Believing in Santa Claus and and Believing in God – Just a Thought

   Some people compare believing in God to believing in Santa Claus.  I think there is no strong analogy there.

     Santa Claus has different meanings, but there relevant one here can be put like this: many children are encouraged literal belief in the existence of Santa – by having children write letters to Santa, by leaving milk and cookies out before children go to bed on Christmas Eve, and perhaps explaining away skeptical questioning (e.g. How does Santa make it to every child in the world on one night?). In other words, what is not at issue is treating Santa playfully as a pretend character, a make-believe figure. Analogously, God is conceptualized as an imaginary character (e.g. from stories in the Old Testament) that people have been encouraged to believe in literally. He (as with Santa) is portrayed like a human agent, only all-powerful and all-good; both are like an existing entity, although they neither come to be or pass away, but exist outside of space and time (which of course doesn’t make sense). Both to differing degrees are said to have performed miracles, to be able to grant petitions, to intervene in history, and more besides, although as spiritual beings they do not exist as part of the furniture of the universe (again, which doesn’t make sense). Whereas the most positive psychological purpose of encouraging children to believe in Santa is the joy and excitement the belief if thought to bring, the best purpose of taking God literally is the comforts of religion: for instance, that death is not the end, that ultimately all will be judged according to laws of justice and mercy by an absolutely wise, good, and merciful judge. There are, of course, more problematic motivations for belief both in Santa as well as in God as well.

            Moreover, both the Santa and God beliefs are thought to have explanatory power: how did those presents get there if, as the parents claim, they did not put them there? Who drank the milk and ate the cookies if the parents didn’t? How did the universe come to be? Where does our moral sense – our conscience – come from? Both children and the religious are encouraged to believe in a mythical, mysterious explanation for what has a presumably clear, everyday or scientific explanation. They are encouraged to think of the existence of Sana Claus and God as questions of fact, logically no different from the existence of tables, chair, and stars.    

            Both Santa Claus and God are characters in a set of mythical narratives, logically no different from traditional mythical creatures such as unicorns or the Greek gods. Yet, whereas philosophers and theologies have seriously debated the question of God’s existence, no serious empirical question about the existence of Santa Claus troubles the minds of any adult, unless one thinks of imaginary creatures as having a kind of existence. (On the different meanings of existence I will say something below.) Parents simply encourage children to believe that the fictional character does exist in the world and not only in the imagination for the sake of making their children happy. The point of the analogy of God to Santa Claus is to underscore the irrationality of religious belief as well as the powerful psychic needs that motivate such irrationality.

            As children mature, some of them begin to question this literalizing of the fictional, the mythical. They ask familiar questions like how does Santa find time to visit every child in one night, why does Santa fail to visit so many poor children, how can it be that the presents are the same as those in the toy store, and so on. Santa’s existence is again thus treated, logically, as a straightforward question of fact, no different from the existence of water on Europa. But unlike the question about water on Europa, we know that not only does Santa not exist; he cannot exist. There is no serious question of his existence. It makes no sense to think of Santa Claus existing as we think of things existing. Children just do not know this yet. When they find out the truth, Santa ceases to play a role except perhaps in memory and nostalgia – children no longer write wish lists to Santa, for example, or if they do it has a different meaning – to let parents know what they want, or to perpetuate a tradition hard to give up for sentimental reasons. This might be taken as a paradigm account of the development of mankind from the infancy of belief to the maturity of secular attitudes.

 

I want to call this analogy into question.

 

            Atheism has two main forms: one that accepts the question of God’s existence as a factual question, claiming then there is no evidence or explanatory necessity for God. The second finds the attribution of existence to God to be conceptually, logically confused. The first atheism accepts the normal meaning of existence as applied to things, and rejects God’s existence owing to the absence of proof or evidence – treating the question, logically, as a question of fact:  like this example – it is not impossible that dinosaurs have survived on some remote island, but in fact they no longer exist; as though it would make sense to look for God with a telescope. Of course, in the monotheistic religions God as never been conceived as a physical object – thus to think of God as an object which science could discover and investigate would have seemed as absurd to the medieval theologian as it does to us moderns. That we cannot speak except using the language of physical objects – of this the medieval theologian was also perfectly aware. The language we must use to speak of God must necessarily be “analogical” (metaphorical, figurative). This leads to further problems of making sense of religious language. For now, it is enough to be clear that no serious theology has ever confused God with a physical object. And those who have felt to need to speak of God as a spiritual entity (that nevertheless acts in the world) were by and large aware that this involved a figurative use of language.

            However, for the deeper second atheism, the very idea of God’s existence – like Santa Claus’ – has no meaning. To predicate existence to a being that ex hypothesi did not come into being nor will never pass away, that is not in time or space, and so on, is not a factual mistake but a conceptual, logical one – rather like positing circularity to a square. And again, to attribute agency to an actor, and then attribute absolute goodness, infallibility, omnipotence, to the actor, making him outside of space and time in addition, makes nonsense out of the concept of agency. When speaking of God, so the claim of the second atheism, speakers use the concepts of existence, reality, and agency without respecting the logical preconditions that make such talk meaningful. Believers know that they will not find God with a telescope or come across him while taking a Sunday walk. However, they fail to realize that this robs the use of concepts of existence and reality of any possible sense. The notion of a spiritual entity – an entity that does not exist in space and time, that does not come to be or pass away – is not to speak of an entity at all. Yet only a something can act in history.

           

            Theological and philosophical defenses often embrace the same assumptions on which both atheisms rest, showing the cultural hold of thinking of reality in terms of physical objects. While no philosophical defense of God’s intelligibility features holding God’s reality to the standard of a physical object, an object in principle investigable by science, many “proofs” of God’s existence do rely on facts or general statements about large sets of facts such as the universe having a beginning, or events having cause. But most attempts to overcome second view, involving the paradoxical meanings of reality and existence when applied to God, rely on some version of Aquinas’ extension of the concept of analogy. God’s existence or agency is like human existence or agency on the one hand, since God is partly revealed through the Creation; what these words mean when applied to God, however, is beyond human comprehension. God’s reality is on a higher plane of existence, and no creature on a lower plane can know anything positive about realities on a higher plane. Believers are the privileged of a mysterious, divine revelation: no independent path to God’s reality is possible. DEAD END

 

The Historical Context

            It goes without saying that these by no means original reflections do not take place in a vacuum. In pre-Galilean centuries, cultural elites showed very little intellectual interest a science that viewed the material world solely through the lens of understanding its causal workings (this tightly connected with a will to control natural services for the sake of the purposes of particular human groups – some of these mostly interested in power and wealth). Theologians and mystics were thus free to conceive (in various ways) nature as a manifestation of God’s majesty: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote. And (by way of reminder) the medieval church was perhaps the most important institution for setting the frameworks in which men understood and legitimated their various actions and practices. Given those various interests which motivate modern scientific investigations played little role in this cultural matrix, cosmology was not surprisingly conceived in ways that reinforced the narratives in which God’s majesty and benevolence (or the dire consequences of revolt) were communicated. Nature was Creation, and the Creation was imbued with divine (moral) purpose.

            With the increasing role that modern science came to play in society, the lens investigating causal workings of nature ceased be a lens and became a mirror of how nature was thought to truly be, apart from any human conceptualizations or projections; and in this mirror God did not appear. One use of God in pre-scientific culture was to function as a quasi-mythological explanation for various natural phenomena; this weaving of God into all aspects of life was a part of complex psychologically and sociological process that reflected the church’s cultural and political power. In the new mechanical worldview, everything natural – and thus real – could be explained scientifically, and this too was part of cultural and political changes that weakened the influence of the church.

  

Alternative Direction: Religious Language and Attitudes Toward the World           

       Without going further into these directions, I would like to suggest an alternative direction, one traceable to Wittgenstein and to philosophers influenced by his thought: Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, Raimond Gaita, and D. Z. Phillips. 

            To begin with, the role God has played in people’s lives seems radically different from any role that Santa (or unicorns, or other mythical creatures) could ever play. Think of the role God played for Bonhoeffer in that Nazi prison awaiting grisly execution and let that stand for the complex and varied ways God has entered the lives of many people of faith (and many cultures). The main weakness of the analogy with Santa Claus is hereby revealed. God can be connected to the meaning of people’s lives in ways that Santa cannot, however important the Santa belief may be for children. The way a concept enters people’s lives determines the sense it can have. Compare the child’s wish list letter to Santa with Bonhoeffer’s prayer from prison.

 

O Lord my God, thank you for bringing this day to a close; thank you for giving me rest in body and soul. Your hand has been over me and has guarded and preserved me.

 

Clearly, Bonhoeffer was not confused about his situation. He knew in physical terms he was at the mercy of the Nazis holding him captive; he knew that in a different sense their decisions resulted in a day in which some respite was possible; he knew things might change any minute. The meaning of his prayer is not to be sought in any confusion about that.

 

Forgive my lack of faith and any wrong that I have done today, and help me to forgive all who have wronged me. Let me sleep under your protection, and keep me from all the temptations of darkness. Into your hands I commend my loved ones and all who dwell in this house…. (9)

 

Now even those would tend to see God as a mythical being on analogy to Santa would not be inclined to accuse Bonhoeffer of  irrationality or using logically empty language in his prayer, as if he were writing asking something of the present King of Prussia – that is, of someone who does not exist.

            Clearly, Bonhoeffer’s prayer only has point against the background of faith in God. And his faith in God is a different act from treating the question of God’s existence as a speculative question and constructing more or less implausible proofs of his existence. Bonhoeffer cannot separate God’s existence from prayer and worship, from what this means in the life of this believer. It comes out of the prayer that Bonhoeffer does not think of God as a super magician who will come and break him out of prison. He asks only for courage and insight; he expresses only the hope that his family will be safe – hope again without the expectation of magical intervention. I suppose he could make a theological argument to that effect, but then he would be doing something different. The speculation depends on the practice of praying, even though theological speculation may influence the practice of praying. But clearly the primary act is the prayer. This is where God talk has sense, and theology at its best seeks to clarify this sense – not provide a rational foundation for it.

            None of this clarifying work so far proves the analogy with Santa Claus weak. The differing roles of God and Santa play in many people’s lives may only reveal the deeper psychic needs involved. Perhaps we look beyond the seeming irrationality of Bonhoeffer’s faith to the enormous courage he showed and the terrible situation he was in and the psychic needs that made for. We may make allowances for the force of his upbringing as an explanation for the role religion played in his life; we may even be tempted to justify the irrationality of his faith because of the consequences it had for him – giving him a foundation for courage and hope in dark times. But none of this would change the fact of the irrationality. Those who believe deep down that Bonhoeffer was irrational or that the language of the prayer is logically empty, analyzable as a cry for help from a man in desperate circumstances, fail to see a different sense of God’s existence that is involved in religious faith such as his, a sense not directly tied to the conceptual problems of God’s logical status as a spiritual entity.

            Of course, outside of the performance of religious acts or the experiences of wonder, existential fear, and so on, if we asked believers to give an account of their faith, they themselves are often hard-pressed to respond lucidly. It is one thing to live one’s faith; another to study theology. Often believers switch language games, turning God from an object of worship, wonder, or prayer (a sublime object beyond positive representation) into an object of speculation in their positive statements of belief. They may find it difficult to communicate to or defend these beliefs against a non-believer who points out that they conflict with the scientific picture of the world. Of course understood in a certain way – as factual statement corresponding to a state of affairs in the real universe – many theological dogmas (e.g. virgin birth, resurrection) do at many points (not all) seem to conflict with the scientific worldview. And this is how religious literalists do want to understand them. At the extreme end, Creationists logically do see God on analogy with Santa, with the difference that the God story is taken to be true (a myth become history) whereas the Santa story is false. 

     But the point here, following D. Z. Phillips,  is that treating such dogmatic statements of belief as matters of speculation needing rational justification obscures the actual point such beliefs may play (or may have once played) in people’s lives, which does imply some metaphysical commitments: for example ‘there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy – or science, or concepts. Or that the sublime reveals something that goes beyond our human concepts like ‘exist.’ This won’t make a secularist happy. They would discount any evidence for this metaphysical commitment as ‘purely subjective.’ But then the insistence of non-experiential evidence also implies metaphysical commitments of another kind: there is no more and no less in heaven and earth than can be conceptualized by our philosophy and science.