The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

the eternally perfect, he is free to seize the “possibility” of becoming historical…. For man’s being and action, this means that God is the living God who in all his indisposability and freedom knows and loves man, acts, moves, and attracts in man’s history.

Later, for comparison with Eastern religions, he reports and seems to endorse “the Western tradition of a negative theology from Pseudo-Dionysius to Heidegger”: (pp. 601–602):

God cannot be grasped in any concept, cannot be fully expressed in any statement, cannot be defined in any definition: he is the incomprehensible, inexpressible, indefinable.

Neither does the concept of being embrace him… he is not an existent: he transcends everything… but… he is not outside all that is; inherent in the world and man, he determines their being from within…

In God therefore transcendence and immanence coincide… Before God, all talk emerges from listening silence and leads to speaking silence.

Later again, in discussing “the God of the Bible,” he says (p. 632):

God is not a person as man is a person. The all-embracing and all-penetrating is never an object that man can view from a distance in order to make statements about it. The primal ground, primal support and primal goal of all reality…is not an individual person among other persons, is not a superman or superego.

But also (p. 633):

A God who founds personality cannot himself be nonpersonal…God is not neuter, not an “it,” but a God of men…He is spirit in creative freedom, the primordial identity of justice and love, one who faces me as founding and embracing all interhuman personality…. It will be better to call the most real reality not personal or impersonal but…transpersonal or suprapersonal.

But, despite all this, Kung also accepts in some sense the God of the Bible who, he says, is wholly and entirely essentially a “God with a human face” (p. 666). It is “overhasty” to dissociate the God of the philosophers from the God of the Bible, but also “superficial” simply to harmonize them. Rather, we should “see the relationship in a truly dialectical way. In the God of the Bible, the God of the philosophers is the best, threefold sense of the Hegelian term “sublated” (aufgehoben)—at one and the same time affirmed, negated, and transcended.” What is more, he “venture[s] without hesitation to declare: Credo in Jesum Christum, filium Dei unigenitum” (I believe in Jesus Christ, the only- begotten son of God) and “can confidently say even now: Credo in Spiritum Sanctum” (I believe in the Holy Spirit) (pp. 688, 699). That is, for all the contrary appearances, he affirms his own orthodoxy.

Kung is obviously fond of having it all ways at once. This is further illustrated by his remarks about miracles (pp. 650–651). Miracles recorded in the Bible “cannot be proved historically to be violations of the laws of nature”; a miracle is merely “everything that arouses man’s wonder,” not necessarily a divine intervention violating natural law. The miracle stories are “lighthearted popular narratives intended to provoke admiring faith.” (If so, we may comment, they have no tendency to support any kind of supernaturalism or theism.) Yet “no one who links belief in God with miracles is to be disturbed in his religious feelings. The sole aim here is to provide a helpful answer to modern man for whom miracles are a hindrance to his belief in God.” That is, if your belief in God is supported by miracles, Kung will endorse them for you; but if you find them an obstacle to belief, he will explain them away! Similarly he quotes with approval Bultmann’s remark: “By faith I can understand an idea or a decision as a divine inspiration, without detaching the idea or decision from its link with its psychological justification” (p. 653).

One main strand in Kung’s thinking brings him close to Hume’s Demea, who stands for an infinite and incomprehensible god against the anthropomorphism of Cleanthes. But then we should recall how Hume uses Demea’s view to prepare the way for Philo’s skepticism. A god as indescribable and indeterminate as the one Kung seems to offer provides no purchase for reasoning, nothing of which argument can take hold in order to support the thesis that such a god exists.

Nevertheless, Kung claims to have given an argument. As we saw, he says that his “Yes” is “justifiable at the bar of critical reason.” Against such writers as Norman Malcolm and D. Z. Phillips, he says firmly that “the question of truth cannot be avoided. And this truth can be tested by experience, as we shall see, by indirect verification through the experience of reality” (p. 505). And again (p. 528):

No, theology cannot evade the demands for confirmation of belief in God: Not a blind, but a justifiable belief: a person should not be abused, but convinced by arguments, so that he can make a responsible decision of faith. Not a belief devoid of reality, but a belief related to reality.

Part of his case consists of his replies to the various arguments for atheism, essentially various proposed natural histories of religion. As we saw there, despite the weaknesses of some oversimplified theories, a satisfactory natural history of religion can be outlined. Kung’s criticisms come in the end to no more than what we have conceded and stressed, that such an explanation of religious beliefs is not a primary argument against their truth. He still needs a positive argument for theism; and indeed he tries to give one.

He concedes (p. 533) that “There is no direct experience of God.” Equally he explicitly rejects (though for inadequately stated reasons) the cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs (pp. 534–535). But he says that though “the probative character of the proofs of God is finished today,” yet their “non- demonstrable content” remains important. For the ontological proof, he offers only the (deplorable) suggestion that it should be “understood less as a proof than as an expression of trusting faith”; but, as we shall see, he really uses the cosmological and teleological arguments in an altered form—indeed, in a form that has some resemblance to Swinburne’s, in that he proposes that “belief in God is to be verified but not proved” (p. 536). Kung, however, combines this with echoes both of the moral proofs and of the will to believe: “an inductive lead does not seem impossible, attempting to throw light on the experience of uncertain reality, which is accessible to each and everyone, in order thus—as it were, by way of “practical reason,” of the “ought,” or (better) of the “whole man’—to confront man as thinking and acting with a rationally justifiable decision that goes beyond pure reason and demands the whole person.” Since his argument thus brings together several different strands, we may be able to use discussion of it to introduce the fulfillment of the undertaking… not merely to examine separately the various arguments for the existence of a god, but also to consider their combined effect, and to weigh them together against the various arguments on the other side, before reaching our final conclusion. This conclusion will be reached in section (b) below.

For Kung the question is not whether we can or cannot advance from an already established knowledge of the natural world, or of consciousness, or of morality, to further, specifically theistic, hypotheses or conclusions. His strategy is rather to argue that in present day thought rationality, both speculative and practical, is threatened along with theism by a pervasive tendency to nihilism. This nihilism, of which he finds the most powerful exponent in Nietzsche, is summed up as the denial of the three classical transcendentals: there is no unity, no truth, no goodness. Man deludes himself in thinking he has found any totality, system, or organization in events; he has sought a meaning in events that is not there; there is no absolute nature of things nor a “thing-in-itself”; the world is valueless and purposeless. Nihilism presents itself “as insight into the nothingness, contradictoriness, meaninglessness, worthlessness, of reality” (Chapter 44).

Kung insists that “The thoroughgoing uncertainty of reality itself makes nihilism possible, whether in practical life…or in philosophical or unphilosophical reflection.” Moreover, it is irrefutable: “There is no rationally conclusive argument against the possibility of nihilism. It is indeed at least possible that this human life, in the last resort, is meaningless, that chance, blind fate, chaos, absurdity and illusion rule the world” (Chapter 44). On the other hand, nihilism is not provable. It is not a priori impossible that “in the last resort, everything is nevertheless identical, meaningful, valuable, real” (Chapter 44). Consequently the basic question is, “Can nihilism be overcome, and, if so,