‘After Disbelief’ Review: What’s a Heaven For?

‘After Disbelief’ Review: What’s a Heaven For?

 

Science and secularism have assaulted a traditional, biblical understanding of the divine. What if we think of God in a different way?

 

                                                                  Photo: Getty Images

 

 

 

By Andrew Stark

Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2022

 

 

Is belief in God tenable after Darwin and Einstein? No, say atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Science, without any need to refer to a superior intelligence, can account for both the creation of the universe and the origin of our species. Not so fast, believers like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga retort. Both the cosmos and human beings are far too complex to have been fashioned by anything other than a supreme being. The battle, begun long ago, rages on.

 

In “After Disbelief,” Anthony Kronman, a former dean of Yale Law School, wants to reconcile the warring sides. He accepts that science has ruled out the existence of the Abrahamic God—a God who occupies a heavenly world above while remaining present to us at “every moment” in time. But what if we think of God in a different way? Though not present to us so far, perhaps God will gradually emerge over time. And though there might not be another realm that he inhabits, perhaps God will become apparent in this world as humankind comes to probe ever more deeply the splendors it contains.

 

How will God emerge over time in this world? That depends upon what the meaning of “God” is. For Mr. Kronman, a working definition is “the explanatory ground of everything that happens in time.” As we explore the cognitive, emotional and aesthetic riches that this world has to offer, Mr. Kronman argues, we will gradually uncover the explanations underlying more and more of what happens. We will come to understand the precise physical forces that explain why, say, a flea has just landed on our shoe. And we will pinpoint the nuanced emotional forces that explain why our beloved’s way of brushing her hair from her forehead (Mr. Kronman here nods to Paul Simon) was bound to captivate us.

 

Whatever those explanations are—whatever those particular physical and emotional forces happen to be—we will then need an explanation as to why they, and not any number of other possible forces, are the ones that operate in our world. And then we will need further explanations for those explanations, and on and on. There is “no limit,” Mr. Kronman says, on what human beings “are able to understand about the world.” And since God is whatever it is that explains everything that happens, we will encounter ever more of God as we uncover ever more profound explanations for the puzzling behavior of subatomic particles, or the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa’s smile, or the delicate ecology of a rainforest.

 

Grab a Copy

After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and Joy

By Anthony T. Kronman

Yale

 

 

Mr. Kronman’s God will seem, to many, somewhat abstract. A God understood as unending intelligibility possesses none of the robust personal qualities of the Abrahamic God: love, say, or anger or judgment. Nor can a God that resides wholly within this world be deemed its cause or its purpose, at least in the ways we associate with a God above.

Still, Mr. Kronman wants to insist, other qualities that we link to the Abrahamic God—infinity, eternity, faith, joy—remain. If the intelligibility of the world is endless—if there is always more that we can learn about it—then Mr. Kronman’s God is infinite. If the intelligibility of the world consists of immutable principles that explain whatever happens over endless time, then Mr. Kronman’s God is eternal. If we can never be sure of what we might learn as we engage in this process of unending exploration, then some element of faith is required to overcome the disappointments we will inevitably experience. And certainly we can see how this unending quest would generate the joy of Browning’s maxim: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?” Except, of course, for Mr. Kronman the question would be: “Or what’s this world for?”

 

So, yes, perhaps unending intelligibility might be something that atheists can accept as a kind of God, even if many who subscribe to the Abrahamic version will be unmoved. And yet the God of Abraham actually dovetails with atheism in ways that elude Mr. Kronman’s God. Both believers and many atheists seem to agree on the importance of grace, humility, awe and spirituality in our lives. For non-believing philosophers like Albert Camus, human beings aid each other with acts of grace every day and receive such acts with humility. For Einstein, the majesty of the natural world supplies moments of awe and feelings of spirituality whenever we care to look.

 

Yet grace, humility, awe and spirituality are words that are all but absent from Mr. Kronman’s discussion of his God. And it’s not hard to see why. Suppose, as Mr. Kronman does, that no limits exist on our capacities for understanding. Then—as we humans continue to approach godlike mastery—our relationship to God as a source of grace, as one who lifts us up precisely because of our humble human limitations, will ebb. And let’s assume, with Mr. Kronman, that God presents a merely human-style mystery—the ordinary sort that we are always encountering when we don’t know, at any moment, what lies ahead for us to discover. Then we risk losing the awesome mystery that a God above supplies when, in moments of spirituality, we glimpse him.

 

Mr. Kronman writes evocatively and with insight. “Romantic love,” he observes, invites us “to think of the beloved as inherently and infinitely lovable,” just “like the inherently and infinitely intelligible object of scientific research.” Artists, he says, “find and save the eternal in time,” translating “our most fleeting experiences into images of undying beauty.”

 

Anyone who, in our age of disbelief, longs to believe in God will find Mr. Kronman worth reading. Maybe in the end, agreement on a kind of reverence toward the world is all we can ask of believers and non-believers. We are left, upon finishing “After Disbelief,” with the thought that, when it comes to seeking a reconciliation between God and science, our reach will always exceed our grasp.

 

Mr. Stark is the author of “The Consolations of Mortality.”