A Plausible God: Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology

A PLAUSIBLE GOD

MITCHELL SILVER

A Plausible God

SECULAR REFLECTIONS ON LIBERAL JEWISH THEOLOGY

Copyright © 2006 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Silver, Mitchell.

A plausible God : secular reflections on liberal Jewish theology / Mitchell Silver.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2681-8

ISBN-10: 0-8232-2681-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2682-5 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8232-2682-4

1. God (Judaism) 2. Judaism—Doctrines. 3. Liberalism (Religion) 4.

Lerner, Michael, 1943—Teachings. 5. Green, Arthur, 1941—Teachings.

6. Kaplan, Mordecai Menahem, 1881—Teachings. I. Title.

BM610.S515    2006

296.3′11—dc22                                             2006021331

Printed in the United States of America

08  07  06     5  4  3  2  1

First edition

FOR ORA, ISAAC, AND HADASS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

PART 1

1. The New God’s Relevance

2. A First Pass at Defining God: The All and the One

3. A Second Pass: God as the Potential for Goodness

4. The Uses of Belief in God

5. The Usefulness of a Plausible God

6. Someone to Watch Over Me

7. Talking to and About God

PART 2

8. Avoiding Idolatry

9. A Matter of Taste

10. Truth and Beauty

Appendix A: The Ineffable

Appendix B: The Untenable God

Appendix C: Theories of Truth and Credibility

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To ask a friend or colleague to read a manuscript even once is to request a substantial favor; an expectation that it be read twice by the same person would be downright unmannerly. That far I would not go. On one hand, the result of my minimally decent manners is that the benefactors of the book only get to read a version of it unimproved by their criticisms. On the other hand, these benefactors avoid the exasperation of re-reading a book whose author, at times, stubbornly declined to take their good advice. The comments of friends and colleagues who read earlier drafts of this book were often so penetrating and insightful that I frequently felt that they, rather than I, should have been writing it. What authors commonly say is true here, too: Much of whatever may be good in this book was inspired by others, and where a reader might find fault, it is probably due to my failure to attend to sage counsel.

Hillel Dolgenas, Joel Greifinger, Joel Marks, and Dan Willbach not only read earlier drafts, but were also extremely generous with their time and willingness to discuss the issues. The written reactions of Arthur Goldhammer, Kathleen Sands, and Toba Spitzer were invaluable in getting me to rethink basic issues. I also received helpful comments from Ora Gladstone, Ellen Grabiner, Amy Herrick, and Nelson Lande, all of whom read large parts of earlier drafts. In addition to philosophical advice, Joel Kupperman guided me toward a more reader-friendly way to order my ideas, and Larry Blum suggested ways of capturing a publisher’s interest. Dan Dennett’s sympathetic reading was enormously encouraging, and his readiness to read a manuscript of a colleague with whom he was only slightly acquainted bespeaks both his kindness and devotion to philosophy.

The comments of anonymous readers from Fordham University Press were enormously helpful. I am very grateful for their efforts, as I am for the efforts of Toni Ellis and Ted Wagstaff and, from Fordham University Press, Helen Tartar, Katie Sweeney, Kathleen O’Brien, Loomis Mayer, and Nicholas Frankovich.

A version of chapter 8 appeared as Secularism, Humanism and Idolatry, in A Life of Courage: Sherwin Wine and Humanistic Judaism (IISHJ and Milan Press, 2003).

Ora, Isaac, and Hadass provide the daily portion of domestic happiness that allows me the luxury of worrying about God.

PREFACE

I never thought that I would need to bother with God. My earliest thoughts of God were laced with skepticism, and well before leaving childhood I had concluded that belief in God was a symptom of intellectual immaturity. As an adult, my devotion to Jewish identity shunned all talk of God, and I affiliated with Jewish institutions that explicitly labeled themselves as secular. I knew that most of the world was still enmeshed with God, but most of my world found no place for the divine. The stereotype that I stereotypically imagined most Americans had of educated Northeasterners was true of my friends, family, and associates: We were a godless bunch.

I had presumed that our godlessness was a function of our modernism, which in turn I thought had something to do with our attitude toward rationality and science. We secularists were the rational ones, the modern ones. God-believers were still mired in supernaturalism and magical thinking. I knew, of course, that there were many people able to function in the world, even as scientists, while maintaining belief in God. However, I thought of them as either too timid, too needy, or too intellectually sloppy to bring their modern, rational mindset to bear on their entire set of beliefs.

But a change has come to my world. Increasingly, for many years now, God has found a place in the lives of family, friends, and associates who claim to be, and appear to be, every bit as rational and modern as I am. Moreover, they are not obviously more fearful, needful, or intellectually careless than I. They would be offended to be called believers in magic. Indeed, they assert that their belief in God is wholly compatible with a naturalistic worldview. It was neither surprising nor interesting to me that there were super naturalists who preserved a corner of their minds for the pre-modern and were comfortable with God; but that there were thoroughgoing modernists who, by every measure of their moral, political, and metaphysical beliefs, I felt were my peers and who went about sincerely proclaiming belief in God, I found intriguing and challenging. What was going on here? How can these people, who thought and acted just like me, believe in God? It was that question that was the original impulse for this book.

Early in my inquiries and reflections, it became obvious that one thing that was going on was that the God that I had been dismissive of since my youth was not the God that so many of my fellow moderns were now embracing. I have come to call the first the old God, and the second the new God. The old God is hardly outmoded. He (and it is best to call the old God He,) surely has far more contemporary adherents than has the new God. But the old God is literally incredible for me, and for anyone, I would argue, who is thorough and consistent in their modernism. Belief in him is simply not a live option for such modernists.¹

But, things are otherwise with the new God. The new God has proven to have a powerful allure to modernists, and can fairly claim to be the sole competitor to atheism for the modernists’ allegiance. My fundamental premise is that the modernist has only two options consistent with her modernism: new God or no God. I want to understand the differences that it makes if one chooses to believe in the new God (supposing for the moment that such belief can be a matter of choice) rather than choosing to remain godless. I seek an analysis of these options, and not just an analysis of the intrinsic truth merits of new-God versus no-God beliefs, but equally an analysis of the personal and social implications of each mode of belief.² I also want to attend to the implications for individual and institutional action of choosing to give one’s beliefs a theistic, or atheistic, vocabulary regardless of the cognitive content of the beliefs. It seemed worth an extended reflection to figure out what it meant to reside in the no-God camp when so many I respected and felt close kinship with had opted for the new God.

It soon became clear that seeing only two options (no God or new God) over-simplifies. In truth, as we survey the descriptions of the new God, we find that we have been offered many new gods, and, for that matter, no God also comes in a variety of formulations. Indeed, whether there is a meaningful distinction between some of the new-God and some of the no-God conceptions is a major theme that I came to explore.

If the new-God/no-God dichotomy is too simple, so is the labeling of one branch of the dichotomy as the new God. Just as the old God is not old in all ways that a thing can be old, the newness of the new God is also restricted. This new God is mostly new only as an important element of (relatively) popular Western religion. The new God is hardly new as an idea. In fact, these new conceptions, or close relatives of them, have long been the gods of some traditional theological elites. If anything justifies calling them new, it is the recent attempts to make these abstract, philosophical gods the conscious objects of mass worship, and the apparent success of these attempts. Although perhaps still a small minority of humankind, there is now a sufficiently large population of science and reason devotees to create a social demand for the scientists’ and philosophers’ gods. More and more individuals and social groups are influenced by belief in these new gods. The choice between new and no God confronts modernists more than ever, and a growing number who have faced it are choosing the new God.

My concerns are nonparochial, but I will approach them mostly through the work of three twentieth-century Jewish theologians: Mordecai Kaplan, Arthur Green, and Michael Lerner. For me, their new gods are the most serious challenge to nonbelief. In part, this is due to broad social affinities. Like them, I was raised as a twentieth-century American Jew. They also declare a frank loyalty to science, making them unambiguously modern. Their liberal politics and humanistic morality are also germane; when I weigh the consequences of religious belief with these thinkers, we will be using a common scale.

My focus on these three theologians, however, is completely in the interest of the general issue: Should we moderns have any truck with God? Kaplan, Green, and Lerner’s work only provides the focal point to make the issue sharp; their theologies may deserve exegesis, but this book has no exegetical ambitions. I hope that I do not distort their thought, but a balanced and well-rounded representation is not the primary goal. They give us food for thought, and I am interested in the taste, digestibility, and nutritional value, but the recipe, preparation, and chef’s intentions are out of my study.

Although the issues are of nonsectarian theological import, the discussion is most often placed in a Jewish setting. Not only are three Jewish thinkers used as models of new-God theologians, but it is also the religious life of American Jews that is often this book’s testing ground for the new God’s implications. Still, I believe that investigations done on this testing ground yield results that are applicable on a much wider social and psychological territory. It is the new God, in all its guises, without regard to parochial dressing, that is my ultimate subject.

Although a premise of this work is that belief in the old God is not a live option for moderns, I make few claims for the most part about what is good to believe in the realm of theology, let alone about what is theologically true. Rather, my interest is "given certain metaphysical beliefs, what is the best way to express them and think about them?" That is, ought moderns be new-God theists or atheists?

Because much of what I will have to say, especially initially, will reveal the hollowness of much new-God talk, I fear that at times I will come off as the grinch who stole God.³ Alas, a degree of grinchiness is the analyst’s lot. The preacher, the poet, and the visionary can soar above mundane understanding, aiming at an emotional and intuitive grasp of the essentials of their subject, but the virtue of a critical analysis is unsentimental understanding. Unsentimental should not mean unsubtle or blind to emotional nuance, but it aims at no emotional effect and must be no respecter of its subject’s majesty, lineage, or friends. I do not mean to be debunking or deflationary, but I do want to understand how belief in the new God works and what it amounts to. In searching out and pressing fundamental assumptions and moral implications of the new-God theologies, some assumptions will be judged untenable, some implications undesirable. Hence, the debunking or deflationary appearance. However, regardless of the tentative results that the discussion reaches at various stages, I am conscious of grinding no axes.

As the discussion progresses, the virtues of new-God belief come increasingly to the fore, and the debunking tone turns to a tone of apologetics. But neither debunking nor apology is the intention; I try to let the chips fall where they may.

For both atheists and theists, my attempted indifference to where the chips land may at times try the reader’s patience. People tend, rightly so, to be passionate about their religious beliefs. Dispassion in a discussion of religious belief and disbelief is felt to be not only unfeeling, but also, in itself, evidence of a lack of understanding. In the realm of religion, we usually want champions of our deeply held convictions; but just because these convictions are so important, I want to bring the most patient, thorough, and sympathetic interpretation that I can muster to both new-and no-God belief.

Although forswearing conscious axe-grinding, I don’t pretend to unbiased neutrality. I approach these theologies as a secularist, long interested in theistic belief sensitive to the power of theistic language, but indisposed to claim belief in God or to comfortably make un-ironic use of God. Part of my motivation for these reflections is to see whether my secularist pose compares well to a new-God theism.

My lack of experience with mystical states strengthens my secular bias. Nothing that I say is meant to denigrate the value of mystical experiences or to deny the phenomenological accuracy of mystics’ descriptions of these experiences (see James 1902); I intend to give them full weight. Nonetheless, my personal innocence of them surely contributes to a secularist bias. Mystics seem inclined to theism.

I will now turn to some matters of method and style.

Dan Dennett likens his philosophical method to sculpture; first, he roughs out the shape of the problem, with no expectation that these efforts will result in a finished product with clean, sharp edges. He then goes over the material again, ultimately aspiring to get the fine details just so (1984, 3). The reader will find that I too repeatedly return to familiar ground, resurveying terrain already covered, but I do it with no expectation that I will ever get the fine details just so. Rather than sculpting, the metaphor for this method is circling. We will keep going around the same issues in the hope that with each pass, by stopping at different points on the route, we get new perspectives and notice different details. The result is not a final picture of the problem that is just so—complete, accurate, definitive. My hope, rather, is that we do get a richer picture with each go-round and end up with an album of portraits that, while not identical, are consistent and mutually illuminating.

Some questions will reappear prominently in our circling of the issues: What must the new God be like to be credible to moderns? Can the new God do what the old God did? Is a particular form of the new God especially useful? Can nontheism in a given matter do as well as new-God belief does? Can pretending to believe have the same effects as actually believing? What is clear about the new God and what is mysterious, and what should our attitude be toward the mysterious elements? How much of new-God devotion is a matter of taste rather than belief? Is all religious belief a matter of taste?

Part of my motive for making these (and other) questions recurring themes is an aspiration for thoroughness. Philosophers trained in the analytic tradition can become fetishistic about crossing ts and dotting is, even where some readers would be content to have them left uncrossed and undotted, confident that they know where the crosses and dots would go. By making certain themes motifs, I am also motivated by the belief that every new context sheds a new light and reveals possibilities that require the reopening of old questions.

As is typical in philosophy, every issue is entangled and dependent on other issues in a way that makes an orderly lineal account inevitably begin with some question begging simplistic discussions. Hence, my circling back is also meant, in part, to discharge the initial question-begging assumptions and refine the simplistic early discussions. The chapter headings would lead one to think that the definition, uses, and effects of God are separate issues, with the ones dealt with in earlier chapters laying the foundation for the issues discussed in subsequent chapters. But the discussion cannot be arranged with one question neatly resting on an answer to the other. It is more like a teepee, with all of the issues leaning on each other, although even that image is misleading, for teepees have separate poles. I do separate out issues, for that is the only way to advance an inquiry, but I remain conscious, and so should the reader, of the merely expository necessity of the separation. Definition, use, and effect are not quite so separable.

This is a book of reflections, not an extended argument for a specific thesis; even so, many of the reflections do take the forms of arguments. Arguments, of course, should be judged for soundness. However, since insight more than demonstration is my overall aim, I hope that should the reader find any of the arguments unsound, she finds them nonetheless of interest. Sometimes, lines of inquiry that I found interesting and compelling led to claims that were inconsistent with other lines of inquiry. Rather than suppress the inconsistencies, I noted them and then speculated on how they might be reconciled. Sometimes, I found the reconciliation less convincing than the arguments that led to the apparently incompatible claims. Even in those cases, however, I let stand the competing discussions, reluctant to let go of whatever partial truth each might contain.

I have tried to make the philosophical issues accessible to nonphilosophers, at least in the main text. I have used the notes at the end of the book for technical elaborations and caveats, as well as for nontechnical pertinent, but tangential, discussions. Putting those thoughts into end-notes is not meant to devalue or disparage them – it is simply to acknowledge that they divert from the main flow of the larger discussion.

I will refer to Green, Kaplan, and Lerner as the theologians or our theologians. There are very significant differences among the three thinkers, and when I ascribe a position to them as a group, usually at least one could justifiably complain that his position is being misrepresented. So I ask the reader to bear in mind that I am using the group to stand for a theological tendency and not to take my generalizations about the theologians as a fair or precise interpretation of any of their individual theologies.

I rarely speak of a possible God or God, should it exist, although often that is what is meant. Furthermore, I sometimes speak of God for brevity’s sake when I think that the context makes it clear that what is meant is belief in God. I vary the pronoun for God between he, she, and it. Philosophically, the neutral it is always best, but 3,000 years of Western religious language makes it too jarring in certain contexts. The he/she alternations, of course, serve the ideal of equality.

God is always capitalized, gods never. The he/she/ it pronouns for God are not capitalized. I felt that a lowercase singular god would be, again given our legacy of religious language, distractingly impious. The uppercase He and She felt like such a false note of piety that I might be accused of irony when none was intended. There is no consistent logic to all of this, but I hope that it comes near to a consistent tone.

I have spoken of circling, but spiraling better captures the intent. For all the going round, progress is made. I end up in a different, and I hope in terms of understanding, a higher place than where I started.

The book is divided into three parts: chapters 1 through 7, chapters 8 through 10, and the three appendices. In chapter 1, I describe the general historical and sociological importance of the new God. We see that the new God theology, the theology that Kaplan’s, Green’s, and Lerner’s work will be used to exemplify, is representative of an ancient, sustained, and recently growing stream of thought. Chapter 1 also argues that we who are susceptible to this new-God theology, the moderns I spoke of above, are also, despite some countertrends, growing in numbers and influence. Much of the remainder of part 1 deal’s with Kaplan’s, Green’s, and Lerner’s version of the new God. Chapters 2 and 3 try to get a handle on the nature of the new God(s) by carefully extracting a definition of divinity from the theology of Kaplan, Green, and Lerner. In chapter 4, I catalogue all of the things that belief in any God might be expected to accomplish, things that belief in the old God did accomplish. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 look at the functions of belief in God described in chapter 4 and explore how well the new God performs those functions.

Although basic general issues frequently take the foreground in part 1, part 2 makes those general issues its primary focus and almost fully leaves behind the detailed discussion of the theologies of Kaplan, Green, and Lerner to reflect on the wider meaning of the new-God and no-God options. Chapter 8 examines the virtues of humanism as an alternative both to new-God theology and to a secularism that refrains from embracing humanism. In chapters 9 and 10, the discussion more explicitly takes the form of conclusions. A mélange of metaphysical, moral, political, and aesthetic considerations underlie the claims made in these concluding chapters.

In three appendices, I deal with issues that are best described, even if paradoxically described, as fundamental digressions; their pursuit would disrupt the discussion even though they are among its central assumptions. Theologians often claim that God cannot be spoken of meaningfully at all—that language utterly fails God. The first appendix argues that if we are going to speak of God, we ought to admit that we can speak of God, and that our God speech can be meaningful. If you are of the belief that one shouldn’t demand that talk of God be logical and coherent, it might be best to start your reading of the book with this appendix.

The second appendix is addressed to those who, after