The perils of constant thought; God as a metaphor

PERILS OF CONSTANT THOUGHT: The Guardian has a wonderful piece up by James Wood, which examines the rise of new atheism, a movement hallmarked by public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. Some of the more interesting content, in my view, deals with the nature of changing one's mind in the process of thought and rumination.

Part of the weakness of current theological warfare is that it is premised on stable, lifelong belief – each side congealed into its rival (but weirdly symmetrical) creeds. Likewise, in contemporary politics, the worst crime you can apparently commit is to change your mind. Yet people's beliefs are often not stable, and are fluctuating. We are all flip-floppers. Our "ideas" may be rather as Woolf imagined consciousness, a flicker of different and self-annulling impressions and convictions. What if you were a strong Christian believer, and you woke one night, terrified by the sudden awareness that God does not exist? Hours pass in this unillusioned crisis, and then blessed sleep finally returns. The next day, you wake up and the awful doubt – a thing of the night – has mysteriously disappeared. You continue to "believe in God". But what does such belief now mean? If it has not been annulled by the doubt of the night, does it now contain the memory of its inversion, as a room might trap a bad smell?

He makes some very good points on the issue. I've always found the Andrew Sullivan view intriguing: if your thinking doesn't change every day on a particular facet of society or its issues, you're probably not thinking (or something to that effect). I'm inclined to agree with him.

GOD AS A METAPHOR: Wood also addresses the commonplace substitution of metaphorical explanations where a literal interpretation isn't possible; that in itself, and the provisional view among many Christians, which all too often seems like this: "Those bits I can't explain in the Bible? Yeah, they're all metaphors." He writes, referring to Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

Can God be literally described, or are we condemned to hurl millions of metaphoric approximations at him, in an attempt to describe him? After all, in Melville's novel, the white whale is symbolic of both the devil and of God, and the writer tries very hard to describe the nature and mass and temperament of that indescribable whale: Melville uses scores of different metaphors to capture the essence of the beast, and fails. It cannot be captured in words. Only when the beast is killed will it be captured. Melville's novel is a kind of ironic counterpart to Aquinas's belief that God can only be described by what he is not. Melville, who fluctuated violently between belief and unbelief, seems to have been terrified by the idea that if God cannot be reached by metaphor, then God is only a metaphor.

Read his full piece.