Review: Enduring Divine Absence

L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876)

While reading Joseph Minich's recent Enduring Divine Absence, I was reminded of C.S. Lewis' first Screwtape Letter. In it, the demon Screwtape recalls a mini-crisis when the atheist "patient" he tempts considers Christianity. The danger passes as soon as the atheist walks out his front door:

Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic.” 

Lewis puts his finger on what Minich calls the aesthetic of modern atheism: "the occasionally overwhelming sense that God is absent from our daily lives and routines. "Unbelief," he writes, "is tacitly felt to be the default intellectual position." Where is God in the land of supermarkets and Amazon Prime? Eventually, mundanity overwhelms transcendence. Faith is a "chased wind that ultimately gets away."

Minich notes a similar phenomenon when we consider nature, giving as an example the great thespian Liam Neeson in The Grey.  Neeson, stranded in remote Alaska, experiences "a universe that is at once full of wonder, but also hostility -- the balance of which is the cosmos's utter indifference to these small homo sapiens fumbling around in the snow" (13). (This aesthetic is also, I think, at the heart of The Revenant and Beasts of the Southern Wild). When nature truly seems not to care, atheism's main appeal is a sensation of relief and release. When you strip away the "crutch" of superstition, as a reward you can "feel the dignity of being honest and brave with reality as it coldly presents itself to us" (15). This, too, is the "inarticulate sense of actuality" Screwtape's patient praises.

Minich argues that this is a distinctively modern phenomenon. He concedes that divine absence is an enduring theme in world literature and culture, but notes a key difference today: "Neither the Psalmist, the Ancient Near Eastern pagan, medieval Catholic, nor the ancient starving Chinese peasant thought that their unanswered cries to the silent sky had any relevance to the question of whether God exists or not. That God existed was an obvious fact written into the fabric of basic phenomenological and social experience" (4). This, he notes, is similar to Charles Taylor's claim in A Secular Age.

There are several impossibly challenging questions the book tries to answer in a mere 94 pages. One of them: "Why is it that someone can find atheism philosophically and intellectually incoherent and yet still find himself attracted to it as a plausible conception of reality" (26)? The answer: well, it's complicated.

First, Minich summarizes the materialist cosmology underlying atheism. This section is commendably generous towards the New Atheists, summarizing Daniel Dennett's work and defending it from sloppy or careless criticism. In short, the scientific method has proven so successful at explaining natural phenomenon that it seems to squeeze out God as an explanation for our world. Minich adds that much of the response from the Intelligent Design crowd is vulnerable to a "God in the gaps" criticism.

It is, still, strange that Darwinism is so commonly thought to debunk theism. There are an awful lot of logical steps between natural selection and a godless cosmos¹. "For [medieval and early modern] philosophers, the explanation(s) of events in terms of materiality and in terms of divine agency were not necessarily in tension ... Darwin's recipients among the religious were not so nervous about the theological implications of his theory" (35, 47). Imagine I find my living room immaculate and, finding evidence of a vacuum, assume there was no cleaner (or more accurately here -- finding a Roomba, assume there was no Roomba maker or purpose for Roomba-ing). This elementary philosophical mistake about causality should leave most traditional arguments for God undisturbed݃².

Minich argues that modern atheism has other problems as well. It cannot, for instance, give an adequate account of causality. (Fair warning: if you, like me, are unaccustomed to intricate metaphysical argument, reading those ten pages will be like eating saltine crackers while thirsty). There are other weighty philosophical crises facing materialism (the claim that everything in the universe is inert matter subject to the laws of physics). How can physics explain our conscious, subjective experience of the world, for instance? Puzzles about consciousness have pushed this dogma to the brink and led serious, widely-respected philosophers to argue that everything from lamps to lambs is conscious or to deny that consciousness exists (!!).

But knowing that materialism is incoherent doesn't dent the feeling so many moderns have that the materialist view of the world is a sort of intellectual default. Why do so many Christians still sense that compared with the modern science, theology and metaphysics are "anti-progressive, dogmatic, full of linguistic speculation and gobbledygook"? This is Minich's next question: what gives this zeitgeist such power? Minich recalls the medieval view of the world unpacked by Lewis in The Discarded Image, which saw the universe as "chorus of communicators rather than an amalgam of machine parts" (49). Has this sense of enchantment been killed? 

You might be tempted to roll your eyes here -- look, another sepia-toned retrospective about medieval Christendom! Let me guess -- if you squint enough, Descartes is to blame for Snapchat, and it's making us all atheists! But Minich avoids waxing poetic about the feudal system or oversimplifying why our world is the way it is. He is realistic about that pre-modern state of affairs:

The "enchanted' universe was not just enchanted but superstitious and devastatingly so. We cannot underestimate the extent to which an average Medieval person might have spent his life in the fear of non-existent entities and (not to be overly polemical) a church which threatened to wield a spiritual power that Protestants would later claim for God and his world and his gospel alone. (64)

Minich also points out that medieval scholars, like modern scientists, tried to predict the workings of the natural world, and they believed this brought God more glory, not less. This leads to one of the main theses of the book:

The real key to the progressive change and sense of things that has shifted in the West in the last 500 years is a change in the human ability to control [natural] agencies, rather than just predict them ... this rendered even the (presumably) most agentic aspects of the cosmos effectively silent and invisible. The real story here, then, is the story of modern technological culture and its implicit postures toward "the real." (52)

Our societies have conquered the rivers and skies, controlled microbial disease, traveled faster than sound, and put cell phone coverage everywhere but my living room. We've gained comfort, distance from nature, and a measure of control over death and disease. Being surrounded by all these triumphs cannot help but shift our posture towards the universe.

There is, Minich then argues, both a correlation and causation between modern technology and irreligion. The economic explosion of the past 200 years has some relationship to weakening faith in Western cultures even as materially poorer countries still worship. "What does the modern technological order ... suggest about what it means for a thing to be 'real?'" Minich asks. His suggestion: it "tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality ... belongs to the order of manipulable" (57). Our daily routines give us a sense of absolute control which feels, while we're in it, like an essential feature of the world. We find ourselves in " a world almost entirely tool-i-fied," a world of my own subjective agency before an increasingly silent cosmos."

There's clearly a powerful insight here. Deuteronomy 8 warns the Israelites that when they enter Canaan, material abundance will encourage them to forget the God who brought them there:

Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest when you have eaten and are full and have built food houses and live in them ... then your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt ... beware lest you say in your heart, "my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth." You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives power to get wealth. (Deut. 8: 11-18, ESV)

This pattern continues throughout Israel's history: Israel flourishes, forgets God, faces the consequences, and is rescued. And although there may be some corporate parallels between Israel and the modern church or various quasi-Christian Western nations, this same phenomenon can equally infect individual Christians. Minich quotes Proverbs 30: "Give me neither poverty nor riches." There is a reason virtually all the world's wisdom literature warns against excess luxury. The user-centered focus of modern technology can equally encourage solipsism.

Minich's conclusion, thankfully, is not too loom-smashy. If these features of our world discourage Christians from church life and spiritual disciplines, Christians should, well, invest in church life and spiritual disciplines. Sometimes this takes willpower, he notes: "While the mind may be persuaded that a thing is true, it is often the disciplines and postures of the body, faking it till you make it, that actually orients our more tacit sensibility" (71). The book closes with an extended reflection on divine absence, which, Minich argues, is better understood as human weakness. The Pharisees, after seeing seven loaves feed 4000 people, tell Jesus they'd believe him -- if only he showed them a sign. What Jesus prophetically warns about rich Israelites could surely be said of us: "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead" (Luke 16:31, ESV).

It's tempting to put Enduring Divine Absence on a dusty shelf next to the vast conservative Christian literature bemoaning the modern world. But I don't think this book is out to be grumpy -- and it holds some really helpful insights and attitudes worth your time.

The story Minich tells about why the modern world is so subtly anti-Christian seems more accurate/helpful than most. Many Christian jeremiads blame modern secularism on bad ideas, and present insulation or inoculation from Enlightenment or Darwinist thought as the way to keep doubting Christians home. Minich's book is far more perceptive. I'd argue most Christian students who return from college awash with doubt are stunned less by arguments against God and more disoriented by living in a vast, semi-autonomous secular ecosystem that seems totally independent of God and overwhelms their sensors of what is "real" and what is good. 

And the book's nuanced approach to intellectual history avoids the reverse chronological snobbery of many conservative polemics. Sentimentalism about medieval times can be fueled by nagging insecurity about the progress of the modern world. American Christians have been losing culture wars for years. Many of these losses have been fueled by silly progressive triumphalism. But it is foolish for Christians to respond with needless contempt for true material and cultural advances of modernity. Minich's level-headed charge to teetering Christians should appeal, then, to Benedict Option skeptics.

In sum: Enduring Divine Absence is perceptive, well-reasoned, nuanced, short, sometimes very dense, and worth your time to consider.

I'll close by strongly recommending the movie response to this feeling that God has abandoned our world: Terrence Malick's insane and glorious The Tree of Life. Sean Penn's character reflects on the death of his brother while working in a cluster of skyscrapers, surrounded by the technology that gives mankind a sense of control over the natural world. As he remembers his brother, he is struck by the words of his mother, who told him there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace.
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Notes

1. Historian Carl Kaestle explains ideologies in a way that is helpful here: "a set of compatible propositions about human nature and society." The key to his definition is that this set of propositions can seem logically connected to the people who hold the ideology, despite tensions and contradictions. (For instance, Kaestle argues that mid-century America was dominated by an ideology that saw republicanism, Protestantism, and capitalism as intertwined and mutually supporting). Similarly, many Republicans and Democrats see a potpourri of policy stances as forming a united "package" (think global warming, gun control, and campus protests).
   
   In this case, I think secular pop-materialism connects scientific discoveries and technological achievement with religious skepticism, and has trouble (to steal a word from Minich) "disaggregating" them.
   
   Kaestle explains two rhetorical effects of this falsely perceived coherence that demonstrate Minich's point: First, if you agree to one or more of an ideology's propositions, it is assumed you must stand for the others as well. (If you are for science, you reject theological explanations of the world). Second, any assault on one of the beliefs of the ideology is perceived as an attack on the whole ideology. (You believe in the Resurrection? I thought you believed in progress!)
2.  Dorothy Sayers uses this error in reasoning as proof that mid-century education was going to pot in her famous 1947 The Lost Tools of Learning.