Looking In the Distance. Richard Holloway

the mystery of the meaning of Being can be neither demonstrated nor destroyed by explanation, it is a wound that has to be endured. And R.S. Thomas is our poet:

      Why no! I never thought other than

       That God is the great absence

       In our lives, the empty silence

       Within, the place where we go

       Seeking, not in hope to

       Arrive or find.

       He keeps the interstices

       In our knowledge, the darkness

       Between stars.

       His are the echoes

       We follow, the foot prints he has

       Just left.7

      It is because we love the honest poverty of the state of unknowing that those of us who are Out There also believe in the moral importance of atheism. But for us atheism is not a straightforward noun, a fixed state of final explanation. It is a verbal noun, atheising, a dynamic process that constantly tries to rid the mind of conceptual idols because it understands the cruelty of idols and their need for constant warfare. Of course, atheism itself can become a conceptual idol, a fixed position as belligerent as theism, which is why evangelical atheists and evangelical theists could be said to deserve each other. ‘God’ is the term we have devised to signify, however hypothetically, the ultimate causal agent of a universe whose existence reains stubbornly unexplained. But the secret history of humanity’s relationship with God is a story of abandonment – our abandonment of God and God’s abandonment of us, leaving only the echoes of previous attempts at explaining the mystery. This constant work of separating ourselves from earlier understandings of God is morally essential if we are not to trap ourselves in a cave worshipping projections of our own shadows. This is the truth behind the eastern imperative: ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road kill him.’ It is the truth that lies behind the Hebrew fear of idolatry, which is the substitution of a knowable object for the unknowable mystery of God.

      Living in this state of unknowing about the ultimate meaning or unmeaning of things is so arduous and painful that it is entirely understandable that we constantly create theoretical objects for ourselves onto which we project a fictitious reality in order to rescue us from uncertainty. The classic text on the subject is from the Book of Exodus, at the beginning of chapter 32:

      And the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

      Like the Israelites who were frustrated by Moses’ long absence, we do not enjoy the state of waiting. For most people, waiting is the prelude to something else, it is never a state of mind in its own right. We are always waiting for something, which we anticipate patiently or impatiently. For those of us who are living in the absence of God, waiting is not anticipatory; waiting is its own meaning, it is a permanent state of unknowing. But this way of being is counterintuitive to our normal needs and desires. We want answers, explanations, portable idols. This is the attraction of all explanatory systems. It accounts, for instance, for the current appeal of a Christian education course called Alpha, which gives briskly confident answers to all of life’s puzzling questions.

      If we could stop the flow of human knowledge and experience, and if Being itself were not in a constant state of passing or becoming, these systems might attain a satisfying perfection, a resolution which is very attractive to the religious temperament. That is why some religious communities completely opt out of the flow of history and locate themselves, as they might put it, in but not of the world, so that their perfectly realised religious system is protected from the erosions of time. Amish Christians and Hasidic Jews are examples of communities that have chosen to enclose themselves in a time capsule rather than trust themselves to the unpredictable torrents of change. But those religious communities that decide to take their chance in history are constantly overtaken by the incessant flux of events. Most of the big religions that are active today have been around for millennia. Many of their explanatory claims were forged in ancient societies, which were very different from our own. To take an obvious example, they all tend to accord to women a status of fixed subordination to men. There may have been good reasons why the subordination of women was appropriate when it was originally religiously codified, but it makes little sense in developed societies today.

      Dramatic examples of the painful tensions that ancient religious traditions can create for contemporary human beings are provided by stories in the recent news, from Iran, England and the USA. In June 2003 the newspapers told us that the Audrey Hepburn look was all the rage among young women in Iran. They liked to wear chic headscarves wrapped under the chin and trendy shades. They enjoyed sitting at sidewalk cafés, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, just like Audrey Hepburn in her first big movie break, Roman Holiday, in 1953. The Islamic clerics who run the country denounced and vainly tried to forbid this unseemly behaviour in young women because it was clearly in defiance of traditional Islamic practice.

      Clerics, of whatever persuasion, are rarely happy with social and cultural change. The difficulty they always face when they confront a challenge to established social relations is what to do about the sacred scriptures upon which their particular system is based, particularly if the new developments promote change in the status of women and the understanding of human sexuality. Another example of this tension, expressed this time through Christianity, was the row that broke out in England and the USA in the summer of 2003 over the proposed appointment of two gay men as Anglican bishops. Traditionalists noisily opposed the appointments on the grounds that the Bible condemned homosexual relationships, while supporters pointed out that the writers of the Bible did not have our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. The bullying tactics of the traditionalists prevailed in England and, after several weeks when he was rarely off the front pages of the world’s newspapers, the priest in question was forced to withdraw. In the USA, however, the Church authorities confirmed the election of a gay man as a bishop, and he was subsequently ordained, though the row that surrounds his appointment is likely to continue indefinitely within the Anglican Church.

      The Bible and the Koran were written thousands of years ago, so they naturally reflect the human arrangements and understandings of their time. This is why the flux of history is tough on clerics who believe that everything in their scriptures is permanently commanded, including male dominance and homophobia, because it means they have to apply first-or seventh-century customs to twenty-first-century men and women, who, not surprisingly, don’t much care for them.

      It is the idea of God behind these ancient ways of organising society that is the main source of difficulty, because God is always claimed as the basis for the enduring authority of the systems that are under siege. Traditional religions have a picture of God as a superhuman person, possessing absolute power over us, who inhabits a heavenly realm that is separated from the earth, but is in regular contact with it, the way NASA communicates with its space stations. Many people find the NASA model for God, as a supernatural engineering and maintenance agency, very difficult to hold today. Religion used to claim with considerable cogency that, given the intricacy of our nature and the way we are precisely adapted to the universe, a great external intelligence had to have designed it all. It was expressed by William Paley in the famous ‘lost watch’ argument in 1802. If you found a watch when you were out walking and marvelled at the perfect intricacy of its design, you would correctly deduce that it had been created by a watchmaker. So it was with the universe itself, the argument went. The idea of God the Designer offered an explanation for the way species seemed to be so miraculously adapted to the world in which they found themselves. That explanation worked for centuries, until Darwin came along with an alternative account that was truer to the facts and therefore more satisfying. He showed that we were not the result of a straightforward piece of planned engineering, but