The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (43 page)

Further, the assumption that there is some order, some regularity, to be found in the world—not necessarily strict causal determinism—both is a regulative principle which we can and do use in developing and testing other hypotheses and also is itself a hypothesis of a very broad kind, which in turn is open to testing and confirmation.
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This seems to be the main thing that Küng means by “unity,” so this too is covered by “critical rationality,” that is, by a fallibilistic but optimistic empiricism. Such an approach, whatever name we give it, can thus be seen to be reasonable in itself, and not in need of any further justification or support.

The reply to nihilism about unity and truth is therefore straightforward, and we can agree with the substance of what Küng says about this. His reply to nihilism about goodness or value is trickier and more controversial. He quotes with approval the view of H. Sachsse that there is a present and pressing need for the development of “relevant and practical norms” (Chapter 45). He concedes that “
Today less than ever can we call down from heaven ready-made solutions,
or deduce them theologically from an immutable universal essential nature of man.” He concedes, too, that “There is in fact what Nietzsche called a ‘genealogy of morals’”—that is, that concrete existing ethical systems have been developed by a socio-historical process—and that today we have to “
work out ‘on earth’ discriminating solutions
for all the difficult problems. We are responsible for our morality” (Chapter 45). All this is strikingly similar to the main theme of my
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
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—and, what is more important, it is in itself an adequate
reply
to nihilism about value. But then Küng seems to slide to a very different thesis (Chapter 45):

Any acceptance of meaning, truth and rationality, of values and ideals…presupposes a
fundamental trust
in uncertain reality: by contrast with nihilism, an assent in principle to its fundamental identity, meaningfulness and value…Only if the reality of the world and man, as accepted in fundamental trust, is characterized by an ultimate identity, meaningfulness and value, can individual norms of genuinely human behavior and action be deduced in an appropriate way from this reality and—decisively—from the essential human needs, pressures and necessities…

This is radically different. Now Küng is suggesting that we must after all postulate an
objective
value from which (along with the empirical facts of human needs, and so on) we might
deduce
specific norms. But this is an error, and in contrast with it we must hold fast to the thesis that value itself is a human and social product. This is not to deny, however, that there is an ethical variety of “fundamental trust” which is needed at the basis of our moral systems. We require, perhaps, a confident hope that we can find principles of co-operation in the midst of competition. This would be a generalization of the practical “precursive faith” of which William James speaks: only if people trust one another before each can be sure that the others are trustworthy will they have a chance of establishing effective cooperation.

There is, then, a reply to nihilism about goodness or value, which again can be seen to be reasonable in itself, and not in need of any further justification or support. But it is significantly different from the reply that Küng gives. Or rather, he both suggests this reply and slides to a different one.

But where, we may ask, does God come into all this? With comic condescension, Küng allows that “
On the basis of fundamental trust, even an atheist can lead a genuinely human, that is, humane, and in this sense moral, life,”
and that “
Even atheists and agnostics are not necessarily nihilists, but can be humanists and moralists”
(Chapter 45). Nevertheless, he now makes the crucial step in the direction of theism: “It must now be obvious that the fundamental trust in the identity, meaningfulness and value of reality, which is the presupposition of human science and autonomous ethics, is justified in the last resort only if reality itself—of which man is also a part—is not groundless, unsupported and aimless” (Chapter 46).

No. This is not obvious at all. Indeed it is false, and Küng’s own argument shows it to be false. The kind of fundamental trust that counters nihilism about truth and “unity,” the “critical rationality” of which he speaks, is reasonable
in its own right
for the reasons he has given. And the same is true of the motives for the invention of value. There is no need to look for or postulate any “ground, support, or goal” for reality. The broad hypothesis that there is some order in the world is one which it is reasonable to adopt tentatively, but also to test; and it has been strongly confirmed by the inquiries which have (implicitly) tested it. Likewise, though the inventing of moral values has gone on mainly spontaneously, it is reasonable in the sense that it is only by having the attitudes which that invention expresses that we are able to live together without destroying one another. Each of these is defensible on its own: neither needs any further support.

But it is upon this utterly unwarranted step that Küng bases his further case for a god. He is seeking not, indeed, a demonstrative proof, but an “indirect verification,” of God as the supposedly required primal ground, primal support, and primal goal of all reality.

He first asserts that “
If God exists, then the grounding reality is not ultimately groundless…the supporting reality is not ultimately unsupported…evolving reality is not ultimately without aim…
and
reality suspended between being and not being is not ultimately under suspicion of being a void.”
He adds that while this hypothesis opposes nihilism, it can also explain the
appearance of
nihilism: reality appears to be ultimately groundless, unsupported, and aimless “Because uncertain reality is itself
not God.”
Similarly, the hypothesis that God exists can give ultimate meaning and hope to one’s own life; but it can also explain the
appearance
of meaninglessness and emptiness here “Because man
is not God”
(pp. 566–568).

By contrast, he thinks, atheism would imply an ultimately unjustified fundamental trust in reality, and therefore the danger of “the possible disunion, meaninglessness, worthlessness, hollowness of reality as a whole” (p. 571).

Küng concludes that “
Affirmation of God implies an
ultimately justified
fundamental trust in reality. If someone affirms God, he knows why he can trust reality.”
Hence “there is no stalemate between belief in God and atheism” (p. 572). Though this affirmation “rests, in the last resort, on a
decision”
(p. 569), because there is no conclusive argument either for or against it, yet “trust in God is by no means irrational…I know…
by the very fact
of doing this, that I am doing the right thing…what cannot be proved
in advance
I experience
in the accomplishment,”
and this provides “
a fundamental certainty.”
Thus understood, “
Belief in God…is a matter not only of human reason but of the whole concrete, living man”
(pp. 573–574).

I have summarized Küng’s argument as far as possible in his own words, because a paraphrase would not only detract from its eloquence but also risk distorting a view that contains so many complexities and contrasts. My criticisms must, and can, be briefer.

Küng’s final step seems to claim that the very act of believing in God is self-verifying; but he gives no reason at all for this claim. The act may carry with it a conviction of certainty: the relief of ceasing to doubt is pleasantly reassuring. But this is purely subjective: to rely on this would be merely another form of the assumption that there is a kind of experience which guarantees the objective validity of its content or intentional object which Küng himself has rightly dismissed (p. 533). Alternatively, the suggestion may be that in postulating a god one is postulating
that which grounds both itself and everything else.
But to claim that the very content of this postulation gives it objective certainty is to employ yet again the ontological argument, and Küng has rightly dismissed this too (pp. 533, 535).

If we delete this unsound final step, Küng’s argument turns essentially upon the confirming of a hypothesis, and in particular upon the relative confirmation of the god-hypothesis as against that of an objective natural world (including human beings) which has no further ground or support or goal. As for the explanation of the
appearance of
nihilism, the god-hypothesis is in exactly the same position as its naturalistic rival. The one says that though there is a god, this god is not obvious, and “uncertain reality” is not this god, that is, is not its own primal ground, support, or goal; the other says simply that there is no such primal ground, support, or goal. In either case the lack of any obvious primal ground leaves room for nihilism. The two rival hypotheses are equal also in their explanations of the
appearance
of meaninglessness in human life. But though they are equally able to explain the appearance of nihilism, the god-hypothesis is the less economical. Its merits, if any, must be due to the other aspect, to its allegedly providing reality with a ground, support, and goal, and man with an objectively valid aim. But Küng has said nothing to explain
how
the god-hypothesis is supposed to do this. Indeed, the Demea-like indeterminacy of his account of God would make it hard for him to do so. But what he hints at is, in fact, a set of suggestions which we have already explicitly stated and examined, especially in Swinburne’s inductive versions of the cosmological and design arguments, in Leslie’s extreme axiarchism. To avoid assuming “the groundlessness and instability of reality as a whole,” Küng suggests that it may be reasonable to assume “a cause of all causes”; and to avoid assuming the meaninglessness and aimlessness of reality as a whole it may be reasonable to assume “an end of ends” (pp. 534–535), or again “
a God who will bring to perfection the world and man”
(p. 657). “Believing in God as Finisher of the world means coolly and realistically—and even more, without succumbing to the violent benefactors of the people—to work for a better future, a better society, in peace, freedom and justice, and at the same time to know without illusions that this can always only be sought but never completely realized by man” (p. 659).

But the explanations at which Küng hints are completely undermined by the criticisms we have given of the specific arguments in Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 13. As I have said, we have no empirical basis, in a knowledge of direct, unmediated, fulfilments of will, from which we might extrapolate to anything like Swinburne’s personal explanation as a way of using a god to explain the world or its details. Nor, correspondingly, do we have any empirical basis for the axiarchist’s suggestion that value as such may be intrinsically creative. Nor, again, could we find any ultimately plausible account of how moral values might rest upon or be created or sustained by a god. Still less do we need anything like a god to counter the supposed threat of aimlessness. Men are themselves purposive beings. In their own nature they unavoidably pursue aims and goals; they do not need these to be given them from outside. To be sure, their purposes are limited, specific, and above all conflicting: diverse strivings do not automatically resolve themselves into any grand harmonious everlasting Purpose. That is why there is a real and continuing task of inventing norms and principles through which we can achieve some rough approximation to harmony or at least contain within tolerable limits the inescapable conflicts of purpose.
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We can welcome Küng’s realistic appreciation of this task and his readiness to take part in it. But neither participation in this task, nor the generalization of William James’s “precursive faith” which we may need to bring to it, depends in any way on a belief in “God as Finisher”; rather, their reasonability arises directly out of a human appreciation of the human situation, as Küng’s own argument shows. Nor are the difficult details of this task made any easier by postulating any sort of god.

If the specific suggestions of personal explanation, creative value, and the various forms of the moral argument fail, we are left with the postulation of a god as merely
that which
somehow supplies a ground, support, or goal for reality. But to postulate an entity as
that which
does something gives us no real additional explanation. If we say, for example, that reality is supported because there is something that supports it, the alleged explanation merely repeats what was to be explained; at best, we have a place-holder for a real explanation. Moreover, even if this god-hypothesis did somehow explain the world or moral values or human purposes, we should face again the familiar objection: Why is this (uncertain) god not as much in need of further explanation or support as “uncertain reality”? To say that God is introduced by definition as that which explains itself, that which terminates the regress of explanation, is again empty and useless; but any attempt to explain and justify the claim that he has such a special status leads us, as we have seen, to the concept which underlies the ontological proof….

Küng’s strategy, as we have seen, is to incorporate the question of the existence of a god within the wider question of how modern man is to meet the challenge of nihilism, and to suggest that the latter can be solved only by a decision in favour of an affirmative answer to the former. But this is wrong. Ironically, he has himself supplied all the materials for showing that the challenge of both intellectual and moral or practical nihilism can be met in purely human terms, by what Küng calls a “fundamental trust” which is reasonable in its own right—that is, equivalently, by a fallibilist empiricism on the intellectual side and on the practical side by the invention of value. The further postulation of a god, even as indeterminate and mysterious a god as Küng’s, is a gratuitous addition to this solution, an attempted underpinning which is as needless as it is incomprehensible.