ABSTRACTS: SOCIETY AND THE DEATH OF GOD (ROUTLEDGE, 2021), SAL RESTIVO
INTRODUCTION. This introduction establishes a “mood,” and “emotional tone” that undergirds the rationale for the book. The rationale is personal as well as scholarly. It reflects the author’s lifelong struggle not only with the very idea of God or deities in general, but also with the meaninglessness of life, the universe, and everything. Furthermore, it reveals the author as an anarchist waving the flag of “No Gods, No Masters.” The significance of the myth of God is that it is a foundation for supporting the lives, interests, and power of earthly masters. The death of God also announces the death of masters. The voice of Nietzsche sings loudly as we begin a journey that leads to the death of God, the death of Theology, and the end of delusionary visions of supernatural and transcendental realms inhabited by angels, devils, spirits, ghosts, gods, heavens, and hells.
CHAPTER 1: SOME INITIAL PROVOCATIONS IN WORDS & NUMBERS. This chapter previews ideas, concepts, and theoretical propositions that the author will fill in with more detail in the chapters that follow. It begins by asking the reader to examine h/er own thoughts and experiences of life, the universe, and everything. The author asks us not to be silent or blind in the face of death, the void, infinity, nothingness. Drawing on the momentous developments of the nineteenth century in the West that included the loss of faith and the consolidation of the idea that God is a human creation, the author asks why these developments have failed to register with the masses. Sociology and anthropology help us understand both these momentous developments and their failure to register. The chapter includes an “intervention” by Karl Marx on religion (it is much more than “the opium of the people”), history as a reservoir of resources for the sociology of religion and the gods, the dangers of writing and speaking truth to power, and a brief introduction to reading religion and prophets: concise case studies of the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Jesus, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith, as well as reflections on the Jefferson Bible, and the religion clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Appendix B is a summary review of the demography of religion in the world.
CHAPTER 2. GENESIS: INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF GOD. This chapter begins with a description of the author’s personal experiences with religion and God and his quest to understand the nature of religions and the gods. The chapter describes the author’s encounters with doubters and knowers, and his introduction to the cultures of reasoning in his family, in books, and in the schools. The nature and issues surrounding the concepts of sacred and profane are discussed, and the author reviews contributions to the “after God” and “after the death of God” movements. These movements offer alternative visions of the future of God some of which sustain the historical God of the Bible.
CHAPTER 3. TO TELL THE TRUTH. This chapter is a search for what we can say about “truth,” what limitations if any we can expect to encounter on this journey, and what our options are if any in encountering such limitations. Does the concept of “pure reason” have any purchase? Are there limits to ecumenical strategies in religion, science, and everyday life? In engaging these questions, the author discusses how he became programmed for criticism. The chapter introduces one of the key ingredients required for understanding religious texts: veiled writing, writing that in a single narrative speaks two different truths, one to the initiated and one to the uninitiated. The author takes time out for an interlude that explains the meaning of the “journey to the past” and the “journey to the east.” In the closing sections, the author discusses the relationship between sociology and theology and theology after Durkheim. The chapter concludes with a discussion of postmodernism, fundamentalism, and science.
CHAPTER 4. FOUNDATIONS FOR A CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGIONS AND THE GODS. This chapter introduces a critical schema for understanding religions and the gods. It includes a list of fallacies the author has identified that can be considered preludes to laws of society (e.g., the transcendental fallacy that there are transcendental and supernatural realms that harbor gods and spirits), as well as classic fallacies from philosophy (e.g., the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). The discussion in earlier chapters of our social essence is grounded here in a narrative of the invention of the social in evolution. Once we recognize that we are always, already, and everywhere social it becomes apparent that touching is a critical feature of the human condition. The author demonstrates why loneliness and alienation are so devastating and why they can lead to violence. The fact that humans are essentially social means that religions and gods are eminently social.
CHAPTER 5. ASSUME THE POSITION: GOD PROOFS. Proofs in the God dialogues and debates are a peculiarity of the Western religions and in particular of the Mediterranean religions, and even more specifically refer to the Christian God. If as some theologians and philosophers believe that God can neither be proved nor disproved, their importance may lie not so much in the proving but rather in bringing God into our discourse. From at least Pythagoras and Plato on, the Western tradition has always shadowed intuition, faith, and belief with some form of rationality. It would not be too strong to claim that all forms of Western thought are infected by rationality. Thus, believers are always in a challenge arena provoked to demonstrate the grounds of their beliefs through reason, empirical demonstrations, or logical arguments and proofs. We should not expect to find provocations to prove God in traditions not subject to the Western scientific (and more broadly rational) traditions. To some extent this means a different attitude toward proof in modern and pre-modern societies. The author also considers the role of evidence and argument in the non-Western religions. The chapter includes an annotated appendix of logician Kurt Gödel’s mathematical proof of the existence of God and an appendix on Bayes’ theorem and God.
CHAPTER 6. EVIDENCE REDUX. Why do some people find it self-evident that there is no God while others believe it is self-evident that there is a God? The answer to this questions rests on experience, not intelligence. More specifically, the answer lies in the concept of objectivity communities. Every self-perpetuating society must have settled on some culture of truth. The world is a sea of different and competing truth communities. This does not entail relativity. Objectivity communities are not equal. To put the matter simply and bracket the complexity of the sciences as we understand them sociologically, the objectivity communities of science are most closely coupled to the natural world and therefore the most realistic in their worldviews. At the end of the day, the survival of any given objectivity community depends on how well it adapts to the tests posed by the evolutionary process.
CHAPTER 7. THE END OF GOD AND THE BEGINNING OF INQUIRY. This chapter explores the relationship between the God question (“Is there a God?”) and the Science question (“What is science and what are the boundaries, if any, of its jurisdiction?”). The author claims that if we answer the science question correctly, we will be able to answer the God question correctly. How should we understand science? It is at bottom the human capacity to reason, and to reason not just or even mostly at the individual level but collectively and generationally. If we understand reason to be collectively exercised generationally and with intersubjective testing and transmission of the results of reasoning; and if we understand that reasoning cannot simply be a cognitive exercise, that it must involve experiment and demonstration; then (1) reason is a key to human adaptation and survival, and (2) its jurisdiction has no boundaries. We are free to reason our way through any and all problems of the human condition. This is a general claim that does not apply automatically to institutionalized Science and certainly not to scientism. All critical students of religion have an obligation let people know what we are up to and to support the solidarity efforts of our existing and emerging thought collectives. The author uses “Science” to refer to the modern institution of science, and “science” to refer to the systematized methods of the general human capacity to reason.
CHAPTER 8. THE LAST CHAPTER OF GOD. This chapter begins the final stages our journey. These final chapters will introduce some new materials while at the same time reviewing and contemplating the journey so far. The chapter will go into more detail about the nature of science viewed from the vantage point of sociology; help the reader understand how to criticize science, how to be rationally skeptical of science, without losing your mind or your voice. The idea that science could be differently imagined and differently organized is discussed in terms of Marx’s distinction between bourgeois and human science. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the author’s perspective on “anarchism: social chaos or social theory,” and some thoughts on the humane inquiries promised by human science.
CHAPTER 9. PERSONAL QUEST REDUX, SUMMARY, AND REVIEW. In this penultimate chapter, the author reviews some of the basic features of his personal quest and reiterates the arguments against the existence of God. He offers a narrative that is in part review of material he’s already covered, in part additions to that material, and in part new material. The chapter recasts the evidence of the raiders of the last illusions, how types of societies predict types of religions, the functions of religion, the special features of the transcendental religions, politics and religion, the core features of the lives of magicians, wonderworkers, and messiah and their parallels with the career of the mythic hero.
CHAPTER 10. READING HANS KÜNG: THE END OF THEOLOGY. In this chapter, the author accompanies the distinguished theologian Hans Küng on his quest to answer the question, “Does God exist?” The journey is nearly 1000 pages long, and the author is there as Küng interrogates the great philosophers and theologians across the ages from Plato to Descartes, from Hume to Kant, from Augustine to de Chardin, and including Hegel, Feuerbach, Nietzsche and more. He interrogates these persons, the classical proofs for the existence of God, and the standard arguments for and against God. Every person and event relevant to the God question seems to be on the map that guides Küng’s quest. He even engages the non-Christian religions. And yet predictably, his journey ends where he and the author knew it would when he started: at the altar of the Christian God and Jesus. The author describes this journey as a narrative proof for the existence of God subject to all the criticisms (some of which Küng himself identifies and affirms) the God proofs invite.
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