Rushdie's God

 I am a particular fan of Salman Rushdie. Of his published words, the few I have not (yet) read are like the water that's left in your cupped hands when all the rest has passed through. Not much. I have taught an entire graduate seminar on his works--though that was long ago, before most of the ones we now have were written. I've gone to India to present a paper on his sense of history, which was soon after published in a book that came out of the conference. I did this in the days when I wasn't quite sure it was safe to travel to India to talk about Rushdie. (Turns out I had nothing to worry about.) If nothing else of Rushdie lasts, it's hard to imagine the Midnight's Children will not be read as long as there are people who read novels. 

That's not to say that I think Rushdie is universally brilliant and not even sometimes rated higher, I won't say "than he deserves" but, as I would rate him. He's a novelist. He's not a philosopher. And he's not theologian either. I'm neither of those things myself, so there's my grain of salt.

I, like Rushdie, like to talk about God. I don't like to talk about God the way Rushdie does. Rushdie is not just a devotee of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but is (or in one case was) also a personal friend of theirs. It's the tradition of no less a mind than Bertrand Russell. And like them, he isn't just an atheist--I have no problem with atheists--but contemptuous not just of religion (I understand even when I don't share that response to religion), but also faith in general, to theism in general. As such, he equates believe in God with magical thinking, with believing in fairy tales and Santa Claus. Something only children and small minded adults can take seriously. 

On the question of whether God exists, I will not take any stand. On the question of whether this characterization of belief makes sense, I will. 

In Languages of Truth Rushdie offers a standard atheists "history" of religion (he cannot distinguish between belief in God and adherence to religion). Ignorant, pre-scientific people, needing to understand and control what they could not understand or control, felt the wind and invented an invisible blower of the wind to whom they could appeal when the wanted the wind to stop and who, if he did not stop the wind, hated or blamed them, in any case required some response from them if they still wanted the wind to stop. (I'm not quoting because the idea is so simple and so standard that it doesn't even matter if I embellish or understate; it comes to the same thing.)

God did not create us in his image, he tells us, we created God in our image. 

Rushdie may be right about all of that. That's not the question. He also may be wrong. Offering no evidence between "common sense," which is an extraordinarily slippery sort of evidence, no one reading Rushdie has in fact any reason to accept his version of history, his story, or, to put it in the terms it best deserves, his myth. There's an essential difference between a plausible explanation and an established fact. Rushdie wants to put his eggs in the basket of science, but then he offers a hypothesis as a conclusion. He has told the story many times of how he lost his faith as child--around the age of 14 if I remember correctly. A lot of children do. I don't see any evidence that his thinking on the question has advanced since then. Almost no one's ever does. (C. S. Lewis is an exception to that trend, not that I don't have problems with the version of faith advocated there as well. But whatever one might say about Lewis, his faith is well thought out, not the shrug-off of Rushdie.) I don't think anyone needs to take too seriously the undeveloped atheism or the theism of a fourteen-year old.  

The point that I wish to make is this: Rushdie replaces a faith in myth with a myth in which he expects us to place our faith. A myth of origins. A simple reversal of the old idea about God's image. How does Rushdie know we created God in our image? Here he does not delve. It's too obvious to need to delve. 

The problem with saying that faith is unreasonable, fairy-taley, jibber jabber, is the number of reasonable people who maintain that it isn't, not just amateur theologians like C.S. Lewis, but actual philosophers like Rene Girard and Paul Ricoeur. And the problem with the idea that we created God in our image is that the claim is always based on the unverifiable notion that God if God existed would never create the universe in which we live. It's unjust. It's too tolerant of evil. Our reason tells us that it is unreasonable for an omniscient, all loving God to make such a shit show universe. 

That may be true. There is reason to assert that it is. But we have nothing like a reason to believe that it is. If we do, we do so on faith. That an infinite God would use human reason, with not just its lack of knowledge but its lack of apparatus, its thoroughly qualified finiteness, to make what we have to call from our perspective "decisions" about how to make a universe is not just an act of hubris but an act of willful blindness. It's plainly silly. Think of a toddler telling you how to fix your car or your government or global warming and multiply that difference infinitely and you have the difference between what religion calls the mind of God and what Rushdie calls the mind of God. 

There's no getting around this. It will sound like a cheap response to the Rushdie, Hitchens, Dawkins crowd. But it is in fact the more reasonable response. It is the line of thought that unlike theirs takes into account reason and science. It sets myth aside to confront the facts as we know them.