The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional by John D. Caputo

Author:John D. Caputo [Caputo, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Polebridge Press
Published: 2015-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

A Theology of Perhaps

I hasten to add that freeing God from the order of being also frees God from a simple declaration of non-being, which belongs to the same order. The latter might take the form of a flat-out declaration that God is an illusion, as in psychoanalysis, where the notion that God is the solution to our problems is held as evidence against God. Or it might take the form of a disproof of God’s existence in the manner of the so called new atheists, who think that science shows that God definitely does not exist. Any such proof or disproof as that is too strong, too overbearing, too much high and mighty talk. I am not proposing a negative ontological argument, that the very idea of God makes no sense and that such a being could not possibly exist. I am not trying to disprove God’s existence. I am trying to repeat what is going on in the name of God in another way and in another register, the one to which the folly of God belongs. I am not saying that, once and for all, there is no God, no Supreme Being. I am simply saying that, with Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), the French philosopher who is responsible for the received definition of post-modernism as “incredulity about meta-narratives,”50 I greet the Supreme Being with supreme incredulity. The French expression translated as “meta-narratives” is “grands récits,” grand narratives, big stories, tall tales, or what I am calling here high and mighty discourse. These are strong, overarching accounts that pretend to give us a theory of everything, to get to the bottom line, to have a totalizing reach, to reach what Hegel called “absolute knowledge.” Considered thus, atheism is every bit as much a big story, a metanarrative, a high and mighty discourse as theism. Proofs of the non-existence of God are every bit as much hot air as proofs for God’s existence; each would keep the balloons of metaphysics aloft indefinitely.

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