Would you believe it? Neil Morgan on a transcendent God

‘The differences between theists and nontheists cannot be buried.’

Within the Quaker family, there have been some attacks on the idea of transcendence of late. Let me try to unpack the discussion.

Since Nietzsche’s prescient assertion of the ‘Death of God’, and its replacement with a sort of god of naturalism, it has been a widely-held view that western culture has had to struggle not to descend into nihilism. Albert Camus described this in The Myth of Sisyphus, and Samuel Beckett, more bleakly, in Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche saw that, once we begin to think that humans are not indebted to the transcendent, we are obliged to ask what ‘value’ our ‘value judgements’ can have. His answer is simply: ‘none’. What we previously understood as ultimate categories (like ‘God’), we reinvent as games of persuasion. We serve nothing above us. We simply invent stuff, make it all up as we go along. We can make coal taste of strawberries, if we all decide to – if we democratically, inclusively, decide that way. After the death of God, we are the bosses.

Although it has been recently argued in the Friend (‘Back from the death’, 8 July, and ‘Dead end?’, 12 August), the differences between theists and nontheists cannot be buried. Nor can they – in a gentler metaphor – be brushed under the carpet. The division is stark. What divides them is this: theists believe that we live in a world that transcends us. We are not the Queen Bees. We cannot make it up as we go along.

This is not to talk of ‘God’, that three letter word, as a ghost or a ghoul, or some sort of fairy at the bottom of the garden (as some Quakers have famously, and rhetorically, suggested). It is, instead, talking about God as a revealed, necessary entity. This was, in fact, the early Quaker experience. Such a transcendent God will not disappear just because people do not like the idea – or because it is somehow ‘non inclusive’.

If the deeply spiritual exists, over and above us as individuals, as many Quakers continue to feel, the ‘inward light’ surely depends on something Other – something transcendent. This feeling, this sense of having anticipated a coming truth, is not easily equated in the natural world. It is certainly beyond persuasion, beyond argument, beyond ‘You really should think this way’, beyond rhetoric. Can we really revere a tree, as was recently suggested in these pages? What would that mean, how could that make sense, in the absence of the framing structure of the transcendent?

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