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How to be an Atheist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Denys Turner
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Might I begin with the personal remark that in the course of preparing this lecture for Blackfriars in Oxford, I was quite unable to prevent thoughts of Herbert McCabe’s absence here today from occupying my mind. You must forgive me if, though he is absent physically, you are able to identify his presence intellectually within the few thoughts I offer you today; for the inclination to give some expression to the conjunction of influences which some thirty years of debate with Herbert have visited upon me personally became, in the circumstances, irresistible. Back in the early nineteen-eighties Nicholas Lash and I published in quick succession monographs on the subject of Marxism and its relation to Christian theology. We agreed on much of a theological nature, disagreed sharply on how to read Marx, so Herbert, then in his second stint as editor of New Blackfriars, invited us each to review the work of the other, Nicholas first, me to follow. With characteristically wicked wit, Herbert entitled my reply to Nicholas’ review ‘Turner Responds to Lash’. Well, today I mark my indebtedness to Herbert by means of a lecture which I am happy to concede is, in a manner, a response to Herbert’s ‘lash’, and in some spirit of emulation, could I achieve it, of that fierce clarity and energy of thought which so characterised what Eamon Duffy called ‘his mighty soul’.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 83 , Issue 977-978 , July 2002 , pp. 317 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Lash, Nicholas, A Matter of Hope, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981Google Scholar; Turner, Denys, Marxism and Christianity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983Google Scholar.

2 A “Plea for Excuses” in Austin, J.L., Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961Google Scholar.

3 Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias, 1 7a 31–33.

4 See Marx, K, Early Writings, trans. Livingstone, R and Benton, George, London: Penguin Books, 1975, pp. 357‐8Google Scholar, where he says: ‘…the question of an alien being, a being above nature and man, has become impossible in practice. Atheism, which is the denial of this unreality, no longer has any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, through which negation it asserts the existence of man. But socialism as such no longer needs such mediation’ (p. 358).

5 Karl Barth, An Introductory Essay to Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Eliot, George, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957, p. xiGoogle Scholar.

6 Summa Theologiae, la, q2 a3 corp.

7 Summa Theologiae, la, q3 Prol.

8 Though it might be contingently impossible for there to be more than one: if there is only one Dodo left, then there cannot in fact ever be more Dodos than that one.

9 Sermon 83, Renovamini Spiritu, in Colledge, Edmund and McGinn, Bernard (eds), Eckhart, Meister: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatise and Defense, New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1981, p. 207Google Scholar.

10 See, for example, Derrida, Jacques, ‘How to avoid speaking: Denials’, in Budick, Sanford and Iser, Wolfgang (eds), Language of the Unsay able: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 1–70Google Scholar.

11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, trans., introd., and notes Duncan Lange, Oxford: OUP, 1998, p. 19: what Nietzsche actually says is: “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar”.

12 In The Existence of God, ed. John Hick, London: Macmillan, 1964, p. 175.

13 Summa Theologiae, la, q 45 al ad3

14 See Tractatus, 1, p.31: “The world is everything that is the case” (or: “ the totality of facts”); 6.41, p. 183: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world”. Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.

15 In private correspondence.

16 Posterior Analytics, I, 9, 75b 37—76a 30.

17 Quine, W.V.O., Word and Object, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1960, p. 109Google Scholar, and Geach, Peter, ‘Causality and Creation’ in God and the Soul, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 80–81Google Scholar.

18 A ‘grammar’ of which many theologians in the middle ages other than Thomas had a firmer grasp than many moderns. As Eckhart insisted, God is ‘distinct’ from creatures by virtue of being indistinct [for a discussion of Eckhart on ‘distinction’ and indistinction’ in God, see my article, ‘The Art of Unknowing: Negative Theology in Late Medieval Mysticism’ in Modern Theology, 14.4, October, 1998, pp. 476–479]. Likewise, Nicholas of Cusa insisted that the proper name for God was ‘the not‐other’[ly non‐Aliud], for God is ‘other’ by virtue of being uniquely the one who is in no relation of creaturely otherness. This ‘grammar’ is necessarily the grammar of such paradoxes.

19 Confessions, 3.6.7

20 Summa Theologiae, la q2 a3 corp.

21 It is hard to know quite how to put this point clearly without being misleading. You do not want to find yourself distinguishing between what ‘God exists’ means in itself and what we can mean by it—for it is hard to know what sense can be made of an expression's meaning something that no one can mean by it. In any case, one thing Thomas clearly does not imply is that there is something we can ‘mean’ but not ‘say’ about God, which is the dubious formula Hacker uses a propos Wittgenstein's talk in the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus about what can be ‘shown’ but not ‘said’: it is possible, Hacker says, ‘to mean things which cannot be said’. Thomas’ position seems nearer to saying this: we are justified in saying ‘God exists’, though what ‘… exists’ means of God is beyond our comprehension. By the time we do get to know what ‘God exists’ means— in the beatific vision—we will no longer need to say it.

22 Wittgenstein was much better on this: in the Tractatus he shows why that there is anything at all cannot itself be just one of those things which ‘… are the case’, a fact in the world: ‘How the world is, is completely indifferent to what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world’(Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, 6. 432, p. 187). Later, he adds that that there is anything at all gives rise to an ‘astonishment’. He differs less from Aquinas than one might suppose when he adds: ‘This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and also there is no answer whatever, we… run up against the limits of language’ (Wittgenstein in conversation with Waismann, 30 December, 1929, in Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, pp. 68–9). I am grateful to my PhD student, Andy King for pointing out this reference.