Jonathan Miller (JM) [To the viewer]: One of the first people I talked to when making the series on atheism was the Cambridge theologian Denys Turner whose inaugural lecture on taking up the chair of theology was entitled "How to be an atheist". Well as it happened, the conversation we had was never included in the final series because it turned out to be far more to do with the current relationship between theology and philosophy than it was about the history of disbelief.
However, professor Turner's theological arguments were so interesting and so forceful that I am pleased now to have the opportunity to show them at their full length.
JM: Well Denys, I'm reluctant as we'll see for reasons which we will discuss to use the word atheism of myself... I'm reluctant to call myself an atheist. I get the impression from your inaugural lecture, that you feel that 'us atheists', if I can use that term of ourselves have somehow, a. 'missed the target' and also, from the title of your lecture, that it - atheism - is an achievement of some sort, or something which one can get good at, and one can do it badly, or achieve it badly. Now, I wonder if you can explain to me first of all why it is you feel that atheism is something which you have to practise... and practise makes perfect... and we've got it wrong.
Denys Turner (DT): Well, I think that you've got to find a way of asking a certain kind of question if you're going to be a proper, card carrying, atheist. I think one begins to be a theist - to start at that end - when one realises that there's a certain kind of question which gets swept off the agenda and my point was that you have to work quite hard to ensure that question doesn't keep on re-emerging... and that question is, "Why is there anything at all?", as distinct from, "How are things, given that we've got them?". Umm... and I think... it takes quite a lot of work, really to be sure that opposition is secure against that kind of question re-emerging, and I think it just does.
Marx once said that each age asks only such questions as it can answer... and it's the cutting back on the agenda of questions which seems to me to be the important issue here. I mean even more important than the question of whether God exists is the question of "What questions are legitimate?", and the standard answer to, I suppose the theistic position in our time, is that the question which the name God appears to be some kind of answer to doesn't make sense as a question - it gets ruled out. So it's the agenda of questions which I would start and why is it that, umm, that a culture limits itself to asking, as it were, a set of routine questions which it has handily the methodologies for answering. It's almost as if the methods we've got for answering questions dictate what questions we allow to be asked. And I just think there's a very troubling question which kind of niggles on the edge of all the other questions.
JM: Well, if we can get back to that bigger and more awkward question... and return for a moment to the card carrying atheist. I always get the impression that the card carriers - and there were more of them, as you say, once, than there are now... Is it not the case that the reason why there were so many explicit, article writing, card carrying atheists who, as it were, affirmed their position, and recruited people and so forth... people like Bradlaw for example, or Annie Besant... and John Stuart Mill for instance... umm, that the reason they were so explicitly card carrying was that they were up against a formal institution which forbade their being a disbelief?
DT: Sure, I mean those were the days when it was intellectually interesting to be a card carrying atheist. I think it's ceased to be intellectually interesting which is why I find the likes of a card carrying atheist like Richard Dawkins to be really just an inverted image of a certain kind of rather narrowed down theism. There's a sort of fundamentalism about Dawkins' atheism which matches... as in the reversing of a mirror image that which he's rejected, and it seems to me there's a certain locking of that card carrying atheist into a fixed form of theism which it opposes which, umm, if you like also matches on the atheist side the refusal to ask certain sorts of questions on the theistic side. To give you a practical example, it seems to me that if you suppose that in this world there is a space which must be occupied by evolution, and that whatever space is occupied by evolution God has to be excluded from, then it doesn't really matter which way round you have it if you're an evolutionary theorist, you're going to have to exclude God. If you're a theist of the same sort then you're going to have to exclude evolution and there is, as it were, an equivalent fundamentalism on either side, which is why I think, much more troubling to a theist is the position of indifference than that of militant atheism. Your position as distinct from Dawkins' for example.
JM: I want to ask you then, why is it troubling to you that there should be people like myself, for whom it's a matter of indifference, to whom - to speak for myself - the question really never occurred. It never entered my mind when I was a child, umm... I heard people using this strange glottally stopped mono-syllable, umm, and never knew what it is they were talking about.
DT: I ??? (led/had?) a more intellectually exciting life than yours. I think everything does hang on the question of whether God does exist or not. And... um... I think that on the one hand I'd like to re-educate some of the card carrying atheists into what it is they should be denying as distinct from what they do deny. And on the other hand, it does seem to me that... that there are questions which remain to be asked, and I think that challenging people to ask them and asking them why it is that when presented with a question, "why is there anything at all rather than nothing", they seem to rule it out as an intelligible or sensible question, or at any rate as a question which doesn't matter. It seems to me that it must matter, though in a rather peculiar sort of way. It's not going to make any difference to how you understand the world if the answer is "there must be something which accounts for the fact that there is anything rather than nothing". It accounts for the existence of what there is, not the kind of thing... the kind of world that it is, and I think that... as Wittgenstein said, "It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is the cause of astonishment", and I think I'd just like to try and arouse people to a stronger sense of that astonishment... that there is anything at all... when there might not have been.
JM: Well you see while I think there is something startling and remarkable about the fact that there is something. and that it never ceases to amaze and to produce all the feelings which, urr, religious people of various denominations say, "where do you get your spiritual feelings from". Now... whatever... I hate to use the word spiritual but umm, the feelings of awe or splendour or what Freud referred to as oceanic feelings that I get are, as suddenly catching myself out and saying it's amazing that a) that my consciousness exists and that my consciousness has content at all. But where I find I differ from you, even in this attenuated non idolatrous form of theism, umm, is that if you can ask the question, "why is there anything at all?" and the answer to that seems to be, "there is something which accounts for it", then I find myself... well, why is there God then... why does the question not go into a series of infinite regresses, umm, asking the question about why is the cause of it all, or the bringer about of it all.. does not itself - himself, or herself require some sort of account?
DT: Well now you and I are engaged in an argument. We could have a discussion about that, and a very complex and detailed discussion about it. And it just seems to me that that's where I would want to start, with a sense that there is a problem here, and that there is a problem here at least moves one away from that condition of absolute intellectual indifference to the question of God - there is a fight on now, and it seems to me that we're back in the days where it mattered what answer one gave to that. I haven't answered your question, but I'm simply saying that your engaging with me on that question is already, in my book, to be doing something called theology.
JM: Why does it have to be called theology rather than an extension of what one would call natural science, umm, which has taken many unpredictable turns to include for example, a truly unseen world - a world of atoms which we will never see, umm, and then a world of sub-atomic particles, field forces and so forth, and indeed, degrees of uncertainty which seem to be mathematically describable... umm... those themselves are opening up all sorts of possibilities with the sphere of natural science, which doesn't seem to require something beyond as an explanation.
DT: Yes... I'm not sure it does have to be called theology, and I wouldn't bother about names there, but there is a reason it seems to me why it can't just be an extension of natural science. It seems to me that there is all the difference in the world between the question concerning how things are, and the question concerning that things are - a question which has to do with the fact that things are, if you see what I mean. Umm, because if you are, as it were, setting that things are against a background of nothingness then ones beginning to entertain questions about creation... and the classical theistic doctrine of creation is that creation is ex nihilo... out of nothing... now it's a curious expression, as Thomas Aquinas pointed out, that nothing isn't a funny kind of something - of any kind, as he said - there isn't a kind of thing that the name "nothing" names.. I mean there are philosophers who go about as if it did, umm, but Thomas Aquinas was absolutely clear about it, he says, "look, it's a very odd sort of making that you're talking about here because the negation against the 'out of' is a making but there's no 'out of' going on here".
JM: Yes, but you see one of thing things that always worries me about these fathers and, urr, these theologians...
DT: I only mentioned it by the way so as to prove that I'm not a one off ... just off the wall because this is classical theism we're talking about here.
JM: No, I know it's been going on for a long time this sort of stuff, but it always seems to be to be rather similar to the rather brilliant piece of improvisation my friend John Bird did when he played the frog footman in my production of Alice in Wonderland... and he improvised rather brilliantly suddenly in the carol mode... when Alice is thundering on the door of the pepper cooks kitchen and she can't get in, and he says, "I tell you what I'll do for you", umm, and then she looks at him questioningly and he says, "I tell you what I'll do for you: nothing. Would that be any good for you?", he said, "I can't do it straight away because I've got all these things cropping up". Then he said, brilliantly, and in a very optimistic way, "if I was to do nothing for you, I'd have to find the time, see, when I could squeeze it in". Now there a beautiful intelligibility about that joke. But the reason why it's a joke is that we know that he's using nothing as though it were something about which we can talk. But then I can't get my mind around the notion of this omnipotent creator existing in this nothingness who then creates something out of the nothingness , or brings something about, leaving the question of, "why is there a God at all?".
DT: Well, I acknowledge the force of your bemusement about that and of course so do the theologians, who say that it couldn't be the case that the God in question is a sort of thing. I mean the classical theologians say that God is not any kind of thing because if God were a kind of thing, God would just be one of the other kinds of things that there are, only a rather different one. So we're not talking about something that's on the map of creation. We're talking about something which is off the map of creation, which is why what we're talking... you know.. how we're talking now is a kind of bamboozling nonsense, if you like. That's by the way called negative theology - that is to say knowing that you don't know what you're talking about at this stage, and I think that's really what theology is about, it's the sense that on the other side of our language is something which sustains it which can't be contained within it. And I think this is what Wittgenstein was after at the end of Tract... at the end of the Tractatus when he said, "well, what underlies how we says things cannot itself be said"... and that's what we call God.
JM: But it could also be claimed that what lies beyond the possibility of being expressed or said is something about which you better be silent in order not to talk nonsense... And you leave it at that... as Russell said when he was arguing with Father Copleston. You simply have to say, "well that's what there is.". It doesn't seem to me that one can press the re-iterated child's questions of "why?" merely because it has a question mark behind it, umm... to an infinity... merely because you can re-iterate at will. Re-iteration is not necessarily a sign of continuity.
DT: No no, I agree. I mean, I think there is an argument to be had as to whether the question makes sense or whether it isn't just, as it were, the irritating childish pressing of a question beyond all possible meaning. Umm... and I think there is a case to be made for saying that the question doesn't make sense. But you can't simply say, "the world is just a fact - there isn't anything more to be said about it." Because that's a refusal to discuss whether the question does or doesn't make sense. I just think there is an argument to be had here... and I think having that argument is, as I say, already beginning to do theology.
JM [to the viewer]: Well as you can see from all this theology, modern or otherwise can be maddeningly obscure, but what intrigued me - since Denys has been quite clear in his lecture that anything that went beyond the idea that God was the answer to the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" is mere idolatry - what intrigued me was how Denys was able to apply this notion of God to his daily life.
JM: You've already given me a position of an extremely attenuated initial state - or a non-initial state - about which there is a legitimate question to be asked. Now, it seems to me that the way you describe it, it is so attenuated... this nothingness... that I find it hard to see it as it being a content of belief, such that it could animate your life, give energy to your moral existence...
DT: Well here's a sort of sound-bite answer... umm... err... Russell says, "the world is just simply given... it's a fact.". I would say nearly right, but not quite right, because the world is actually gifted. That is to say it is - it comes, as it were, of a gift of a certain kind.
JM: In other words, it is given in...
DT: It is given in the sense that there is a giver, and whatever it is that accounts for the fact that there is what there is, is going to be the giver, you know the creator - the giver of this, and so existence is a certain kind of gift. I mean my existence, or any body's existence, or that there is anything at all is in the manner of a gift. And of course one begins to move further in the direction of what I actually believe about things when we make this move from saying the world is simply given to saying that is has been given to us - that there is an author of it - it is, as it were, given to us by a God who... and a further step down that line is this is not an ironic gift, this is a gift of a good an loving God. Now there are all sorts of steps that have to be taken to get from that very very primitive grip about the creator up to that... to that sort of point. And there are many obstacles to taking those steps with any degree of confidence, one of them of course being the immediate problem - the problem of evil.
JM: Well, lets leave the problem of evil on one side for the moment, and talk about the gift, and talk about the donor. Now it seems to me that language being what it is that the notion of "donation" and "gift", and "giving" are inseparable from the recipient...
DT: Yes
JM: Now what I would like to know is to whom is the gift donated? Now the only things that are in a position to be conscious recipients are in fact human beings... Now if this donor... is preparing this gigantic, urr, box of gifts, why is it that it took so long to create the urr, the grateful recipient? Why were the eons of non-recipients?
DT: Sure... Is any other world possible, than this world? I mean... one can invent possible worlds, in fact one... on some accounts - some cosmologist's account, all the possible worlds do exist, indeed they'd have to exist for this world, which we know of to be the way it is, I mean it's one of the ways I'm trying to explain how come we've got what we've got... ummm... but leaving that out of the question for the moment... why not this world? Is any other world... possible?
JM: Well, I have to reply to you in all ignorance that I'm not a good enough physicist or mathematician to be able to, as it were, conceive of alternative arrangements of sub-atomic particles and so forth. But... I'd live to go... leap-frog backwards a little bit. Urr, and it raised a question which I think you wanted to ask. and we can ask it between ourselves.
The Notion of gift pre-supposes intention, and one of the things which I find as someone trained in biology, and I think that Richard Dawkins would say this as well, and certainly Daniel Dennett does... that, urr... intentions and so forth don't start to appear in the universe until there are entities which have what Dennett would call "interests", urr, maintaining themselves. And these don't start to occur until a relativ-- very very late in the universe. And I think that it's really putting the cart before the horse to start invoking intentions on the part of this maker - this gift-giver, urr when intending and having purpose seems to be something which occurs only when you get biological systems which have interests for which there are purposes of self-maintenance and survival.
DT: Sure. I'm not sure in what way I'd want to get the word purpose in here. I mean, I know there are questions about scientific explanation and how far it does and does not involve purposive concepts. I mean some read evolutionary theory itself in a quasi-purposive fashion... though a Dawkins won't... Urr, I think an aesthetic account of what is going on is better than a purposive one where what one means by purpose is, well, doing things as means towards certain ends which are the intentions in question. It's much more to do with... when you ask, "well, why does the world exist?", it's much more like asking "well, why did Mozart write The Marriage of Figaro?". Well, there's a quick answer - he needed money fast. But a much better answer is because it was just a wonderful exercise of his own creative powers in which there was great joy, and it was a great joy, as it were, to those who performed it and then those who listened to it... So the thing is justified just in terms of it's inherent beauty.
Now I think that does connect with gifts, which of course etymologically is connected with the word "gratuitous". You're not talking about purpose for which it exists - it exists simply because that sort of thing is beautiful. Now to say of a thing that is beautiful is to say why it exists. If you ask "well, why beautiful things?" then I think you've already mis-understood what beauty means.
JM [to the viewer]: I still felt that I was in the dark, and I simply couldn't understand how it could be that the creation was said to be a performance on God's part, carried out for aesthetic reasons. Or how this form of Christianity could become a faith that you could practise in church without it being so simplified that it would become, in Denys' own words, idolatrous.
JM: Well alright, let me accept your claim in... as you express it... and really press you to say in what sense is this a Christian theology, and what does it mean, as it were, on Sunday? How does it construct your, as it were, worship. In what sense do you... outside the daily practises of your life, in those parts of your life which you regard as you religious experiences and your religious actions and religious feelings, what does it do? To whom, for example, to what are prayers directed? Or are there such things as prayers in this, by your own admission, attenuated form of non-idolatrous religion?
DT: Well, I mean... Quite often I suppose that when I think when I'm praying I am simply talking to myself... a kind of inner dialogue and so on. But there are times when one, it seems one is utterly at ones wits end and it seems clear that, you know, you are utterly at the mercy of something bigger that you are. I mean, when you're at your wits end, you're not very big... and it's not hard to find something bigger than you are when you're absolutely at the end of your wits...
JM: But even when you're within your wits you're constantly... unless you're merely, as it were, going about your business and therefore you're distracted from the largeness of things... urr, what is it that makes the difference between merely saying, "what a beautiful sunset... what a vast universe... why is there any- why am I conscious of anything?". How does it differ from those sort of bewilderments and amazements that we all have, unless we are clods.
DT: Well you see, yes, I don't really think it does all that much. I mean if you're looking at it from the point of view of the experienced feel of it, I don't see that there's any difference at all. I just think that sometimes, giving it a name can make all the difference in the world.
JM: But then, for the pious atheist, which I would think of myself as - pious in sense that have episodes of piety - they are not episodes of piety in which I am bewildered and find myself asking the question of why it is at all, but find myself, umm, shaken to the depths of my being that there is anything at all and by the strange mysteries of the fact that my scrambled egg in the morning is me by the end of the day... Something as negligible as scrambled egg can become something as... part of something as considerable as me - or considerable as anyone.
Now that seems to me to be the most mysterious form of incarnation - much much grander than what happened in Bethlehem. Now why do we have to go back to Bethlehem in order to worship the extraordinary majesty of there being anything at all? Even without having to invoke an author for it.
DT: Well you see, I'm not sure I would actually succeed in getting a merely philosophical argument going which demonstrated that this fact that there is anything at all is in the way of being the gift of a loving God.
I think that that would have to be revealed to be believed. If only for the fact that there is so much counter evidence.
JM: Well in that case I want to ask you the question, for the religious person in what way, and in what manner, urr, and what episodes of revelation bring it to your consciousness?
DT: Everything. It's either everything you see, or simply not true. It couldn't be in just some things. It would have to be that creation is like that, and therefore everything has to be brought into the story in some way or other. That is to say I wouldn't be selective about it. I wouldn't want to go down a line in which I said, "Well, this reveals God, but of course that doesn't.", as if you could explain some things in these terms but other things didn't fit with it, because it seems to me that's intellectual dishonest. It's got to be the lot. You've either got to accept that everything in some way or other reveals God, including failure... and that is the most surprising thought which is why the central part of the Christian story has to do with the way in which failure works within this.
If it weren't the case that everything could be included in the picture of what reveals God including catastrophic failure - the failure of love, the mystery that if you do love, as Herbert McCabe once put it, "If you don't love you're scarcely alive, but if you do love you'll almost certainly be killed". That's the story of Jesus it seems to me.
Now that is a totally inclusive story, that is to say it says, look, the whole lot, everything about it... is in some way or other a revelation of this mystery of love. It's either the case that everything does or else your position is correct... that none of it needs to, you can look at it in a different kind of way and you don't need this story at all.
JM: Yes, for me it's merely the revelation of itself.
DT: You see I don't think there is any rational argument which could settle the argument between you and me. I mean I think it is a question of faith and whether on can accept it or not at this point, and it seems to me that one is talking about faith at precisely the point where one has gone that step beyond the point where you can have a properly speaking philosophical argument about it. So when you ask me about content of my belief, we've moved away from that which we can properly dispute, because you either accept my position or you don't.