Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Stephen Fry and Russell Brand on Theodicy

Stephen Fry gave an interview earlier this week where he was asked to say something to God. Fry is an atheist, which is probably the reason he got this question. Gay Byrne - the interviewer - looked shocked at Fry's answer. (Honestly, what did Byrne think he was going to get if not something provocative?) Fry's answer, as he prefaced, was something of a theodicy. In short, he places God on trial for the pain and suffering of humanity, especially those elements of nature that cause suffering (e.g. childhood blindness, bone cancer) that cannot be attributed to human action or inaction.

Today comedian Russell Brand answered Fry in this way. To his credit, Brand acknowledges what a cultural gift Fry is, both in his career and his activism. The entire reply has a tone of respectful disagreement--something that Brand does not always do well.

As someone who believes in God more often than I don't, I should probably applaud Russell Brand for making apologetics work in skinny jeans. This is something that C. S. Lewis could never pull off (although Lewis's bellybutton piercing should not be overlooked). But I find myself applauding Stephen Fry in this debate.

Both Fry and Brand begin from a posture of respect. This is no small gesture and I wish that more public figures could figure this out. Both have obviously given the question of theodicy some thought. They're not scholars. But they're not pretending to be. We could quibble with a few details. They both get the "woman caught in adultery" wrong. Overlooking these details, I much appreciate that they demonstrate an intention to bring substance to the conversation. Both demonstrate passion. Indeed they wouldn't be trending on social media without a bit of passion. But what Brand lacks that Fry demonstrates is a sense of empathy. Without empathy, this entire enterprise rings hollow. I don't mean to say that Brand is insincere. But his arguments with Fry don't quite speak to the *heart* of the problem.

Fry has his finger on a problem that haunts any witness of senseless agony. I'm talking about the sort of suffering that can't be measured by reason: the existential experience of chaos, that moment when the pain of another becomes ineffable. It's when theodicy sinks from the head to the gut that it really becomes a problem. Not the fact of it; the identity-altering experience of it. This is the element that doesn't translate to the lecture-hall-debate setting.

Brand's experience of the beauty, precision, and pulse of nature is essentially a religious experience. I'm in. I'm all in. But Fry's experience is equally compelling. It is an experience of nature that is as visceral as any religious experience. When one experiences theodicy at this level, I think that the appropriate reaction is agonizing disbelief. In fact I'm not sure that I can imagine a different response that demonstrates sanity quite as well. If a person can survive such darkness and muster empathy on the other side, I will forgive a bit of anger toward those who prop up a deity devoid of complexity.

Empathy is the key. In a debate setting, it is the ability to hear the basic, gut-level human experience in the testimony of the other side. It is to acknowledge that the experience of the perceived other is valid and illuminating. This is what Russell Brand is missing. This and a hairbrush.

-anthony



7 comments:

  1. The thing that most strikes me about atheists like Fry (and I think there are many) is their profound faith. To paraphrase Joseph Heller in "Catch-22," the God they don't believe in is awe-inspiring! Fry's God requires no apologetics. Fry's God is perfect justice, infinite wisdom and limitless love. I can't imagine what it would take to believe in such a God--even if what followed was my belief that the God I believe in does not exist, I think that my faith would be much greater than it is today if I could believe like Fry.

    The God I believe in is much more like Brand's God. It's not the God I wish I could believe in.

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    1. Larry, you say this so well that I feel uncertain about my alternative reading. But here it is: Fry's "God" is not one of his own making. He is pushing back against the notion of God he's learned from people of faith. Put another way, Fry hasn't constructed what God must be like if God were to exist. Quite the opposite. He is deconstructing the God that could never exist.

      -anthony

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    2. Anthony, that's a great reply. Agreed: there's a certain rhetorical flourish to Fry's argument. But to my mind, he's setting up an unavoidable opposition within which to discuss God: between Genesis 1:31 and childhood bone cancer.

      Maybe what I'm saying is, there are a lot of ways to have faith. I think the faith that says, "Nothing is more important than a child's bone cancer," is at least as profound as the one that says, "God has a purpose and a reason for everything." In the Pesikta D'Rav Kahana, a 5th- to 7th-century midrash, God reportedly responded to Jeremiah's "[They] have forsaken me and have not kept my Torah," with the lament, "If only they had forsaken me and kept my Torah." I don’t mean to set up a faith v. works distinction here. I’m trying to suggest, before any works are done, that faith in the values, principles and teachings OF God is faith IN God.

      I am thinking about your distinction between a God that could exist if a God were to exist, and a God that could never exist. On some level, I tend toward's Brand's God because this God falls on the possible side of this distinction. But what does it say about my faith that I believe in a believable God? Is this something like having faith in gravity?

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    3. Larry,

      Your definition of faith leans toward the broad and vague, as I'm sure you know. I guess that I'm okay with the idea that faith is not necessarily a religious orientation. But I wonder if our atheist friends will hear this as an insult.

      -anthony

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    4. Anthony, I will push back for a moment, but only for a moment. Who has the bigger faith? The person who says that God might sanction genocide, or the one who says that such a thing can never be?

      This is not a rhetorical question. Each answer is right, from a particular perspective. Faith is multi-dimensional. Personally, I maintain a belief in God by giving up many of the traditional ideas of a "personal God." To keep faith, I have lost faith. Someone else might hold onto the arguably higher ideal of a personal God by giving up the belief that such a God exists. That someone else has kept faith by losing faith. From a 50,000 foot view, I'm not sure there's a difference.

      OK. I understand what you're saying about broad and vague, but only because I find so much of what I read about faith as narrow and particular. In dialogue with Christians, I sometimes find that the first question asked me is, do I believe in God? When I respond "yes," I sometimes find that I have effectively quashed all interesting conversation about faith and God. I feel like saying, "Hey! Maybe there's a difference worth exploring between your faith and mine."

      You're right about insult. I've been known to say to atheists, that maybe instead of not believing in God, God is a name that can be put to what they believe in. I find that very few of the atheists I speak to are strict materialists. Many would describe themselves as "spiritual," and some believe in "something bigger than we are" or something lying beyond or embodied in the beauty of a sunset. I sense that for at least some atheists, God and faith have become narrowed to the point where these atheists have been effectively excluded. So, to put the name "God" and the noun-verb "faith" on their most treasured beliefs can feel like a trap.

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  2. I don't agree. Public debates shouldn't include appeal to anecdotal pain and suffering and the argument from suffering is a bad argument. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be empathetic with people but entertaining these kinds of rhetorical techniques and bad arguments is making people dumb and stopping them from engaging.

    When people argue like this, give them a hug but then tear their argument (or non-argument) to shreds. It's actually doing them a favour.

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    1. Billy, you're quite right: we don't agree.

      -anthony

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