Ignorant `hic's: an address at the memorial church

This week, I gave the address at the unitarian church in Cambridge. Here's what I said:

Ignorant `hic's

I quite like indian food, so I enjoy going out for a curry from time to time. But I have a slightly embarrassing problem when I eat hot food; it always makes me hiccup. Of course, everyone has advice on how to cure the hiccups: their own special method. My personal favourite recommendation, which is absolutely guaranteed to work, is `Hold your breath for 20 minutes'.

The problem with hiccup cures is that they often rely on the user not being used to them, so after a while you can't use them any more. Sometimes our religious practices can end up like that, too; we get so used to them that they lose their value. We go through the motions, singing hymns but not worshipping. That's a huge problem, which I won't attempt to address today. One thing I'll do instead is suggest my own spiritual `hiccup cure'; it's a trick, or hack, to help you see the sacredness of ordinary things. Hopefully it will be new to some of you, so that you'll be able to use it. I'll also give a diagnosis of what I think is a key feature of the spiritual hiccups, and why it is such a bad thing.

I came across this `hiccup cure' by accident just under a year ago. The way it happened is a simple enough story; there is almost nothing to it. But it remains strong in my memory. There was a film night, here at the church. We watched a Japanese animated film called `Spirited Away'. It is a magical film; I recommend it. But it is not the story of the film that I want to talk about; it is the credits. There is nothing very unusual about them. The names of those involved in the making of the film are shown in turn against a neutral background; in this case the background was a patch of ground; dirt with some stones on it and a couple of scrubby plants. However, since this was an animated film the dirt, stones and plants had been drawn rather than photographed.

Whoever had drawn this picture had lovingly filled in a lot of detail: the shading on each rock, and the gentle changes in the colouring of the ground. I was fascinated by this process of creation. Why had this stone been placed just here, rather than a little to the left? How did the artist come to settle on this colour for one patch of dirt, and on that for another? Maybe it just felt right. I know that inscrutable feeling of rightness a little, but it is shy and mysterious. And perhaps the artist's mind and hand were guided by something else entirely. Perhaps some detail hides a mistake, so expertly that I cannot tell. Perhaps the whole thing was sketched inattentively, during a conversation or in a meeting. To be honest, it wasn't specific questions like these which fascinated me, but something they can only serve to hint at: a sense of a subtle story of which I could only see an accidental trace, the foam on the tip of the wave.

I don't want to dwell too long on the details of this experience, but rather to point out something a little odd about it. The picture was a picture of stones and dirt, which are not unusual things. I encounter them beneath my feet every day as I walk about. But even when my eye does, occasionally, rest on them, they do not strike me in the same way as that picture. It's just a bit of ground, after all. It's not as if somebody took the time to choose where to place each pebble.

But if I do look at it like that, as if it had been carefully arranged, then I suddenly do notice all sorts of fascinating oddities, and my mind no longer slips away onto other concerns. That's the trick, the `hiccup cure'. To encounter their sacredness, try looking at the ordinary things you come across as if they had been created by a person; an artisan. The aim of this practice is to help us stop, sometimes, and pay attention to the world.

There's an episode of the TV detective show Columbo in which Columbo's investigation takes him to an art gallery, where there's a lot of modern art hanging up; canvasses with just a single diagonal line and so on. Columbo goes to look at one; a white plastic square which is set into the wall, with some vertical slits in it, through which you can see that there is a hole in the wall behind it. `How much is this piece, ma'am?' he asks the gallery owner. `Which one?' she replies, `Oh, ... that's the ventilation system'.

When Columbo thought of this system as art, he was curious about it, but when he was told it was functional he lost his curiosity. This wasn't because there was less to be curious about. Most of us have little idea of how ventilation systems work, how to install them, what can go wrong with them and so on. But these are the kinds of question we normally just avoid thinking about. We're all immensely ignorant about the world around us, but we don't usually notice this. We think about the things that we reckon we do know about and subconsciously edit out those features of the world that we don't understand.

The practice of encountering things as if they had been created can help us to recognise and acknowledge this vast ignorance. When I was talking about this with my brother, he pointed out something which drives home just how much we naturally ignore. Imagine if you were to go out onto Christ's pieces, pick a chunk of grass, and examine it as if were created. In the words of the poet Lew Welch, you might

Step out onto the planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside are three hundred things nobody understands, and, maybe, nobody's ever really seen. How many can you find?

Well, maybe you would find a couple of hundred. But now imagine if we were all to do this, with the same patch of grass. I reckon our collections of mysteries would barely overlap, and this would still be true even if there were a hundred of us. So each of us, straining to see a hundred mysteries, would miss ten thousand. That's how ignorant we are; how ignorant even of our own ignorance. Of course, being reminded of this ignorance is always helpful when we need a dose of humility.

What we encounter when we allow ourselves to see the world this way aren't simply riddles to be solved, but mysteries, even sacred mysteries. That is, in seeing the everyday mysteries of the world, we see the sacredness of ordinary things and the boundary between sacred and mundane blurs away. As Gordon Atkinson speculates in the second reading we had earlier, maybe we should `build a shrine to everything', at least if it weren't for the fact that `the mortar is worth as much as the saint'.

One reason it is great to be reminded of how much our minds filter out is that so much of it is fascinating and wonderful. We find it amusing when small children are as fascinated with the wrapping paper as with the gift inside, but secretly I think we all mourn the loss of the childish fascination which would reveal to us once more how magical wrapping paper is. To put it in more biblical language, our minds are often so focused on the treasures we have on earth that we completely forget about our treasures in heaven. Conversely, perhaps if we paid attention to what treasure we do have in heaven we might cling a little less fiercely to what we've managed to scratch together on earth. You cannot serve both God and mammon.

Of course, in drawing attention to this mystical way of seeing the world, I don't want to give the impression that it is always the most appropriate way to engage with things; that we should be continually exhausting our stores of `hiccup cures' to pull ourselves ever deeper into this vision. Sometimes, we do need to filter out our ignorance. When you're driving, you don't want to be fascinated by the unexplored territory on your right; you want to keep your eyes on the road. In an art gallery, you do want to spend a fair amount of your attention on the official artwork. I just want to suggest, or remind you, that sometimes dropping our filters can be of immense value.

So, where is it most important not to glide over our ignorance? I think one of the most important areas is in dealing with other people. I know myself better than most of you know me, and I know that I have all kinds of quirks, some rather endearing and others much less so, and that occasionally my reasons for acting run untraceably deep. I also know that this isn't some special fact about myself - we're all like that, we just find it harder to see it in one another. We have the annoying habit of overlooking our deep ignorance of one another and working with pictures of each other based on first impressions or even flimsier things like sex or appearance. I include myself in this; I know I make this mistake all the time. It's part of who we all are that we do this, and it is a tragedy, something we should be actively fighting. We should remember how we all shape ourselves day by day, crafting ourselves in small ways into the people we later become, and we should respect the artistry of that.

A second key area is in our encounters with God. Let me take a deeply stereotypical example. I went on holiday with my family to northern Scotland a few years ago - right up away from the bright lights of civilisation. The first night we went outside and I saw the stars, properly saw them, for the first time. I guess most of you know how that whips your mind away from under you. We don't have a good way to talk about what is encountered there except with religious language.

Thinking in terms of creation can recall to our minds the grandeur of it all, as in the first reading today where thinking about `who created all [the stars]?' leads to thoughts about `bringing out the starry host one by one' and `calling them all by name'. There's an important caveat at this point. For this thought experiment to remind us of the vast mysteries we like to leave in the wilderness, we don't have to actually believe that there is, somewhere, a being who actually knows the name of each star. Approaching them through the lens of creation is enough. And after all, don't they all deserve names? `You know, out of respect.' Just like every mote of dust that dances in every sunbeam, and in every starbeam on every distant planet.

We can't take it in; we must refer such knowledge to the mind of God. But there's a huge danger here. The danger is of using this language to cover over, rather than explore, our ignorance: of dismissively saying `God knows'. We can take God's name in vain to pretend that we understand more than we do. So often the word is used as a stopper, an unquestioned answer, rather than as an acknowledgement of the depth beyond our questioning. We think if we have a neat enough signpost to the sacred grove we don't have to go visit. But it doesn't have to be like that. We can find ways to remind each other why the signs were put up, with small `hiccup cures' and with broader frameworks of religious language and ritual. I pray that we will constantly find new ways to refashion the word of God from heavy chains back into a`two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit'.

Once upon a time...

As I've mentioned here, I had a very sudden loss of faith in the summer before I began my PhD. One of the most frustrating things about this loss of faith at the time was that I was completely unable to give a good reason for it. I certainly hadn't discovered any logical inconsistency within Christianity, nor had I suffered at the hands of my fellow Christians. I wasn't going through a lull in my prayer life (though I did, as part of a wider crisis, a few months before), and I was still studying the Bible regularly.

Since then, I've put together a `just so' story, which I think gives some explanation of how it happened. However, you should bear in mind that this story was put together over a year after the fact, and it may well be off the mark.

Before I get into the story proper, I'm afraid I need to digress to explain some technical details to do with apologetics. The word `apologetics' refers to the practices employed by Christians in defence of their faith, especially reasoning and argumentation. The kind of apologetics that matters for this story is called presuppositionalism. It is based on the idea that, whilst we justify some of the things we believe in terms of others, we all have some ultimate presuppositions on which our worldviews are based and which do not rest on anything else for their justification. A key part of the presuppositionalist strategy, at least as I encountered it, is to conclude from this oversimplified picture that it is OK to take, for instance, the existence of God and the truth of the Bible as such basic presuppositions. In other words, on this view there is no need to argue for these beliefs - they can be taken for granted. There's much more to presuppositionalism than that, but what I've said is enough to let me press on with the story.

When I was at university, a charismatic member of my church was a presuppositionalist, and I encountered this style of apologetics in conversation with him. It made a lot of sense to me (at least, the parts I explained in the last paragraph did) - after all, if God is foundational for ontology it makes sense for belief in God to be foundational for epistemology. So I became presuppositionalist.

This meant that, when I encountered a refutation of an argument for the existence of God, I didn't have to worry. After all, my faith wasn't based on such flimsy things as arguments. So I could examine the refutation and, if it made sense, accept it. Here are a few typical examples:

• Argument: the unity and perfection of the Bible indicate that it must have had a divine source.
  Refutation: examination of the text shows that the various authors had very different, sometimes conflicting and often questionable projects.
• Argument: God answers prayer.
  Refutation: repeated scientific testing has produced no evidence that prayer has any measurable illness-reducing effect.
• Argument: the fine tuning of the universe is highly improbable unless there is a God.
  Refutation: the notion of probability does not apply to things like universes in the same way as to things like coins.
• Argument: God is necessary to explain morality.
  Refutation: it is plausible that there may be evolutionary explanations (though not justifications) of morality.
  

I could extend this list ad nauseam.

And lo! It came to pass that my faith was completely unsupported. I did not know of any compelling argument for the existence of God, or any of the other supernatural claims of Christianity. Of course, I didn't mind that, because I didn't have any compelling arguments against, either. And I was happy to presuppose the truth of Christianity.

How did this affect my beliefs? Well, it began to disconnect my religious beliefs from my day-to-day expectations about the world. Since I was not aware of any phenomena in normal life which science was unable, in principle, to explain (so that God would be needed), I made no allowance for such phenomena. Thus, for example, if someone was ill and I prayed for them this did not increase my expectation that they would recover. This did not devalue prayer in my eyes.

What this meant was that my internal model of the world was not what I thought it was. For the purposes of normal living I was making use of a perfectly workable worldview which did not rely on the presupposition of the existence of God at all. Although this presupposition was present, and I believed it to be fundamental, all that was being supported by it was the ornate cathedral of religious doctrine which I had been slowly building over the years.

One day, there was a switch in perspective - suddenly the religious doctrine no longer counted for me as belief. It was all still conceptually present; I am still able to recall and understand much of it today. But the concepts involved no longer served as beliefs for me. The cut was relatively clean, and what was left behind was the nontheistic worldview which had already been serving me (as a substructure of my beliefs) for some time.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Self deception

What sets humans apart? One common answer is that it is our self-awareness; our sense of self. Whilst there isn't a qualitative division, this certainly seems to be something that is far more developed in humans than in other animals. So a natural question to ask is how it came to be so highly developed. There's a relatively simple story which gives one plausible answer. It may well not be right, but if it is it is rather humiliating for us. The feature which sets us apart may have been born in deception.

Here's the story:

Proto-humans began to develop a community structure which relied on intelligent communication. Some proto-humans began to build mental models of other proto-humans. This helped them to judge and more accurately predict the behaviour of others. They survived better, and this became widespread.

Some proto-humans began to meta-model - to model the modelling that was occuring in the minds of others. They survived better, and this became widespread.

In some, this meta-modelling was especially detailed with respect to the models that others had of them. This was for at least two reasons. First, it was easy for their brains to gather data about their own state and the ways it was making them behave. Second, it was these meta-models which yielded the most significant information for those doing the modelling. They survived better, and this became widespread.

Finally, some proto-humans began to make use of these meta-models in more sophisticated ways; to modify their own behaviour so that they were harder to second-guess, and even to give a misleading impression to others. In order to do this, their mental self-models became extremely detailed and detached from any specific model of the minds of others. They survived better, and this became widespread.

Does this story have a moral? If so, it isn't that deception is natural for humans and therefore morally fine. The question of whether a thing is natural (in the sense of emerging in an understandable way from the normal running of nature) is independent of the question of whether it is good. Instead, if this story is true, the moral is that we shouldn't trust our sense of self quite so much. When we rotate our inner eyeballs to look back into ourselves, it may be that the image we see is one that was born in deceit.

Idolatry and the speaking theist

In a couple of previous posts I discussed a potential reinvigoration of religious language, focusing in particular on the use of the word God. I approached this usage from the perspective of the nonbeliever, and tried to answer the question of why it might be reasonable to retain religious language despite rejecting supernatural ontology. But I reckon that the same use of the language of God would be helpful for the believer, shattering the box in which (so they think) He must be confined. It is this case which I'll be presenting here.

The main motive which I'll present for believers in God to prune the ways in which they speak of Him will be avoidance of idolatry. Because the charge of idolatry carries such heft, it has been constantly reappropriated and reapplied to condemn a wide variety of activities, from the worship of wooden statues to greed. There is a particular thread of meaning, however, which is more directly relevant to the use of religious language. A paradigmatic example is found in Exodus 32:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, "Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him."

Aaron answered them, "Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me." So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD." So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

Notice that the festival is to the LORD, not to some other god or gods in competition with Him. The golden statue isn't a rival of the LORD: it is a misrepresentation. Misrepresenting the LORD is a very serious offence, as the sequel shows:

When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

He said to Aaron, "What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?"

...

Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, "Whoever is for the LORD, come to me." And all the Levites rallied to him.

Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' " The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, "You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day."

It isn't just the golden calf that Moses objects to, but the practice of the people, which is misrepresenting the LORD before His enemies.

So what kinds of representation are OK? Deuteronomy 4 is pretty clear:

You saw no form of any kind the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below. And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven. But as for you, the LORD took you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of his inheritance, as you now are.

No representations of God are allowed. Why not? Because any representation is, and must be, a misrepresentation; a reduction of God to something common, to a part of His creation. This idea has been taken very seriously in some kinds of Judaism, so that even the name of the LORD is not spoken. It is also famously the source of the abstract constellations of pattern so prevalent in early Islamic art. It has been taken less seriously in Christianity, a point to which I shall return later.

Working out the full implications of this prohibition leads not just to a condemnation of some kinds of statuary. I'll argue that, taken seriously, its range is so wide that it undermines a great deal of religion, including its own frame of reference. This ironic reflexive undercutting begins to show in the instructions Moses gives the Israelites for when they enter the promised land, in Deuteronomy 27:

When you have crossed the Jordan into the land the LORD your God is giving you, set up some large stones and coat them with plaster. Write on them all the words of this law when you have crossed over to enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you. And when you have crossed the Jordan, set up these stones on Mount Ebal, as I command you today, and coat them with plaster. Build there an altar to the LORD your God, an altar of stones. Do not use any iron tool upon them. Build the altar of the LORD your God with fieldstones and offer burnt offerings on it to the LORD your God. Sacrifice fellowship offerings there, eating them and rejoicing in the presence of the LORD your God. And you shall write very clearly all the words of this law on these stones you have set up."

There are two lots of stones to be set up. First there are the stones for the altar, in which great care is taken to avoid even attempting to represent God. These stones are used just as they are, and not marked in any way. But opposite these stones stand another group, which are thick with inscriptions. These inscriptions represent God, despite their formulation in language, and despite their protestations against any such representation. They stand as a testimony against themselves.

The marks on the stones cannot be God, despite their aroma of (Platonic) heaven. They can only represent Him. So they can only misrepresent Him. Language is no less an attempt to circumscribe God than pictures, and no less a blasphemous failure. The iterability on which language relies deprives it of the power to capture the unique; the transcendent is debased and rendered translatable for `all the nations under heaven'. The quotation from deuteronomy 4 above slyly undercuts its own exclusive rhetoric by witnessing the possibility of a comprehensible translation for us heathen English.

The idea that misrepresentation of God with language, even with the best of intentions, is seriously problematic is eloquently presented by Job. Faced with a mystery about God, Job's friends do their best, given their limited understanding, to present a picture of God which sets Him in a good light. Job's response is damning:

Will you speak wickedly on God's behalf?
Will you speak deceitfully for him?

Will you show him partiality?
Will you argue the case for God?

Would it turn out well if he examined you?
Could you deceive him as you might deceive men?

He would surely rebuke you
if you secretly showed partiality.

Would not his splendor terrify you?
Would not the dread of him fall on you?

I'm often reminded of these lines when I encounter Young Earth Creationism; adherents of this movement have repeatedly spoken decietfully for God. That they are misrepresenting God is reasonably clear, given our current scientific understanding. But not all representations are so clearly misrepresentations at the time they are made. This is beautifully illustrated by a later passage from Job in which, apparently, God is speaking:

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,

which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,

to water a land where no man lives,
a desert with no one in it,

to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?

This representation of how God acts to bring about the weather made perfect sense at the time. It was reasonable, for example, to suppose that hail was stored somewhere by God, rather than magically appearing in the sky when needed. But given our current understanding of the weather, this passage is clearly full of howlers, and these howlers lie at the level of the basic assumptions used to form the picture of God. Our own current state of knowledge is very likely to also contain such howlers, so relying on it to represent God puts us at a serious risk of idolatry. These mistakes were to do with scientific knowledge, which is (at any given time) relatively clear-cut. Most of the language used to picture God is not scientific but theological, and thus far more seriously disputed. Therefore it is impossible for more than just a small fraction of theological discussion to avoid the serious error of idolatry; indeed, it follows from the argument I am making that all theology that attempts to represent God, however reasonable it might seem at the time, falls into this trap.

However, there is an even deeper problem here. The very use of language itself implicitly provides a picture of that which is spoken about. For example, the use of a noun suggests that there is a particular thing which can be referred to by means of that noun, and which behaves in a regular manner reflected by the grammar of nouns as we use them in our language. I've commented on how this picture is reflected in the way we use words like `exists', for example, here. Some of the key blunders in the history of science involved the use of nouns where they would turn out to be inappropriate, and the implicit pictures of the world that go along with that use; think of the ether or phlogiston, for example. Something similar may be happening with current discussions of dark matter and dark energy.

Of course, our own ways of thinking are so closely tied in to our language that it is difficult to see how the implicit pictures which the grammar of that language presents could fail. However, as I've suggested here, there are good reasons to think that they do break down even when we seek to speak of perfectly ordinary matter on a very small scale. These pictures serve us well when we want to talk about things on our own scale, but there is no reason to suppose that they will work equally well for addressing all domains where we wish to have knowledge. In particular, to return to the main theme of this post, there is no reason to suppose that God will fit our grammatical boxes. To use the word God simply as a noun is to implicitly represent, and so misrepresent, Him. This, too, is insidious idolatry.

How, then, is this idolatry to be avoided? I mentioned earlier one attempt - namely the avoidance of the name of God in some flavours of Judaism. However, this practice can only stand as a reminder of, rather than an escape from, the blasphemy of language, for some equally arbitrary string of symbols (Adonai, G-d) can always be hauled in to continue the desecration. Alternatively, we could attempt to cut out all God-talk completely. I've argued against this practice elsewhere. For now, it suffices to note that God-talk began to be used in some particular contexts and that at present it seems to be the only language we have for addressing those contexts. The importance of maintaining the space into which this language began to point was argued in a recent address at the unitarian church here in Cambridge.

Indeed, thinking (at least for ourselves) about those contexts in which God-talk seems most appropriate suggests a possible way to use this language without falling into the traps outlined above. To take a simplified case, recall a time when you were struck dumb by the expanse of the stars on a cloudless night. This experience of awe includes a sense of something encountered beyond ourselves, even beyond the physical world. In such a case it is natural to say you have encountered God: to use the word `God' as a placeholder indicating the direction in which this sense points. But it is important at this point not to be drawn into the supposition that this word, `God', can now be treated as any other noun; that we may, for example, sensibly ask whether two distinct Gods were encountered on two different such occasions or whether it was the same God both times.

Indeed, if what I have said above is right, we should not even suppose that to ask at this point a question like `Does God exist?' is a sensible use of language. Since it may have weight for some theists, I should flag up that I think this illustrates a proper response to strong atheism. It would be tempting to say that, prior to all their arguments, strong atheists have made a mistake in supposing that the question `Does God exist?' may sensibly be asked. But in fact, of course, they have made no such mistake. For the question was already appropriated and answered in the affirmative by theists, and the standard arguments of strong atheists are quite properly directed against this idolatry.

Now that I have laid out how the use of religious language in a nonmetaphysical manner may be approached from the side of more traditional theism, it is worth taking a little time to consider some objections to this approach.

The first kind of objection is the suggestion that the approach I have sketched must simply be switching one idol for another. For example, since the characteristic example I mentioned above involves the internal experience of a single person, perhaps all I am doing is substituting the self and personal experience as a new idol in place of God. But this can't be right; like the simplified models in physics textbooks, I chose the example above for its simplicity and clarity, but not for its typicality. Typically, religious use of language will emerge from the practice of a community, not just a single person.

Is it the community which is being substituted for God, then? This doesn't seem right either. After all, it is not the community which is being discussed when religious language is used. That language is directed away from ourselves, and towards the divine (indeed, it is in order to gesture in this direction that we are most in need of religious language). Faced with the infirmity of our langauge in the face of God, there is indeed a danger that we will seek firmness elsewhere, but it is not inevitable: in any case there is no excuse for seeking that firmness in misrepresentative pictures.

The next kind of objection runs a little deeper. In order to lay out my initial account of idolatry, I had to speak of God using religious language in a traditional manner. But this is exactly the use of language which I later condemned as blasphemous. So, just as I earlier suggested that the book of Deuteronomy undermines itself, so does my own argument. In order to make the argument, I must stand on the very foundations I am undercutting.

This objection does not remove the force of my argument, but it does show that it can only serve as an internal critique of a special kind: as a kind of deconstruction. For I have sought to show that traditional religious accounts conceal within themselves the seeds of their own condemnation. Once this is made explicit, I claim, the structure implodes, taking the argument with it. However, this very movement serves to gesture in the direction of the holy, and of a more tentative way of addressing God.

A third objection is that what I have said is an overblown attack on sincerely held beliefs, which will serve only as an excuse for violence and condemnation. Because of the extreme force of the language of idolatry, the objection runs, it should be used with more caution. It has been used to excuse murder in the past. First of all, it is worth noting that even if this objection were accurate it would not be a reason to reject my argument. That a claim has been used in the name of violence does not make it false. We can't deny the truth of nuclear physics just because of the horrific weapons it underpins.

However, in fact this objection is not even accurate; all its force is drawn away by the second objection. After all, in the moment in which we are drawn to condemn traditional religious language as idolatrous, even before we are able to strap on our swords in the name of divine retribution, that condemnation undercuts itself, together with the language, and falls away, having removed only our own inclination to speak of God in a certain way, and left us with no resources to condemn others.

We might try to save the objection by pointing out that even if the argument is internal it opens a possible charge of hypocrisy. This, too, is a serious enough charge that it should be used with caution. But even this revised objection will not stick. For we can not say, as an outer criticism, that those using religious language are commiting idolatry even on their own terms. For this would involve accepting those terms as sensible, if false. But such an acceptance would be a misuse of religious language of precisely the kind I have been arguing against. Even this attempt at violence undercuts itself. The only objection to be made from the outside is that we cannot make full sense of the traditional religious language without condemning ourselves. This is hardly a vicious allegation.

There is a final objection, which I suspect is likely to be confined to a Christian approach to theism. The objection is that, just as God somehow, mysteriously, became a man (who could, no doubt, be modelled in bronze), so too He is able to lift our language to the level of picturing Him, thus humbling Himself to the point of being captured in human speech. On this account, when theists talk about God, they are saved from the dangers I have outlined above by His own divine action. It is, I think, thoughts of this kind which have made Christians less coy about representing God than Jews and Muslims.

This objection relies on perpetual miracles to correct the potential idolatry of theists all over the world. These miracles are of a rather odd character; they cannot be simple corrections which smooth over inaccuracies in the meaning of speech which is approximately right. The very idea of approximation is tied to our ways of picturing things with words, and so any approximation to what we say would still be blasphemy if attributed to God. Instead, God must be making a radical break in meaning at each point, and causing theists' statments to mean something wholely other than their usual meaning and inexpressible in language.

There is a certain arbitrariness here. Why does God fix up images of Himself made in language, but not graven in metal? Or why not mysteriously cause discussion of the weather to secretly mean wonderful things about Him, whilst reducing the meanings of potentially blasphemous statements to pleasantries about the weather? Of course, part of the problem here is that the language of meaning is overstretched, and that to follow the pictures it presents us with can be problematic in the same ways as doing the same with religious language. This idolatry of meaning is a displacement of the original idolatry and does not resolve it.

Nevertheless, let us suppose for the sake of argument that there is some sense to this superstitious hope that God will sanctify certain kinds of speech - He is supposed to move in mysterious ways, after all. It would follow that the usual conventions we follow based on our normal understanding of meaning would not apply in such cases. For example, we normally try not to affirm both a sentence and its negation together. But there is no reason for this convention if the meaning of the sentence is not tied to the form of words used. In particular, it is inappropriate for theists to deny the claims of others (such as `God has no Son') on the grounds that they contradict other claims which they affirm (such as `God has a Son').

In a similar way, we usually count utterances as knowledge when they are connected to their content through an appropriate causal chain including the mind of the utterer; it is not at all clear that religious utterances could count as knowledge under the `perpetual miracles' account. In short, even if there is no way to rule out this objection, its consequences for the treatment of religious language fall far short of what would be needed to support the usual practice.

It is this standard practice, which unthinkingly supposes that the implicit linguistic pictures evolved to capture the material word can be directly transplanted onto descriptions of God, which I have been objecting to. I suggest that instead it would be proper to limit our talk about God to the point where we find ourselves unable to express the superstitions which are such a common accompaniment to engagement with Him.

Conceptual concretions

Rocks exist, and so do numbers. But there's something rather more concrete about the existence of rocks. At a basic level, we might explain this by saying that we can reach out and touch rocks, or bang them together; we can interact with them in a physical way. We can't do that with numbers. But there's something a little more subtle going on here; after all, I reckon that rocks in Melbourne exist concretely, even though I've never bothered to go there and juggle with them. Maybe I could do that. But the universe is full of rocks, and there's a limit to how many light years I can run before I get out of breath. My inability to visit them doesn't diminish the concreteness of their existence.

Well, perhaps what's going on is that in principle if I was in the vicinity I could heft those rocks. This comes closer to the truth; it shows that our understanding of concrete existence depends somehow on our understanding of how, in principle, the universe might turn out to be. That is, it depends on the structure of our understanding of how the universe is patterned: Our rudimentary physics, if you will. To help us navigate the day-to-day world, we all have built in models of how the stuff we encounter might be expected to behave. Of course, our modelling kit is rather more sophisticated: It deals with the raw feeds from the nerves leading to our brains and it's only after some serious processing that this raw data is made to fit models involving stuff behaving in various ways; what we are consciously aware of is always already neatly chunked like this. The models we use fit nicely with the language we use; some bits (the stuff) correspond to nouns and other bits (the behaviour) to verbs.

It is a little clearer what is going on if we look at the models we are more aware of; the ones we consciously make for ourselves. Nowadays, especially in the sciences, these are often expressed in terms of mathematics. Usually, there is some mathematical structure, in which we can perform computations, and which corresponds closely with the world, so that we can speak of those computations as being somehow about the world. More precisely, the mathematics is set up in such a way that the statements and equations it produces correspond in a sensible way with statements we might make about the world, and the rules for rearranging those statements and equations do a pretty good job of preserving truth. Under this correspondence, some bits of the mathematics correspond to nouns, some to verbs, and so on. It is the bits which correspond to nouns which are taken to `concretely exist' with respect to a particular model. The fact that the model works then underwrites their existence, in the sense I outlined here.

Of course, things are not quite so simple. First of all, there are lots of things that we think of as concretely existing, but which are a bit fuzzy round the edges. Clouds, for example. We can clearly see that they exist, but the question of just where a cloud ends and the rest of the sky begins is hard to answer precisely. This isn't a problem for our modelling of clouds, however, since we know that clouds are made up of tiny droplets of water, which certainly exist concretely and whose behaviour we can model pretty accurately. So the concrete existence of fuzzy things, like clouds, is understood in terms of the concrete existence of less fuzzy things, like water droplets.

However, the lack of fuzziness of water droplets is just a matter of scale. If you had the ability to shrink yourself down to a microscopic scale, and to look closely at the surface of a water droplet, you would see that the surface is also quite fuzzy, with water molecules near the surface constantly jiggling around and some of them flying off into the air, whilst others from the air rejoin the droplet. So we don't escape fuzziness by looking at the water droplets; maybe if we really want to understand the concrete existece of water droplets (and so of clouds) we need to understand the behaviour of the real concretely existing constituents; the water molecules.

This is the situation with most things we think of as concretely existing, even rocks. Our theory of them involves them being somehow constituted of smaller concretely existing things. From the behaviour of the smaller things, we can derive the behaviour of the larger things; so we can explain the concrete existence (to a good approximation) of the larger in terms of the smaller. The smaller things may be explained in terms of even tinier constituents, and so on down through several levels. We proceed in this way from biology to chemistry to physics.

What lies at the bottom of this downward chain? Maybe, at some level, there are tiny basic constituent particles of the universe whose concrete existence is not just approximate but perfect; they precisely obey mathematical laws which fit well with our grammatical distinction between nouns and verbs, assigning these particles the roles designated by the nouns. This would be the ideal kind of backing our ideas of concrete existence could have. In fact, it is hard to imagine how the universe could be any other way. Perhaps our imaginations could stretch to some simple variations; an infinitely descending or even periodic series. But it seems completely clear that the concrete reality at any level, if it is only approximate, must be backed up by a more detailed explanation involving the interactions of smaller concretely existing things.

Imagine, however, the following alternative scenario: we wish to find a sensible theory of microwidgets, which are taken as concretely existing items at some point in this chain of explanation - they can't quite be at the bottom, because careful experimentation has shown that they are a little fuzzy. We find, as usual, that the best way to explain the fuzziness in the behaviour of microwidgets is by means of a mathematical theory. Also as usual, by taking some small simplifying approximations in this mathematical theory, we can reduce the theory to a theory which mentions objects called microwidgets, behaving as microwidgets should (but without the fuzziness); so we can use this theory to understand why it is sensible, for the most part, to take microwidgets as concretely existing. The difference is that the new, `more accurate' theory does not fit the grammatical conventions of our natural language; it cannot be translated into statements about even tinier nanowidgets and their quirkily nanowidgerific behaviour. No part of the mathematics corresponds to nouns, or to verbs. It just doesn't fit our way of thinking.

My reference to grammatical conventions in the last paragraph isn't to things like `In sentences of such-a-kind the noun should come before the verb' but rather to conventions like `There are some words which are called nouns. They refer to things.' These conventions apply, so far as we know, to all kinds of natural human language, and grammar is the word used for these conventions by the linguists that study them. So, to repeat, in the scenario of the last paragraph it is these deep universal conventions which are irreconcilable with the mathematical theory in question.

Is this even possible? It is certainly hard to conceptualise how it could ever work out that way, and it doesn't seem to have been seriously considered as a possibility until it actually happened. But it has happened. The theory which has wonderful predictive power but does not share the grammar of our thought has been discovered, and accepted as the best current model of small scale phenomena (though, of course, the word `phenomena' is no longer really appropriate). It is quantum mechanics.

There have been many attempts to say just what the concretely existing entities postulated by quantum mechanics are (it being assumed that there must be such entities). Unfortunately, all of them either fall foul of the mathematics or contort the idea of existence so seriously that concretely existing things no longer satisfy the grammar of nouns. However, this is not the only, or even the main, reason for concluding that the grammar of quantum mechanics and normal grammar are incompatible. It is simply a clue that might lead us to suspect that that is what is going on. It is possible to formalise what it might mean for a mathematical theory to fit our natural language, and to demonstrate that quantum mechanics does not satisfy the necessary formal criteria. See, for example, this paper (though I'm not sure the authors of that paper would agree with all that I've said here; it is the mathematical, rather than the philosophical, content of the paper which is relevant).

The striking conclusion of all this is that the deep grammar of our languages, the grammar on which concepts like concrete existence rely for their very meaningfulness, is contingent. It is appropriate for talking about things which are about the same size as us, and which move at a sedate speed. We should expect this, since our language evolved to help us cope with sedately moving things of a similar size to us. We have no reason to think it must fit what happens on smaller scales (though it does fit down to the atomic scale, where it begins to jar). Our reason for assuming that it had to be that way was that the grammar is so ingrained our ways of thinking that we cannot conceptualise any way the world could be that wouldn't fit.

This conclusion does not depend on the fact that quantum mechanics is odd in the ways I have outlined, though quantum mechanics provided a helpful pointer to it. Even if the mathematics of quantum mechanics is revised or, by some miracle, found to be compatible under a sufficiently cunning contortion with natural language, this will not resolve the issue. For there doesn't seem to be any good reason to reject the possibility that it could have turned out in the way I have presented above. Our only reason for supposing that the world must be neatly divisible into concretely existing entities even on tiny scales appears to be that we are blinkered by the grammatical form of our own thought.