Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer
Gaming Out
Working With It - Future Games
♒️
Working With It
The following passage from Enns’ The Sin of Certainty (2019) suggests the closeness, yet also the gap, between Enns’ theistic perspective and an agnostic perspective:
Watching certainty slide into uncertainty is frightening. Our beliefs provide a familiar structure to our messy lives. They give answers to our big questions of existence: Does God exist? Is there a right religion? Why are we here? How do I handle suffering and tragedy? What happens to us when we die? What am I here for? Answering these questions provides our lives with meaning and coherence by reining in the chaos.
When familiar answers to those questions are suddenly carried away, like stray balloons at a county fair, we understandably want to chase after them to get them back. When once settled questions suddenly become unsettled, our life narratives are upset—and no one likes that.
Reflecting on that tension and working through it is what this book is about.
The subtitle of Enns’ book is Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs. Agnostics of course don’t trust themselves to know whether or not there is a God. Nor do they find questioning religion interpretations unsettling, given that they don’t have certainty to begin with. They haven't settled on any one particular point of view. If they have unsettling questions, they tend to explore them and amp up the tension, rather lower the tension so that they can work through them.
They don’t see the need to work through the tensions at all, since they are the very substance of the adventure of life. Rather, they work with them, in the manner of Pyrrho, Zhuangzi, or Hegel, balancing them, playing them off against each other, or leading them toward a further synthesis. To the agnostic, tension — in the form of ambiguity, unsolvable questions, contradictions, paradoxes, etc. — is the very thing that opens up possible avenues to explore. Yet the exploration of these avenues in no way means that there can't be an end or destination. If agnostics find something so beautiful, solid, or certain that it makes sense of their lives, they're under no compunction to keep travelling.
Enns’ title The Sin of Certainty is provocative, yet agnostics might argue that in avoiding the sin of certainty trust in God is no match for doubt. Trust tends to lead to certainty and doubt tends to lead to uncertainty. Of course, his provocative title may be less a skeptical technique than a playful overturning of expectations. He isn't trying to get rid of certainty as much as he's trying to change fixed or certain ways that traditional believers read the Bible. Conclusions about the Bible may not be solid or certain, but a free exploration of the Bible leads to a more solid or certain belief in God. In this sense Enns is arguing for freedom of interpretation, much as Luther did five hundred years ago, against a far more monolithic institute of interpretation, the Catholic Church. Yet, like Luther, he isn’t arguing that we question the primacy of the Bible.
♒️
Nor is it Enns' job to right thousands of years during which Jews and Christians saw their erstwhile Mesopotamian neighbours in a condescending light. And yet I wish it were his job; I wish it fell under the purview of Christians to be more fair to the other religious civilizations they often disparage. Babylon is a particularly severe case, given that Christians took it up as a hallmark of depravity when in fact it was one of the most advanced civilizations in the Ancient World. The negative Jewish view of Babylon understandably comes from the fact that they were held captive there, yet it’s counter-productive to continue to paint Babylonian Civilization in negative terms or to ignore the contributions it made to both global and Judaeo-Christian thinking.
♒️
Enns’ study might frustrate those who want to go beyond the Bible, or those who want to use philology and Assyriology to undermine biblical authority. Yet agnostics needn’t have such a negative view of Enns’ scope, nor such an enthusiastic view of the anti-traditional deconstruction project. Agnostics can leave that to the New Atheists. Instead, they can appreciate the diverse aspects of the Bible that Enns explores, and they can enjoy his sharp sense of humour. They can also look into other authors, like Jean Botteró, who delve into the Ancient Mesopotamian context. In this way agnostics can follow a positive sum strategy, travelling side by side with those of a theistic bent, using critical re-evaluation toward a common goal of enrichment. Yet this doesn’t mean that they need to shy away from engaging in debate, or in making counter-arguments against dogma and exclusivity – in particular against the notions that 1. monotheism is superior to polytheism, 2. the Jews are the Chosen People of God, and 3. the Christian or Muslim inheritors of the Jewish tradition have a monopoly over any hypothetical ultimate religious truth.
Although I’m critical of the general zero-sum policy of most traditional Christians, I still see Enns’ project as a way of opening up Christianity, so that people will feel they can access it without constantly being judged because they dare to doubt. In this sense, he is also working in parallel with agnosticism.
The agnostic is open to religion, and any religious philosopher who opens up the horizons is to be admired. Yet if the opening up only goes so far, and starts to close down debate by downgrading other ways of thinking, agnostics are bound to react. For to agnostics, religions aren’t the property of those who believe. They are ways of thinking that anyone can access, think about, debate, and compare. Moreover, different religions are different ways to experience the ineffable, the above and beyond which is by definition not subject to human reason or understanding. The more specific and dogmatic religions are, the more they’re like desperate hopes, like stabs in the existential dark, like attempts to grasp and manage what we don’t know for sure and what we certainly can’t manage. To agnostics, it seems more reasonable to try to experience religion, yet also to doubt, to qualify, to compare, and to render vague what’s impossible to make concrete.
♒️
Future Games
Privileging, idealizing, deifying one system of hope & emotion at the expense of another system makes religion a zero-sum game. In the Middle East this turns nation against nation, group against group. In the West this just makes people less eager to play.
