument doesn’t suit the music, we say that the music doesn’t exist. Reason is an idiom, suitable for sorting and ordering observable phenomena within human brain. To infer that what cannot be classified with a particular idiom has no existence is an argument peculiar to the 19th Century.

How is one to know or understand supra-material objects and their qualities through the rational process? Kant has no idea. He and his disciples appear content with the attempted murder of God. It never occurs to him that the reality above the world of the senses might be apprehended through a different form of instrumentation. If Kant is right, and we cannot learn through reason and argument if God exists beyond the bondage of human rational thought, then how can we know Him? What instrument is available to us, beyond reason?

Has God no power of self-revelation? If God exists,and if he is all-powerful, he must have the power of self-revelation. What is the mechanism through which self-revelation works? Or by what organic process is self-revelation unraveled? What can exist beyond reason?

Like fish who would deny the existence of water, philosophers delight in their genius to deny their own existence. Having discovered the limits of their own intelligence they accuse those for whom consciousness is self-evident of being ignorant. And yet, the existence of reality is self-evident and needs no proof. For those with an inkling of their own spiritual reality, proof is not needed. Those who are prejudiced against their own spiritual sense speak the language of delirium. Like the Quixote, their brains have dried up after having occupied themselves with too much word jugglery.

Kant’s craft was in shifting God out of consideration on wholly epistemological grounds. This leaves his metaphysics as not only agnostic but even filled with atheistic overtones. His so-called philosophy of religion is really an attack on the religions of his time. He seems intent on removing religion and theology from any serious academic discussion. His genius is shown in the fact that he was successful, especially in the West.

Eastern philosophy has a different take. For Eastern philosophy, especially the points of view that flow from the Vedanta and Upanishads, consciousness exists before and after reason and transcends the purely rational. The atma, the self, is a self-evident fact that must be taken into consideration before any attempt at ratiocination.

In Western philosophy and theology, one of the most robust attempts at a refutation of Kant has come from another German thinker: Rudolf Otto. Otto was a Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion. He felt that despite the fact that one may speak of the functions or levles of consciousness, consciousness itself is beyond classification, irrational, “plainly strange,” “wholly other,” non-deducible, irreductable, and unclassifiable. Otto was intrigued by the mysticism he found in India as a student of Sanskrit and the Vishnu-bhakti of the Śrī-Vaiṣṇava school. He studied the system of qualified dualism promoted by Ramanuja and translated works on Vishnu-Narayana into German.

Otto's book The Idea of the Holy, is an important theological work, read by Catholics and Protestants alike. Since its publication in 1917 it has remained popular as a powerfully felt answer to Kant’s Critique.

Idea of the Holy promotes the idea of the “holy” as what he calls, “numinous.” In his attempt at explaining a self-evident mystical experience, he employs a special philosophical vocabulary. Otto’s numinous is a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self".

His term derives from the Latin numen which means “divine power”. Oddly, he picks a term with echoes of Kant's noumenon, a Greek term referring to unknowable reality.

Rudolf Otto, mentor of Karl Barth, friend of Rabindranath Tagore

For Otto, the numinous or “intuitive divine mystic experience” is characterized by awe and reverence. Based on his insight into South Indian bhakti, this strange German philosophy teacher finds that an experience of God is characterized by a sense of mystery which he calls mysterium, awe and reverence or tremendum and fascination fascinans all at once.

Otto points out that the conscious state of awe and reverence achieved through mystic communion with the divine is beyond classification and cannot be understand rationally. The numinous, therefore, cannot be cognized.

Rudolf Otto, (25 September 1869 – 6 March 1937) worked and wrote after Nietzsche and ushered in much of the twentieth century reaction to the agnosticism of Kant and the atheism of Nietzsche. Darwin and Marx had made their impact. The ideals of Marx were taken up passionately by Lenin who tried to found a Communist society in Russia based on his teachings. The atheism of “Religion is the Opium of the masses,” was made official state doctrine by Lenin and Stalin in Russia and an entire generation was denied freedom of worship. Yet somehow theism and mysticism survived.

While the teachings of Kant, Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx had left an indelible impression on science, culture and politics, Rudolf Otto’s quiet views on mysticism influenced 20th Century Christian theism.

Theologican Karl Barth approved of Otto as did Freud’s rival Psycho-analist Karl Jung, who borrowed the idea of the “numinous.” Among theologians and philosophers influenced by Otto’s views were Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, and Joseph Needham.

Rudolf Otto mounted an effective defense against the materialistic rationalism of the 19th Century by forwarding the importance of “Religious mysticism.” His personal experience of mysticism was sparked by his contact with the Vaiṣṇavas of South India. He was fascinated with the model of worship he found there which stresses the awe and reverence of God. And yet his fascination with refuting Kant’s Critique by forwarding the “non-rational” element leads him to some insipid conclusions. Useful as his refutation may have been, his own mystic experience seems impoverished by comparison to true Vaiṣṇavism.

Otto’s idea of the Divine or Numinous resembles much more the Old Testament God of terror and awe than the beneficent sweetness of Reality the Beautiful as seen in the worship of Śrī Kṛṣṇa. His awe of God seems more akin to dread and ghost worship than to any loving relationship found in the bhakti tradition.

Otto stresses, mystery, terror, and fascination in the face of the Supreme Majesty of the Divine. And yet this is a superficial understanding of the Personality of Godhead. While he has found comfort in the mysticism of India, he has grounded his concept of divinity in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition where the Old Testament version conceives of God as the “All-powerful Father in Heaven,” and humankind as absolutely tainted with primordial sin. Since the Christians insist on the need for atonement of man’s sins through the blood of Christ, the mediation of Christ is essential for redemption. The gap between the Absolute Power of Divinity in the Fatherhood of God and the helplessness of man, fallen into sin, is tremendous and fearful. Otto finds only the virata-rupa of Krishna as seen in Bhagavad-gita brings forth the kind of terror that might correspond to the Christian Deity.

Rudolf Otto’s version of mysticism was helpful to many theists living and writing in the 20th century from Karl Barth to C.S. Lewis. But we can go deeper. As a competent linguist, Otto not only knew Sanskrit but also Bengali. He not only translated the Bhagavad-gita, The original Gita: The song of the Supreme Exalted One, London 1939 and was interested in the relationship between Christianity and bhakti, he also served as interpretor to Rabindranath Tagore during the latter’s visit to Marburg, Germany. However his version of bhakti falls short.

Otto has much to recommend him, especially in his noble attempt to revive God after the attempted murder by Kant. Still, he leaves many essential truths unexplained. His conception of divinity as “beyond reason” is valuable. The moderns first supported the “clockwork God” of Newton and finally rejected that Deistic Lord of the laws of nature as no longer useful. Otto tries to support the Fatherhood of Godhead, and yet he falls sort in dealing with the higher aspects of reality. The Fatherhood of Godhead as conceived by Otto may affirm Christ’s vision of a loving God,the idea that God loves his children but his version does little to explain man’s love for God. An object of terror cannot rightly be considered an object of love.

There is no need to define divinity exclusively in terms of terror, mystery, and fascination or mysterium, trememdum fascinatum, as does Otto. Otto seems to have been unable to understand God as Love, settling instead for terror and mystery.

And yet, history has given us many examples of saints in the mystic tradition of Christianity who claimed communion with the Love of God. Saint John Chrysostom achieves divine love through the holy name of Christ. Saint Francis, immersed in love, expresses love for all beings, including the most helpless animals. The experience of God as Love is not limited to the Christian world.

Rudolf Otto, fascinated by rationalism concentrates on the knowable aspects of divinity and terminates in terror. But in bhakti-yoga, God is experienced through divine love and dedication.

Nevertheless the give and take between atheists and theists have seen many variations on the them of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Otto influenced the theologians of the 20th century, notably Karl Barth, and C.S. Lewis. While he finds “Fear” to be the basis of religious conviction, at least he feels that God is still alive enough to fear. His analysis of divinity may be useful as an answer to atheism, but is far from a healthy, developed view of enlightened consciousness, since it lacks joy. Fear and submission to God from awe and reverence may be superior to a complete lack of consciousness, but true communion with divinity should involve love, dedication, and voluntary self-abnegation.

In any case, atheistic opposition has resulted in the gradual and further elucidation of the theistic position. But although the opponents of theism have been silenced from time to time, they are not always really converted to the views of their rival. The rational materialist view sometimes appears to conquer all opposition until a mature and gifted protagonist of mystic realization reappears on the scene.

Otto was interested in bhakti, but true love of God is possible only in the absence of fear, of awe and reverence. And yet, while his definition of divinity lacks higher perspectives, Otto was useful in preserving and defending theism from the darkness of atheism.

The protagonists of rational materialism have made much of the need for conforming to an ontological model which excludes any metaphysics. They want us to speak of “being” while at the same time holding as an axiomatic truth our own “non-being.” Since consciousness, which exists outside the mind and creates the mind, cannot be proven rationally as a function of the mind, created by the mind, therefore it doesn’t exist. Or at least we are not allowed to speak of its existence. We merely hold the ontological reality of our own self in abeyance whilst discussing “being.” This is something like running a race with your shoelaces tied together. Before studying “being” I must be handicapped by denying my own “being,” as a prerequisite to study. I return to the Quixote: la razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace...

The study of ontology is not for the faint-minded, who like the Quixote run the risk of drying up their brain-pan. Ontological discussion has the tendency to degenerate into meaningless affirmations on the meaning of being. In essence, ontology studies the nature of “Being.” In the words of the scandal-plagued Bill Clinton when he said, “there is no sexual relationship” the truth, “all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” As Heidegger put it, “Was ist das Seiende, das Seiende in seinen Sein?" as "What is being, what is beingness in its Being?”

For bhakti-yogis, being is self-evident and avoids these discussion. Post-modern rationalists, however, love nothing more than hair-splitting. The true mystic realization of being goes beyond discussion and hair-splitting and concludes in divine love.