Steve Wiggans at Religion Dispatches has a good review of Penn Jillettes new(ish) book God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist And Other Magical Tales. I should note before beginning that I have always been a big Penn & Teller fan. I love their deconstruction of the practice of performance magic. Particularly the way that they will describe a trick to you, tell you how its done, explain exactly how they are about to deceive you with it, and then still manage to amaze you.
That said, what makes someone like Penn a great magician doesn't necessarily lend itself to writing a good book about something (say, religion) about which he does not have an equivalent level of expertise. I have not read the book, although in light of Wiggans review I may pick it up in any event, since it does sound hilarious. But while it would indeed be interesting to read a deconstruction of religion that accomplishes something akin to what Penn does in his magic act, the approach he takes in his book is more that of an interested amateur, who knows a (very) little about his subject, and pretends to be an authoritative voice.
As Wiggans points out, one of Penn's rhetorical strategies in the book is to define atheism in a very expansive way:
As the subtitle indicates, Jillette believes atheism is more prevalent than many Americans would care to admit. This may be due to the definition of atheism he provides in the book’s preface: “If god (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your child—would you do it? If your answer is no, in my booklet you’re an atheist.” He later qualifies this a bit, asserting that anyone who can’t answer a solid “Yes” to “Does god exist?” is an atheist. Religious specialists, however, tend to be sticklers for precise definitions. Those who don’t know about the existence of god are agnostics. Toward the end Jillette has a few choice words about those who refuse to give a clear answer. Either you believe, or you don’t. Agnosticism is for cowards.
And here, of course, is the heart of the problem when amateurs act like authorities. As Wiggins points out, it's not like there aren't categories to describe degrees of belief, or that there isn't a very real difference between the stance of the agnostic and that of the atheist.
But the core issue is Penn's suggestion that any form of religious doubt, any questioning of the tenets of one's religion, any consideration of the possibility that one may be wrong makes one an atheist. Again, rhetorically, it's a shrewd move, but it makes absolutely no sense to anyone with any sense of the actual subject matter of theology. Penn would have us group in the category of atheists not only folks like himself, his fellow neo-atheists like Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, and even Bertrand Russell and Lucretius, all of whom can be easily understood to be one sort or another of atheist, because they make an overt assertion of the idea that God, in whatever relevant form, doesn't exist.
But Penn would also have us include Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Kierkegaard, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine. Actually, insofar as his definition of atheism includes anyone who has entertained the slightest shadow of a doubt about the existence of God, it includes virtually the whole of humanity across time and space.
And this of course is the point. In casting such a wide net, Penn is attempting to show that atheism is the default position, and religion is the outlier, applicable as a term really only to those on the radical fringe of society. For Penn, if you think God probably exists you're an atheist. If you believe God must exist, you're a fanatic.
This is of course the same kind of strategy commonly used by the neo-atheists. But it doesn't bear genuine scrutiny. Faith is not, despite what they may believe, the absolute certainty in the existence of God. Rather it is a trust in the existence of God, and as importantly in the goodness and love of God, even in light of the possibility that God may not exist.
But this definition of faith allows for far too much leeway for the Penn's and the Hitchens's of the world. Only those willing to strap a bomb on themselves and commit mass murder are really religious by their lights. But this is attempting to say far too much, and allow far too little by way of genuine perplexity in the life of faith.
Theologians from Aquinas to Calvin to Tillich have understood that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but rather a constitutive element of faith. The capacity to consider the possibility that one may be wrong, that other points of view have validity, and that knowledge comes through a fearless inquiry into the nature and structure of those things that we believe are part and parcel of both what makes us human, and what makes us religious. Entertaining as I'm sure Penn's book is, I suspect that it won't be of much use to anyone who is looking for a sincere engagement with the question of God's existence or non-existence.
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