Wednesday, June 13, 2007

God is a Metaphor

PZ Myers with a nice blog post that subtly turns into an even better essay on humanism and literature:
[Stanley] Fish confuses the rejection of the supernatural pretext with the rejection of the depth of real feeling. He is mistaken. In my case, I read his superficial theological gloss with loathing because I see him substituting the wishful thinking of millennia of shamans and priests for the reality of the human condition—his conciliatory apologies are support for generations of lies. He confuses the efforts of the writers of those texts to grapple with suffering and doubt with the legitimacy of the religious answer; I can respect the beauty of religious literature and the struggle put into it while at the same time realizing that falling back on the will of an imaginary being is an admission of failure. I don't consider the believers to be simple-minded—I think life can be hard, and that the great minds of history have endeavored to articulate some sense of meaning to pain and beauty, because that's what human minds do. But I also think that passing the buck and inventing an ineffable universal will as an ultimate cause is a seductive trap, one that Fish has readily fallen into, where we try to project our mental state onto the universe as a whole. St Paul's anguish was real, but the supernatural entity to which he directed it was not. When an atheist rejects the entity, it does not mean the anguish is denied.
God is just a metaphor for all that is universal in the human experience (the terror and pity of tragedy). We don't need religion to find meaning; we need art.