The Unmaking of God, by Dr. William F. Nietmann, University Press of America, Inc. © 1994 and The NIV Bible, © 1978, The New York International Bible Society (My Image © 2020 F. P. Dorchak)
Dr. Nietmann’s stated goal in the Preface was to “…reformulate religious authenticity…[and] show that human existence is essentially religious.”
As I approached the last third of The Unmaking of God, Dr. Nietmann did, by way of Søren Kierkegaard, broach the subject of uncertainty of philosophical thought, in that “The task of evolving meaning reflects what is involved in being human.” Basically, that we’re not perfect and that thought evolves over time and consideration. He also later stated that “Ideas are produced by persons.” I liked to see these two sentiments stated. I also liked this statement: “There is no finality to thought.” And other thinkers, some religious, were also presented, but one thing that kinda bothered me was his notion of “the meaninglessness of human existence.” That was a bit too Nihilistic to me, and I do not subscribe to Humanity being any kind of meaningless. Maybe he was merely presenting trains-of-thought, but it was hard, at times, discerning what was Dr. Nietmann’s thoughts and what was being shown as others’ thoughts.
Dr. Nietmann presented much “evidence” to prove his stated goal (I underlined many passages in the last half of the book), and it was all quite thought provoking, but when he went on to state that “Philosophy often seeks the objective grounds for understanding existence,” well, that caused me to pause. I’m sorry, but all thought is subjective. It all originates from human minds, and given the changes in philosophical and religion thought on the “same topics” over the years changing, how can anything be considered “objective?” Sure, some things may be “more right” than others, but it’s all subjective and therefore subject to interpretation. Granted, he says “seeks,” but religion seeks to give us comfort and answers, seeks answers to the Whys, as well…of course even considers itself to be objective.
All of humanity seeks to do something.
Absolutely everything starts as thought and manifests (seeks to be) physical, depending on the amount of attention given.
So I maintain the same can pretty much be said of religious thought as well, once you disentangle yourself from any Wittgensteinian, Derridian, et cetera constructions/deconstructions/definitions. I am amazed at the thought put into words and signs and meaning, but I think there is an overcomplication that frequently occurs in philosophical thought.
There is a lot more that is presented, but since I’m at odds with much of it, I really don’t want to take the time to detail it all. It’s a continuation of philosophical evidence against religious evidence. To me much of philosophy should be utterly obvious, when it is not, and as I mentioned in my posts on Herr Wittgenstein, I do believe that words are symbolic to the thoughts they represent. As are symbols. As if corporeal existence representative to what’s going on in the incorporeal.
However…I do heartily agree that philosophical thought is far more rigorous (and critical!) than religious thought. Philosophical thought holds no constraints on where it should go and what it should deconstruct, while religious thought is highly constrained to only that material that is within the given-religion’s worldview and canons. There are so many other sources that contradict each and every religion from each and every other religion. And there is this little term of “faith” that pervades them all, when external sources directly contradict religious sources. Yes, this was brought up in the book.
Søren Kierkegaard
In Chapter VI, we get into Kierkegaard, whom I’ve always enjoyed. I like the way he thought…though there are elements in many philosophers I liked (including Plato), but, overall, I think Kierkegaard has perhaps been my favorite in the deconstruction of religious thought. To Kierkegaard, he viewed religion as beginning and ending as a reflection upon one’s existence as a human being. Søren appears to agree with much of Dr. Nietmann’s positions, such as that religion describes our finitude and not the metaphysical. Kierkegaard defines “subjectivity” as human existence (Ha! Further fuel for my fire, see the above paragraphs!). And as such that we all need to “…find a way into subjectivity without becoming objective“…by way of confronting ourselves through “indirect communication.” And that further, which I liked when I first read about it in Dr. Nietmann’s “Philosophy of Religion” class, back in 1983, Kierkegaard says that “For Christianity is a fine belief to die in, the only true comfort, and the moment of death is the appropriate situation for Christianity.” In other words, to profess your belief in God and accept Christianity at death is the way to go.
Life Is Essentially Religious
Dr. Nietmann did lay this out by saying that religious thought should be better defined as addressing one’s existence (or “finitude”), and not be bothered with defining God. That instead, religion should be more concerned with the searchers for God. To “…[be] there to see a person who perpetually exists in his/her own thinking.” How are they living their lives? Dealing with each other? That religion should leave it to philosophical thought to answer all the more esoteric concerns. He goes on to state: “The truth of religious language is to be found in its capacity to frame and unfold human existence, not in whether its propositions are objective enough to be believed.” He says that not doing this, but in continuing to depict objective “truths” about the Universe hides and even obliterates the world of human experience…and it is exactly that human experience that religions should be addressing. Nothing more. But, instead, religion has became “subverted” by “philosophical theorizing.” And his book has tried to build that case.
Agape
Agape is a Greco-Christian term that referred to the highest form of love…the love of God for Humanity and of Humanity for God. Dr. Nietmann feels that agape should not entail concern for the realities of the Divine or an Ultimate Being, but should instead be the “…shaping force in the articulation of one’s being….”
Again, it all comes down to one’s finitude.
Revelation
In his section titled Revelation, he goes where I was dying to see him go: he flat-out stated that “Ideas are produced by persons,” and said that if religious language were to see itself as providing knowledge, revelation would be a “sneaky way” of claiming religious imagery/dogma as facts, and never being held accountable for doing so. Basically just saying something is real without needing to provide any proof whatsoever. Again, this is not religion’s mission. It’s mission is to address Humanity’s subjectivity.
I also really liked how he ended his Unmaking of God dissertation in “The Silence of God” section, but I will not recount them here, because they are powerful to his entire claim, and I don’t want to steal anymore of his thunder without readers reading the book for themselves. I’ve borrowed quite enough of his salient quotes already. I do feel he actually has done a great job of proving his point, yet I question how much actual philosophical consideration were employed in reality over the two-thousand-year creation and management of Christian religion. There is so much I want to get into with this point, also about religious origins, but am not going to for one reason or the other. Maybe in some other post. So, while I do appreciate what Dr. Nietmann presented regarding the philosophical and religious…
Yes, But…
When I studied under Dr. Nietmann at NAU (1979 – 1983), I would constantly engage him in counterpoints. This would then invariably lead into fifty-minute discussions of much back-and-forth…usually between him and me. So…as I read The Unmaking of God, I was instantly struck by a counterpoint that something seemed “off” about his entire argument. As I stated above, Dr. Nietmann wanted to “…reformulate religious authenticity…[and] show that human existence is essentially religious,” and while that is a lofty, most noble (and I maintain, largely academic) goal, I don’t see that ever happening, if not for the most basic reason that religion (and since Dr. Nietmann limited his discuss to Christian versions of it, that’s what I’ll also refer to here) has become utterly not only ingrained into a formidable emotional, politicized, and weaponized institution, but also heavily monied. You think it’s tough to change or reign in tremendously large corporations that rake in huge amounts of remuneration from their ills forced upon the environment and Humanity, well, religions are far larger than all of them put together, and not in a numbers way.
In a notional way.
And notions are hard to kill let alone change. Once you get away from the “Holy Seats” of religions, where the leaders physically reign, you also have to get past the emotional and faith-based anchors of all the followers: people have been unapologetically killed for speaking out against religious orders, and let’s not even talk about all the torture inflicted in the name of religions and their Gods. When you start picking at one’s internal and core beliefs (and I’m not talking religious leaders, here, I’m talking the masses), you cut to the quick, and things turn ugly fast. As Dr. Nietmann also said in his Preface that his wife likes to avoid all things philosophical because “It creates dissention, and she believes in living with peace with others.”
Yes.
Unfortunately, very few people can calmly and intelligibly discourse with those of conflicting faiths and beliefs. But that notwithstanding, people of faith simply discount any provable facts that go against their religious tenets, because of their faith, so it is usually an exercise in futility to even try to, unless you are trying to mine their beliefs and not challenge them. This is from my experience. I simply no longer go there.
But I sensed a deeper, perhaps more insidious counterpoint that took me the length of the book to more positively formulate, because, well, I did have to finish the book to see where he was going with it all. And, yes, he did eventually bring in some external sources, but still not much in the way of the Biblical creators and heavy religious thinkers. The Dead Sea Scrolls, or more of the apostles. Those who actually built Christianity from the sand up. And perhaps that is sparse and dangerous territory, because there are so many theories about exactly how the Bible was physically written, and how Christianity was physically manifested, including all the many religions of Christianity, once you look away from the Bible as a factual source. There are even Biblical scholars who question taking the Bible as literal, so it’s not just one or two of us.
Dr. Nietmann wanted to create a more sterilized version of not only philosophical, but religious thought. Again, noble, but again, not gonna happen. It’s a great academic goal for universities and the like, but it just will not gain any traction until some global “inciting incident” (yes, here I’m talking about an actual, no-shit, you-can’t-avoid-it, “Second Coming”)…or, maybe, once most of the Old Guard die off and such new thought percolates through all institutions and becomes the new quorum. Who knows how long that might take. I could go out on a limb and maybe say if not a hundred or two-hundred years, maybe 1-2,000 years?
But even more so than all of the above, I have this issue with Dr. Nietmann’s well-thought-out and well-presented arguments: all of this…religious thought, philosophical thought, and all their permutations thereof…are all human-derived considerations.
Obvious, you say? Perhaps it’s so obvious it actually does bear pointing out. He did mention it above (“Ideas are produced by persons“), though didn’t take it as far as it really should have been taken.
And in terms of religious and philosophical thought, I also disagree with Dr. Nietmann in the limitations he had placed upon what religious and philosophical thought are supposed to be. In my experience neither of the two can ever be sterilized, because both are human generated. And from what I have discovered and researched since taking an interest in the subject as a teenager, both religion and philosophy came about precisely because of trying to explain our place in the universe. Period. You can tweak and dial and contort everything anyone has ever said about both, mess with word and symbol definitions, but the reality I see and experience is that both factions have been trying to explain Why and Where and Who since humans first began reflective thought. They are two arms of the same curiosity. One is called “religion” and one “philosophy.” One is more rooted in the emotional and the other in logic. One is more rigorous, the other simply is not.
But you see, as I learned long ago and experienced in the workforce, that the same set of numbers can be used to both prove and disprove the same set of “facts”…and so can words.
Absolutely everything can be twisted around to prove a conflicting set of facts. It’s about interpretation and repetition. Some don’t even bother with trying to logically deconstruct anything, but just feel if they SAY it…say it enough…say it loudly…it’s Truth. A fact. Even in the face of outright contradictory “factual,” logical, and empirical evidence. It’s simply and patently ignored. And some feel that placing certain words before and around other words logically proves their points-of-view.
But, for crying out loud, how do you explain all these differing factions claiming to be right? They all cannot be “right” given the same sandbox they’re all playing in.
People continue to believe what they believe. And so it goes.
Is that wrong?
I used to think it was entirely incorrect. Obfuscating proper living.
What I now believe and what I’m pointing out in my counterpoint here is that both religious and philosophical thought should not be about who is “right”…but about how humans deal with their finitude, if I may borrow Dr. Nietmann’s term. What it is to be human.
One is not…less-right…than the other, for they are all about beliefs. Even philosophy. You have to believe something in order to discuss anything, especially to pick something apart (e.g., believing in one thing over another in order to be critical about the other). Philosophy and religion are both attempts at humanity to comes to terms with itself: God, violence, origins—you name it. The premise that religions should keep God out of it, I find well-meaningly flawed, I’m sorry, Dr. Nietmann. All I have ever learned and researched about religious origins was that was precisely why religions originated, and to remove that aspect from religion is the major reason why religions sprang up to begin with, despite all your well-presented arguments. That was why I was looking forward to more religious-thinkers presented. Whether or not Christianity originated from the oppressed seeking personal or spiritual valuation or piggybacking upon current philosophical considerations of the day (or…something else…), pretty much most of the religions I can think back to started because of some different God Concept. Or, if they didn’t start out that way, quickly migrated toward it and wholeheartedly embraced it. And doing that is still, as I see it, an inherent part of defining our “finitude,” and to surgically remove that one aspect of religion predicated upon all your presented just seems utterly artificial, and none of it came together enough for me at the end of the book to really believe it. Given all your presentations, all the definitions and hermeneutics, none of it dealt with that version of Why you say philosophy should be one way and religion another.
But that doesn’t make The Unmaking of God a wasted effort!
You are contributing your own version of Humanity’s understanding of Finitude.
Unlike you, I don’t blame philosophy for incorrect religious thought. I don’t blame religion for being “incorrect.” Both are exactly what they are, and perfectly so.
Both are necessary and critical paths to each of us understanding our place in the Universe. In understanding ourselves. And just like there are followers of Freud or Kierkegaard or Christ…they are all trying to do the best with what they have…what they know. Believe to be true. And in understanding either or all of the above, just the intent of doing so is part of the learning experience of BEING HUMAN. What we must all go through while walking this rock. It is the intent of bettering our lives…giving due consideration to what we believe in and how we behave.
How we treat others.
So, Dr. Nietmann—in my most humble of opinions—your dissertation on philosophical versus religious thought is one more way that we learn how to deal with both issues. As Humans.
And, hopefully, lead better lives because of it.
Reality Check 