Доказывать существование Бога - это кощунство

[wayter]

Рецензия на книгу Карен Армстронг "The Case for God"  (англ.) Ее книга "История Бога" выходила по-русски.

Вкратце:

Доказательства существования ничего не доказывают. Более того, они в некотором роде являются богохульством. Бог, Брахман, Дао - имена реальности, которая превыше человеческого разума и способности языка к описанию. Даже идеи существования и несуществования неприменимы к Богу.

Ранняя христианская теология была апофатической (то  есть говорила о Боге через отрицание того, что не есть Бог). Но позднее рациональная и псевдонаучная теология ее подменила. Обычный язык, язык доказательств и выводов, конкретных примеров и общих правил хорош для обыденных вещей - но не для того, что превыше человеческого опыта.

И теизм, и атеизм в равной степени потерпели неудачу.

* * *

Karen Armstrong would unhesitatingly dismiss Wright's vision of a deity inferred from the evidence of human evolution as a lamentable instance of the mistake lying at the core of the West's disaffection from received religion -- namely, regarding the case for God as one to be made from such evidence. "The Case for God" is in fact largely an elaborate history of the spread of this mistake from the late Middle Ages to the present. The alternative she offers -- the case she finally makes -- is for an ancient way of talking about "God, Brahman, Dao, or Nirvana." For her, these are conceptually different names for the reality that exceeds human comprehension and escapes human language, including all human predication of existence or nonexistence. The story she tells is primarily about the Christian and post-Christian West because it is here that the ancient way fell first and deepest into oblivion.

The earliest Christian theology was apophatic. Apophatic theology -- the theology of the original, Greek-speaking Christian church -- was "naysaying" theology, a kind of religious language whose difficult task it was to acknowledge in human language the very inadequacy of human language. Whatever it said, apophatic theology immediately took back, and then it took back the taking back. Ordinary language -- the language of evidence and inference, of instance and generalization -- was fine for ordinary matters. But to confess the universal human experience of a final failure in this language is to take back the confession. It is to lose the game before it begins.

In an ambitious work clear in outline and rich in detail, Armstrong writes the history of how apophatic theology was forgotten in the late Middle Ages; how rational and then quasi-scientific Newtonian theology rose to replace it in early modernity; how, when others were recognizing this as a mistake, fundamentalists tightened their embrace of it; and how, in the wake of the passing of modernity and the failure of both its theism and its atheism, postmodern theology may point toward the recovery of what was lost. A god whose existence you can prove is a god to whom you cannot pray, postmodern theology argues, and prayer -- not proof -- is where religion rises or falls. Armstrong's very considerable service is to show how this novel idea is a very old idea newly recovered.