Editorial: minding the (explanatory) gap

‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran’, says the robust and bluff believer, Francis Bacon, as the studio manager reaches to switch off the sound on his Elizabethan cultural perceptions, ‘than that this universal frame is without a mind... God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it...’. ‘It is true’, he goes on, ‘that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion’. Bacon assumes that the atheist rejects ‘religion’, not just belief in God: no middle term is readily available to him. There is a lingering nuance that ‘atheism’ is ‘shallow’ in its rejection of ‘religion’, which we can register, and even deploy, without thereby endorsing theism: can now insist that the rejection of theism is not yet atheism. Or can we? This is familiar enough stuff for Buddhists, who seem typically in their ‘non-theism’ to represent an agnosticism of indifference rather than of perplexity. But we need to recall why it might seem contentious, and revisiting the scene of religious perplexity can be salutary, since religious dialogue is not apologetic opposition but imaginativeengagement.     

Marxist‐Leninist scientific atheism 1

The main object of Marxist‐Leninist ‘scientific atheism’ consists in the discovery and assimilation of ‘scientific’ data and its use in the ‘atheistic’ destruction of religion and all its appurtenances. The first task is to show — using the data mainly of the natural sciences — the non‐existence of the object of religion, i.e. God. Second, it is necessary to explain how a theory without an object came to be and continues to show signs of vitality, i.e. to find the causes or ‘roots’ of religion: and this in terms of historical materialism.     

The Context and Argument of The Political Philosophy of Needs

Abstract

In this translation of Charles Taylor’s paper, ‘Die Immanente Gegenaufklarung: Christentum und Moral’, the author discusses the relationship between Christianity and morality, in the light of developments in the West over the past five centuries. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between morality and the development of unbelief, the rejection of God, and atheism.     

A new typology of modern atheisms: pilgrim atheism versus tourist atheism

This paper distinguishes between two types of modern atheisms: pilgrim atheism versus tourist atheism. Pilgrim atheism is based on and firmly supports the religion/science dichotomy. New Atheism is today’s well-known representative of pilgrim atheism which is characterised by its hostility to all religions. However, their very atheistic conception of the human being as a cognitively privileged animal depends on a theological conception of humanity, i.e. the human being is a God-like creature who can attain God’s objective knowledge. The second part of the paper is dedicated to exploring an emerging modern atheistic discourse: tourist atheism, emblematised by figures such as Alain de Botton. The fundamental argument of that part is that tourist atheists approach religion as a cultural heritage which still contains some benefits for non-believers. Thus, their strategy of approaching religions is not absolute rejection but engaging with them as repositories of useful sentiments, rituals, insights and ideas. Thus, tourist atheists do not hold the religion versus modernity dichotomy. The paper argues that tourist atheism, which has greater concerns for human subjectivity and internal pleasure of humans, is also an extension of another theological conception of humans as created in the image of God: humans who reproduce God’s autonomy and singularity.     

Re-evaluating the hiddenness argument from above

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - J. L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument for atheism (2015) assumes that God’s perpetual openness to a relationship with any finite...     

Misers or lovers? How a reflection on Christian mysticism caused a shift in Jacques Lacan’s object theory

In his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation (1956–1957), Lacan patiently elaborates his theory of the ‘phantasm’ ($?a), in which the object of desire (object small a) is ascribed a constitutive role in the architecture of the libidinal subject. In that seminar, Lacan shows his fascination for an aphorism of the twentieth century Christian mystic Simone Weil in her assertion: “to ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we would learn much.” This is why, in his theory, Lacan conceptualizes the object of desire as the unconsumed treasure—and, in that sense, the “nothing”—on which the miser’s desire is focused. But the more Lacan develops his new object theory, the more he realizes how close it is to Christian mysticism in locating the ultimate object of desire in God, in a sevenfold “nothing” (to quote the famous last step in the ascent of the Mount Carmel as described by John of the Cross). An analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet allows Lacan to escape the Christian logic and to rearticulate the object of desire in an ‘unchristian’ tragic grammar. When he replaces the miser by the lover as paradigm of the subject’s relation to its object of desire, he substitutes a strictly Greek kind of love—eros, not agape—for the miser’s relationship to his treasure. Even when, in the late Lacan, “love” becomes a proper concept, its structure remains deeply “tragic.”     

Hobbes's Challenge to Descartes,Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal God

This paper brings new work to bear on the perennial question about Hobbes's atheism to show that as a debate about scepticism it is falsely framed. Hobbes, like fellow members of the Mersenne circle, Descartes and Gassendi, was no sceptic, but rather concerned to rescue physics and metaphysics from radical scepticism by exploring corporealism. In his early letter of November 1640, Hobbes had issued a provocative challenge to Descartes to abandon metaphysical dualism and subscribe to a ‘corporeal God’; a provocation to which the Frenchman angrily responded, but was perhaps importantly influenced. Hobbes's minimal realism was consonant with atheism, to which Descartes felt he was being forced. Moreover, Hobbes was unrelenting in his battle against Cartesian dualism, for which he saw Robert Boyle's experimental science as a surrogate.     

The axiological solution to divine hiddenness

Philosophers have recently wondered whether the value impact of the existence of God on the world would be positive, negative, or neutral. Thus far discussions have distinguished between the value God's impact would have overall, in certain respects, and/or for particular individuals. A commonality amongst the various positions that have been taken up is to focus on the goods and drawbacks associated with both theism and atheism. Goods associated with atheism include things like privacy, independence, and autonomy. I argue that it is better overall and for everyone to prefer a hidden God to no God. This is because it is possible to experience many of the goods attributed to atheism if God is hidden even if they do not really obtain, while also gaining many of the additional goods connected to theism. This amounts to a new solution to the problem of divine hiddenness: God might hide in order to increase or maximize the axiological value of the world.     

Friendly atheism revisited

This paper endeavors to explain what friendly atheism is and why it is reasonable to seek to be friendly toward those whose views about God differ substantially from one’s own.     

The Cornered Object of Psychoanalysis: Las Meninas, Jacques Lacan and Henry James

Long recognised as a painting ‘about’ painting, Velázquez’s Las Meninas comes to Lacan’s aid as he explicates the object a in Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966). The famous seventeenth century painting provides Lacan with a visual mapping of the ‘ghost story’ he discovers in the Cartesian cogito, insofar as it depicts the unravelling of the Cartesian representational project at the moment of its founding gesture. This article traces Lacan’s argument as he turns to art, linear perspective and topology to model how the object a persistently eludes the grasp of scientific knowledge. Following a discussion of distance-point perspective in Renaissance Italy and the role this innovation played in enabling distorted depictions of objects in space, I propose Henry James’s ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” as the sequel to Lacan’s reading of Las Meninas. In James’s tale, we obtain a narrative account of what the figures in Velasquez’s painting might ‘see’ as they return our gaze towards us.     

A comparative study of the subject in Jacques Lacan and Zhuangzi

Jacques Lacan has creatively grafted Zhuangzi’s concept of the subject on the Western tradition of Logo-centrism. Lacan rewrites the triangle positions of the subject as the Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, expresses them in the vocabulary of detective stories, and achieves his scholarly reputation. The insufficiency of his theory could be redressed by Zhuangzi’s idea of ‘the poetics of oneness.’ For Zhuangzi, a man can forget his ‘Social I’ and ‘Corporeal I,’ arrive at the phase of ‘the equality of things’ in his symbiotic fusion with the surrounding things. These two thinkers complement each other and enrich our understanding of the subject.     

The possibility of having knowledge of al‐wujūd al‐mahd ’sheer being’ according to ibn carabi's Kitab al‐jalal wa‐al‐jamal

Mysticism in general makes a distinction between ‘God‐for‐us’ and ‘God‐in‐him‐self. This paper attests that the Muslim mystic‐philosopher, Ibn ‘Arabi's concepts of ‘Sheer Possibility’ and ‘Sheer Being'; ‘Beauty’ and ‘Absolute Majesty’ parallel God‐for‐us and God‐in‐himself. The paper also attempts to examine the extent of possible human knowledge of God beyond the level ‘God‐for‐us'/'Beauty'/'sheer possibility’ and the relation of such developmental knowledge to the Qur'an, according to Ibn ^cArabi. The paper ends with a statement on the need to examine the hermeneutical mechanism supporting this sort of linking of human knowledge with the Qur'an and a need to discuss the possible motives behind traditionalization of developmental knowledge inputs.     

Atheism in religious clothing? Accounting for atheist interventions in the public sphere

In this paper I review several recent attempts to recast atheism in religious form in Canada, the US and the UK. First, several atheists have argued for the redefinition of atheism as a creed deserving of religious protections from the state. Second, various atheist ‘churches’ have gained publicity in recent years, in part due to their appropriation of the Protestant church format and the rhetoric of religious association. Both of these expressions of atheism stand in marked contradiction to older forms of atheism which emerged in response to (and rejection of) Christianity in the West, and they also stand in contrast to popular forms of atheism today, of the kind espoused by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. As a result, the cases reviewed here represent the ways in which contemporary atheist movements constitute several different counterpublics, and they mark a significant change in the state’s acknowledgement of atheism as a positive form of belief.     

The new social psychology of France: The heritage of Jacques Lacan

In recent years psychology has taken on a new cenerality in French thought, but the extent and character of this development is not well understood and its religious dimension is generally overlooked. It is misleading to think of Jacques Lacan as a Freudian; his thought is rooted more in that of Hegel (via Kojève) and involves a fundamentally non‐Freudian theory of desire. Freud's focus was biological. For Lacan, as for Kojève, human appetite is oriented more toward the subjectivity of others (in a struggle for recognition between ‘self and ‘other') than toward pleasure or a release of physical tensions. The religious dimension is closely associated with the theme of a possible relation to the other as other and the question of whether recognition is something to be coerced through domination or given in the mode of love. Even without belief in a God, the Law is needed to support sublimation and to teach the love of neighbor. Other Lacanians continue this theme. François Roustang has criticized Lacan for failing to realize the full theoretical import of his own prophetic message about respect for the other, especially with reference to the transference relation and its exploitation in the analytic process. Marie Balmary brings the Lacanian thrust full circle by analyzing the way the Bible itself deals with psychological issues.     

Being as Iconic: Aquinas on ‘He Who Is’ as the Name for God

Aquinas claims that ‘He Who Is’ is the most proper of the names we have for God. But this attempt to ‘describe’ God with a philosophical concept like ‘being’ can seem dangerously close to creating a false conception based on our limited understanding – an idol. A dominant criticism of Aquinas’ use of this term is that any attempt to use ‘being’ to describe God will inevitably make him merely some object in our ontology alongside other beings, unacceptably mitigating God's radical transcendence and otherness. I will argue that Aquinas has a very creative response to this charge: ‘being’ stands in a unique relationship as the only concept that can ensure we do not draw God under some particular creaturely limit and thus use divine names to create an ‘idol’. In other words, ‘being’ is a special paradigm concept/term which ensures that we preserve humility in our attempts to name God.     

Anselmian Atheism

On the basis of Chapter 15 of Anselm's Proslogion , I develop an argument that confronts theology with a trilemma: atheism, utter mysticism, or radical anti-Anselmianism. The argument establishes a disjunction of claims that Anselmians in particular, but not only they, will find disturbing: (a) God does not exist, (b) no human being can have even the slightest conception of God, or (c) the Anselmian requirement of maximal greatness in God is wrong. My own view, for which I argue briefly, is that (b) is false on any correct reading of what conceiving of requires and that (c) is false on any correct reading of the concept of God. Thus, my own view is that the argument establishes atheism. In any case, one consequence of the argument is that Anselmian theology is possible for human beings only if it lacks a genuine object of study.     

True self-love and true self-sacrifice

A philosophical assessment of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, exposing some errors of reasoning that undermine part of the foundation of his atheism. Distinctions between theism, atheism and agnosticism are also provided and explored for their significance to Dawkins’ argument.     

‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva's Negative Theology

Abstract

This article examines Julia Kristeva's paradoxical concept of a ‘mystic atheism’. It falls into three parts. First, it briefly surveys Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of Christian theology in Au commencement était l'amour (1985). Secondly, it assesses Kristeva's analysis of the Christian mystical tradition from Teresa of Avila to Angela of Foligno in such works as Le féminin et le sacré (1999) and the three volumes on Le génie féminin (1999-2002). For Kristeva, Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the transition from theology to psychoanalysis: what she locates within the work of the female mystics is a so-called ‘mystic atheism’, that is to say, an affirmation of an other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it. Finally, the article offers some critical comments upon Kristeva's own ‘mystic atheism’: I argue that—like much negative theology—Kristeva's psychoanalysis remains ontotheological in form and that this dimension expresses itself in a problematic tendency to anthropomorphize the other within. In conclusion, I will suggest that Kristeva's ‘mystic atheism’ ultimately remains within the theological tradition it seeks to call into question.     

Explaining and Explaining Away in Science and Religion

Abstract

There is no good reason to think that there is a necessary conflict between science and the existence of God, but is there still some way in which science might support atheism? The most plausible strategy for atheism is to argue that scientific explanations can remove the need for God in some cases via “explaining away.” This paper proposes a number of questions to help identify whether explaining away takes place in a given context, and explores several cases where explaining away might be thought to occur, with particular attention given to the most obvious case: the theory of evolution.     

Can One Be Cognitively Conscious of God?

How do humans ‘register’ God: attain knowledge or revelation of God? Analysis is familiar in terms of explanatory hypothesis, necessity, authority and commitment. However individuals speak also of ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ of God/Christ/grace – received widely, not just by an esoteric few. But may we properly hold that people can be cognitively aware of God? Undoubtedly such speech has problematic aspects. Not only do psychosis, self-deception, gullibility recur. Commentators are liable to enlist what may be termed the A-conceptual Lucidity picture, which critically fails. Various positions urged by thinkers rule out by definition the very possibility of cognitive awareness of God. Some analysts assert: a person’s experiencing x is constituted throughout by the person’s use of concepts in toto reached previously and independently. But, why adopt any a priori dismissiveness? We should favour a portrayal of people’s epistemic situation respecting God called the Consciousness Portrayal. Phrases therein include: ‘God’s gracious, guiding activity’; ‘a person’s access to God’; ‘attentive consciousness/conceptualization/knowledge of God’; ‘diverse levels or modes of consciousness’; ‘God’s guidance in a person’s creatively picking out concepts’; and ‘“cognition” which, as regards meaning, is not just a function of calculative reasoning’. Alertness to usage in non-religious contexts aids our finding the religious phrasing intelligible. The Portrayal is approachable from an internal and external angle. Opponents’ challenges to the Portrayal invoke some broad epistemological theses, often pronounced intrinsic to ‘rationality’. But we fittingly espouse certain contrasting epistemological views. And these prove to fortify the Consciousness Portrayal.