Superman

A long time ago I discovered David Bentley Hart, whose demolition of the new atheists is founded on the very sound assumption that Hart’s opponents have, in general, not the foggiest idea what they are talking about. When the new atheists vent their individual and collective spleens they are talking, usually, not about the God of the great monthotheistic faiths, but about something smaller: a demiurge.

A demiurge is a secondary God. In the various forms of Gnosticism which competed with what later became Christianity, the demiurge was created by God and then in turn created the universe. The demiurge is an extraordinarily powerful being, but is itself a creation and is subject to the laws of the created order. A demiurge is, in other words, superman. The demiurge is powerful enough to create worlds and tear them down, but is geographically and temporarily limited, is subject to the full gamut of human emotions when deciding how to act, is constrained by externally imposed legal codes, and is subject to change and development. The idea of the demiurge was an answer to the hard question: how can spirituality have an effect on the material universe? Or, to rephrase that, how can something spiritual and good and perfect give rise to something ( as the Gnostics judged it ) material, wicked and imperfect? The answer was to posit an intermediary. It’s always nice to have someone else to blame, after all, and it does let God off the hook as far as plagues and volcanoes are concerned.

The guys (for the most part) who, in the first few centuries of the common era, dreamed up the shape of Christian theology as we know it, quickly ditched the concept of the demiurge, but the idea stuck around. It stuck around so persistently, in fact, that when you question many people on their understanding of God it’s some kind of demiurge that they’ll describe. And when people reject Theism, perhaps after some unfortunate encounter with the church, or perhaps after reading a superficially plausible rant by one of the new atheists, it’s usually a demiurge they are rejecting. Try doing a Google image search for “God” and see what you come up with: lots of pictures of big bearded blokes living in the sky, that’s what. Or listen very carefully as your favourite Christian describes their God or as your favourite atheist describes what they don’t believe in, and more often than not they’ll tell you about a demiurge.

How did God begin? How can God be everywhere at once? Why did God need to kill Jesus in order to save us? How can God be three things at the same time? What does God do to people who don’t love him? Why does God send earthquakes? All these are questions which only make sense if the “God” being referred to is in fact a demiurge.

It is beyond the capacity of any of us to comprehend God. To think of God at all we must use metaphors and all metaphors are limited. The trouble is, we mistake our figurative language for the reality to which we hope it points. It’s entertaining and gratifying when David Bentley Hart points out the atheists doing this. It’s less entertaining and less gratifying when we realise that we Christians are overwhelmingly prone to the same behaviour.

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