Reza Aslan: God, a Human History

PANTHEISM AND CHRISTIANITY: THE PROBLEM WITH ASLAN’S GOD

Reza Aslan claims to be a ‘believer’, and his book, entitled God: a human history, charts the stages of his spiritual journey. The funny thing is, I, who would also claim to be a believer, would, by a chapter or two into this book, have mentally classified Aslan as a non-believer. Having reached the end of his short text, I could just about figure out how, Aslan, by his own lights, would count himself a believer. Yet, interestingly, it also occurred to me how, by those same lights, I would have to count myself a non-believer! So great a divergence in the potential understanding of the nature of religious belief was remarkable – and, I felt, perhaps even worthy of a blog.

Pantheism as pure religious consciousness

What our author actually believes would be excellently summed up, as far as I can see, in those famous lines of Alexander Pope:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

This, of course, is pantheism. There is a familiar theological objection to this position which one sometimes encounters, but always struck me as unfair. It runs like this. If everything in the world is God, and nothing is not God, then the content of the concept God is null. Aslan is therefore an atheist. However, Aslan’s way of approaching pantheism via the notion of tawhid (= oneness) in Islam and Sufism makes abundantly clear there is something that the notion of God uniquely expresses: namely, the element of inter-connectedness – the inter-connectedness of everything with everything else, and, of course, the inter-connectedness of everything and ourselves. Maybe it is only the notion of God, we might argue, that allows us to say ‘everything’ in the first place. A more familiar expression of this idea can be found closer to home in the famous essay, On Religion, that Friedrich Schleiermacher addresses to religion’s ‘cultivated despisers’. There is no doubt about the kind of real-life experience that underlies this form of religion. Numerous examples can be found in poetry as well as in the ‘mystical’ strand of many religions.

This experience of ‘oneness with the all’ has never been an experience I have particularly sought from Christianity – or for that matter ever been rewarded with. And this has never bothered me in the least! So, from a pantheist perspective, maybe that places me at the extreme negative end of their scale of ‘religiousness’ – as one of this world’s congenital non-believers.

Monotheism and the roots of the pure religious consciousness

For Aslan, this pure religious consciousness is the enduring legacy of monotheism, and, above all, of Islam (the purest form of monotheism), which paves the way for its emergence in the Sufi mystics.  However, only the final chapter of the book brings us to this final stage in the evolution of religion.  The bulk of its narrative is taken up with the up-and-down history of monotheism, and its efforts to break out into the religious mainstream. These efforts seem, at first, to have been unavailing – chiefly, he argues, on account of its wholly counter-intuitive nature.

Monotheism is counter-intuitive because it appears to defy a number of the hard-wired neurological instincts which, according to Aslan, explain how religion originated in the first place.  These include: the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device (HADD) which leads us ‘to detect human agency, and hence a human cause, behind any unexplained event’; the Theory of Mind, which obliges us to conclude of any entity resembling us that ‘it must also be like us’ (rather in the way that children instinctively treat certain toys as though they were really alive); finally, the instinctive sense we apparently all of us possess that we are ‘embodied souls’. The first two of these instincts drive us to shape the gods in our own image, and ultimately resulted in the fluid polytheistic pantheons of the Sumerians and the Greeks. This was the natural outcome of evolution.  But with monotheism, a certain puristic moralism seems, for some reason, to throw the evolutionary process into reverse, ‘dehumanizing’ rather than ‘humanizing’ our conceptions of the divine.

How can this be accounted for? Aslan is careful to distinguish at this point between monolatry, which is the tendency for a boss-god to emerge within a pantheon, concentrating in himself the attributes of lesser gods, and monotheism proper, which proceeds by eliminating both the lesser gods, and the attributes for which they stand. Aslan’s answer seems to be that monotheism represents something like a pure religious intelligence that, from time to time, manages to overcome the dead weight of evolutionary anthropomorphism (though he doesn’t quite put it in such terms). This explains a number of things: the length of time taken for monotheism to emerge; the faltering nature of its first appearances (the projects of Akhenaten and Zoroaster come to nothing); finally, when a viable monotheism arises in the shape of Judaism, the subsequent backsliding into Trinitarian polytheism, with the advent of Christianity.  Eventually, the monotheist ideal is rescued from the jaws of utter extinction by Islam. But a full realization of the implications of the monotheistic principle of tawhid had to await disclosure by Sufi mystics.  And here, at last, we arrive at the pure and de-humanized pantheist mysticism that Aslan advocates as the ultimate distillation of whatever wisdom is conveyed by the idea of God.

A reductive account of religion?

The appeal to psychological mechanisms – HADD and the Theory of Mind – will inevitably attract the charge of reductionism.  On a theoretical level, at least, Aslan seems to leave open the possibility that something like religion might be both neurologically hard-wired and at the same time correspond to something out there in the world. In practice, his discussion of the evolutionarily derived instincts towards anthropomorphism (HADD and the Theory of Mind) shows not the slightest inclination to countenance the potential existence of humanized gods. There remains, however, a third and supposedly more fundamental instinct – ‘humanity’s first belief’ – that we are ‘embodied souls’. In regard to this Aslan remarks, quite explicitly, that it cannot be proved or disproved. We are apparently born with this intuition, and can choose to accept or reject it.  My own interpretation of this distinction of Aslan’s between the first two and third instinct is that what he regards as best in human religion – a kind of de-humanized mysticist pantheism – derives from the third instinct (which is both evolutionarily hard-wired and difficult to refute); whereas the more commonplace forms of religion allow this justifiable core to be adulterated by anthropomorphism.  This instinct to humanize the gods is entirely comprehensible (given our evolutionary past), but, unlike our sense of being ’embodied souls’ has no conceivable basis in reality.

Aslan’s big mistake

Aslan’s position is not altogether reductive. However, it is totally speculative.

Aslan seems remarkably confident that the world will have appeared to the primal Adam and Eve much as it does ourselves, when due allowance is made for psychological mechanisms (like HADD) which will have distorted their vision. And it may be, of course, that other factors, such as culture, have little impact on how we view the world. But others have conjectured, with equal plausibility, that what we see depends crucially on the cultural schemata that direct our vision. Now if the latter is the case, it has implications that apply as much to the case of twenty-first century European interpreters of primal religious behaviour as to the case of the primal Adam and Eve themselves. Take, for instance, Aslan’s own fundamental assumption about the nature of ‘religion’: that it is a field of human practice distinct from kinship and politics, with God as its proper object. This sounds like common-sense in our own culture. But what are Aslan’s reasons for supposing that this understanding would have been meaningful to primal Adam and Eve – or that it can lay claim to any self-evident universality? All things considered, therefore, I suspect we would have to feel very confident about Aslan’s psychological interpretations of animist behaviour not to entertain at least a sneaking suspicion that they function at least partly as rationalizing explanations of cultural differences of which he may have failed to take account.

If there were no evidential basis on which to establish our arguments one way or the other, I suppose we would have to finish on this rather inconclusive note.  That, on the relative importance of nature and culture or on the universality of his concept of religion Aslan might – or might not – have the truth on his side. But the fact is we are not quite thrown back on mere conjecture about such things. There is a vast ethnographic literature reporting field studies of social anthropologists dating from as far back as the 1920s when Bronislaw Malinowski first introduced the concept of participant observation. This literature addresses itself precisely to the kind of questions Aslan is interested in – along with other questions he may not, but ought to be. Not perhaps specifically in regard to Adam and Eve, who lived a long time ago. But certainly in regard to a sufficiently diverse range of their successors for the results of such investigations to give us some sense of the overall parameters of the religious phenomenon. Especially as this kind of anthropological encounter has frequently been engaged in by many who, unlike Aslan, have expressly sought to apprehend their own culture in eyes of another’s.

Strangely, this highly relevant empirical evidence is unknown territory to Aslan. We can be fairly sure of this – since if he had so much as dipped his little toe into this literature, he would certainly have ceased to believe that religion is a field of human practice distinct from kinship and politics, whose proper object is the gods. A trace of some awareness on Aslan’s part of this astonishing gap in his researches is perhaps momentarily betrayed by his reference to Emile Durkheim’s theory of social cohesion as ‘the most widely held explanation for the origins of the religious impulse’ (p.30). But if so, he is using an outdated theory as a label under which to dismiss ninety years-worth of empirically-based research, much of it addressed quite specifically to some of the questions posed by his book. Mary Douglas has famously argued that Durkheim was indeed the founding father of social anthropology. But what she had in mind was not the ‘theory of social cohesion’ which Aslan dismisses, and would probably find few contemporary advocates, but Durkheim’s more fundamental intuition that ‘our knowledge of the universe is socially constructed’ – and the inference (which arguably Durkheim only partially drew from this) that all our human beliefs are context-dependent and culture-dependent, whether beliefs in ‘objective scientific truth’ or beliefs in ‘gods and demons’. Such a view excludes from the outset the kind of definition of religion that Aslan adopts as his starting-point. This is plainly why Aslan, in turn, feels he must pre-emptively dismiss ‘anthropological and sociological explanations’. But the problem for Aslan is that the fruitfulness of such explanations has been amply demonstrated by the cogency of those enormous number of ethnographies that operate within a socio-anthropological frame. All of which Aslan proposes we should ignore because of his claim to have discovered the neurological explanation of human religious experience. This, as I have already said, requires us to place an awful lot of trust in the scientific basis of those neurological explanations.

Pantheism and the beliefs of an everyday Christian.

So what my own non-pantheist, Christian understanding of God?

I would have to say that I know God chiefly in Christ.  Independently of that,  my sense of ‘God’ seems to equate, experientially, with my feeling of the contingency of my own existence, and its total giftedness.  ‘New, every morning is new’, as the chorus says.  That is about it.

Far more central is Christ, and his road of the cross.  The implications here are very practical and relate to how I, and people around me, are living our lives.  First, there is the assurance of our forgiveness for the mistakes we make, and need to appropriate that on an everyday basis.  Then, Christ’s model of the road of the cross, as a pattern of how to live our lives in a way that is grateful and free, and not constantly in servitude to idolatrous desires that threaten our happiness and everyone else’s.  This isn’t, of course, just a model for us personally, but a blueprint for community.  It is to the extent that such a community is constituted that such a life comes to be modelled, and the modelling of the life that produces the community.  And because this whole project is so beyond our powers as individuals, we can only continue in faith that God Himself will somehow bring it to fulfilment.  But in supplicating God to work in this way, we speak of the Holy Spirit.

I guess our eyes tend to be focussed on God’s work among us.  And to this extent our experience of God is always mediated – through Christ and the Holy Spirit.  I freely acknowledge that, to Aslan, I and people like me, might seem to hold a very this-worldly, un-supernatural sort of faith – more a matter of practical living than spiritual experience.

What, then, about union with the All?  I suppose such desire for this as I might have is rather tempered by the sense that so much in the world around is patently out of joint with anything that a good God could have intended.  The closest to it I can come is the sort of piety I instinctively believe we should all feel to what precedes and envelops us – and to the ‘ancestors’ that we now have as Christians in the great family of the Church.  In this sense, it seems to me there really is a connection between my sense of God and the primitive instinct expressed in all archaic communities to make a return to the source of their existence.  But neither their piety nor my own extends to the All.  In fact, on the basis of what Aslan tells of the likes of the Sufi mysticism, I feel much closer to the tribesman making offering to his ancestral spirit, that I do to the likes of Bayazid and al-Hallaj.

On that, at least, Aslan and myself would agree.

JORDAN PETERSON: 12 RULES OF LIFE

DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING

YUVAL HARARI: HOMO DEUS

MARY BEARD: HOW DO WE LOOK

TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE

JOHN GRAY: SEVEN TYPES OF ATHEISM

REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY

JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF COMMON SENSE

NEIL MACGREGOR: LIVING WITH THE GODS