Religion for Atheists

VII

Perspective

1.

For atheists, one of the most consoling texts of the Old Testament should be the Book of Job, which concerns itself with the theme of why bad things happen to good people — a question to which, intriguingly, it refuses to offer up simple, faith-based answers. Instead it suggests that it is not for us to know why events occur in the way they do, that we should not always interpret pain as punishment and that we should recall that we live in a universe riddled with mysteries, of which the vagaries in our fortunes are certainly not the largest or even, as we will become aware if only we can look at matters from a sufficient remove, among the most important.

The Book of Job begins by introducing us to its eponymous hero, a man from Uz, on whom God appears to have bestowed every imaginable favour. When we first meet him, Job is living in a large house, he is virtuous and content, he has seven sons and three daughters, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen and 500 donkeys. Then, in a single day, a catastrophic series of disasters befalls him, his family and his livestock. First a band of violent Sabaeans make off with the oxen and donkeys. Then a great storm breaks out and lightning kills every last one of the sheep. Members of a neighbouring tribe, the Chaldeans, steal the camels. Worst of all, a hurricane blows in from the desert and destroys the house of Job’s eldest son, killing the youth and all of his nine siblings, who have gathered inside for a feast.

As if these tribulations were not enough, mysterious sores begin to spread over Job’s body, rendering his every least movement excruciating. Sitting in a pile of ashes, a broken man, Job scrapes at his skin with a shard of pottery and, in terror and sorrow, asks God why all of these things have happened to him.

Job’s friends think they know the answer: he must have sinned. Bildad the Shuhite is certain that God would not have killed Job’s children had they — and Job himself — not done something very wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,’ Bildad confides. Zophar the Naamathite goes so far as to hint that Job’s crimes must have been terrible indeed, and God generous in his treatment of him, because the Lord always forgives more than he punishes.

Job dismisses these explanations, though, as nothing more than ‘proverbs of ashes’ and ‘defences of clay’. He knows that he has not sinned. Why, then, has he been beset by these troubles? Why has God forsaken him? Does God even exist?

At last, after a good deal of further debate among the men, Yahweh himself is prompted to answer Job. From a whirlwind in the desert, furious, God thunders:

‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee …

Where wast thou when I laid

the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding …

By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? …

Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven …? …

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? …

Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom …? …

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?’

Job’s direct challenge regarding God’s existence and ethical intentions is thus met with an indirect response, wherein the deity goes on at length about how little humans know of anything. Fragile, limited creatures that they are, how can they possibly understand the ways of God? he demands. And given their ignorance, what right do they have to use such words as undeserved and unmerited? There are untold things about the galaxy that mankind cannot properly interpret and upon which, therefore, it ought not presume to impose its flawed logic. Human beings did not bring the cosmos into being and, despite their occasional feelings to the contrary, they do not control or own it. God tries to shake Job out of his preoccupation with the events in his own life by drawing his attention to the immensity and variety of nature. He evokes a sweeping vision of the totality of existence, from the foundation of the earth to the tracks of the constellations, from the heights attained by a hawk in flight to the labour pains of a mountain goat, in the hope of instilling in the man from Uz a redeeming sense of awe.

The strategy works: Job is reminded of the scale of all that surpasses him and of the age, size and mystery of space. God’s whirlwind, and the sonorous, sublime words he speaks, excite a pleasing terror in his audience, a sense of how petty are man’s disasters in comparison with the ways of eternity, leaving Job — and the rest of us, perhaps — a little readier to bow to the incomprehensible and morally obscure tragedies that every life entails.

2.

Some millennia after Job received his lesson from God, another Jew, Benedictus de Spinoza, undertook to reframe the same argument in a more secular idiom.

Spinoza had no patience with the notion of an anthropomorphic Supreme Being who could speak to his followers from a mountaintop and dwelt in the clouds. For him, ‘God’ was merely a scientific term for the force that had created the universe, the first cause or, in the philosopher’s preferred phrase, the ‘cause of itself’, causa sui.

As a philosophical construct, this God offered Spinoza considerable consolation. During moments of frustration and disaster, the philosopher recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective, or a re-envisioning of the situation, in his famous and lyrical coinage, ‘under the aspect of eternity’, sub specie aeternitatis. Fascinated by the new technology of his age — and most of all by telescopes and the knowledge they yielded of other planets — Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to step outside ourselves and practise submitting our will to the laws of the universe, however contrary these might seem to our intentions.

We are not so very far, here, from God’s advice to Job: rather than try to redress our humiliations by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness. The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings — much to their detriment — are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.

Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place. It surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history, and the achievements of our fellow humans as the measure of all things — a grandiosity that plunges us into continuous swirls of anxiety and envy.

3.

Religion is above all a symbol of what exceeds us and an education in the advantages of recognizing our paltriness. It has natural sympathies with all those aspects of existence which decentre us: glaciers, oceans, microscopic life forms, newborn babies or the resonant language of Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire …’). Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

Religion is more acute than philosophy in understanding that it is not enough merely to sketch out such ideas in books. It would of course be ideal if we could — faithful and faithless alike — view things sub specie aeternitatis at all times, but we are almost certain to fall out of the habit unless we are firmly and consistently reminded to do so.

Among the cannier initiatives of religion, then, has been the provision of regular souvenirs of the transcendent, at morning prayer and the weekly service, at the harvest festival and the baptism, on Yom Kippur and on Palm Sunday. The secular world is lacking an equivalent cycle of moments during which we too might be prodded to imaginatively step out of the earthly city and recalibrate our lives according to a larger and more cosmic set of measurements.

If such a process of re-evaluation offers any common point of access open to both atheists and believers, it may be via an element in nature which is mentioned in both the Book of Job and Spinoza’s Ethics: the stars. It is through their contemplation that the secular are afforded the best chance of experiencing redemptive feelings of awe.

Myopically, the scientific authorities who are officially in charge of interpreting the stars for the rest of us seem rarely to recognize the therapeutic import of their subject matter. In austere scientific language, the space agencies inform us of the properties and paths of the heavenly bodies, yet they seldom consider astronomy as either a source of wisdom or a plausible corrective to suffering.

Science should matter to us not only because it helps us to control parts of the world, but also because it shows us things that we will never master. Thus we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly — perhaps after the main news bulletin and before the celebrity quiz — we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety.

To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes.

We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven’t called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

Piccadilly Circus: the Messier 101 galaxy, part of the constellation Ursa Major, via the Hubble telescope. (illustration credit 7.1)