"this abstract God of the philosophers"

This section of Hans Kung's book I've been commenting on should really start with the last paragraph I posted the other day. 

There are in fact many non-Christians or former Christians who say that they would believe in such a great Whence and Whither, they would believe in an Absolute or Supreme Being, a Deity, or "God";  that atheism leaves them intellectually and emotionally unsatisfied.  But they have little idea of what to do about this "God," scarcely know what or who God is, or what he is like.  In this sense, if they are not atheists they are at least agnostics.

Now this does not totally surprise me.  I certainly do not want to belittle the God of the philosophers, or the God of general religiosity., of whom agnostics generally speak.  I do not want to declare this God is an idol fabricated by humanity, as some Protestant theology has done for a long time.  How could I do so, when I consider Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus,  Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz,  Kant and Hegel?  For it is still a great thing for a human being to know something about this great Whence and Whither, Why and Wherefore, of humanity and the world;  something about the great mystery of reality; and thus to have a certain basic orientation.  But I would suggest that it is not very easy to live with this still-hidden mystery, with this abstract God of the philosophers;  to know what or who he is, or what he is like.  This God is a God without a countenance.  He is "the unknown God" the theos agnostos of the Acts of the Apostles, and he thus rightly remains the God of the agnostics.  This at any rate is so unless, like the great philosophers of modern times (and also their atheistic opponents) we allow ourselves to be influenced by the Christian idea of God, which is present everywhere even today.  

It is inescapable that the "God" we discuss is the God we individually conceive of.  That is true of anyone, anything we discuss.   I think our educations, the influence of the methods and assumptions of science on our ways of thinking, the results of that in the general culture has led us to not understand that when we're talking about so many things we are not talking about anything real but an abstraction of them.  

This is clear when you consider things asserted the "average person" that is a product of statistical analyses of data collected from, ideally, a sufficiently large enough, randomly selected sample of the general population of such People.  That ideal, just mentioned, is itself an abstraction, in no instance I've ever seen does such data come from such an ideally randomly selected sample of sufficient size.  And that doesn't take into account that most, perhaps almost all such data collection take for granted something known to be untrue, that the people so imperfectly sampled will at least as imperfectly report, their opinions, their actions, their experiences, their opinions, etc. when we know that the method, itself, insures that much of such data will be unreliable or false or ephemeral and not valid by the time the numbers are crunched.   Yet people believe with all of their hearts in the attributes of this artificial and misleading "average person".  

And that's only one problem about treating abstractions as if they are real, there are many more such artifacts of the culture of science as it translates into the general culture. 

This passage leaves me thinking of what a profound insight it is when, in Exodus 3 13-14, when Moses asks God who he should tell the Children of Israel is the God who sent him to them that he should say “I am who I am. You must tell them: ‘The one who is called I Am has sent me to you."

I interpret this to point to the difference between the absolute reality and those real entities we talk about.  In talking of the ultimate absolute reality,  God, the Creator of all of the other things we can only know about through their perceived and analyzed attributes, who created and endowed things and creatures with their attributes, we are facing the ultimate inadequacy of our own minds and means of knowing.   And that was something those People who the snarky TV-movie-si-fy-etc.  cultured atheists love to deride as "bronze age goat herders" got when so many of the educated class among us can't conceive of.   And in our ignorance, not only do we construct a myriad of idols, we are led to have the utmost faith in them. 

The idea of a Christian God, the same God, is bound to confound such People.  I am sure that Kung's list of  "this great Whence and Whither, Why and Wherefore" could be the focus of such snark among those who are so confounded but it's not a bad way to put the problem of God put in terms of human experience, either. 

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In a lot of ways this book and Kung's work, in general, are addressing the doubts of the educated class of People who have such an outsized influence on the general culture through the media.   I think that his attempt to reintroduce Christian morality into that culture is important in every way.   While most people are not members of that class, merely the consumers of their media product.  I think that in a lot of that product, which we are seeing produces effects that endanger egalitarian democracy in the countries most heavily influenced by the media, Europe, the West, where democracy reigned in the post-war period, many of those effects the product of unlimited "freedom of the press" and "free speech".   Freedom without the morality that is not provided, in an effective form, by anything but religion will produce vulgar despots such as Trump, Putin, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban, Giuseppe Conte, etc. and ineffective opponents to them.  Clearly the theories of such lovers of such freedoms have failed the scientific method of making predictions and seeing those come true.  We were supposed to have enhanced egalitarian democracy under the post-war regime of absolute free speech, instead we see resurgent neo-Nazi and neo-fascist movements, the post-Marxist gangster governments, using the same pseudo-liberal slogans of "free speech" as their foremost tool.  In view of that the ACLU championing of the free speech of Nazis is a glaringly obvious mistake, but one our educations prevent most educated people from recognizing when it is blindingly obvious. 

And I have come to believe that, in the West and in much of the rest of thet world the form of religion that will be the vehicle of the corrective of that will be Christianity.  I have no doubt that the same potential exists in the other monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam, many non-Abrahamic religions - I'm reading a lot about traditional Cree religion and believe it has that same potential - but that the most likely source of that for most people will be Christianity or it won't happen.   I see absolutely nothing in general secular culture which contains it as more than borrowings from religion and if it is a weak force within religion, it is totally impotent in that secular adoption of morality from Christianity or other religion. 

This section of the book has such wide implications that Kung had to leave out for brevity that it's going to take a while to go through. 

If I had twice as much time I could probably produce an entirely different commentary on the book, it's implications are that wide.  But this is the one that seems most important to me.