Kierkegaard is wrong: an absurd God is not good

Kierkegaard is wrong: an absurd God is not good.

I’ve posted three times previously on Søren Kierkegaard   As with all my posts, I’m always trying to figure out the gist of someone’s argument by presenting it to others—that is, you dear reader.  I think I’ve finally “got” Kierkegaard, and I think he’s fundamentally wrong.

The three stages of life

Kierkegaard says that there are three stages to life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.  The aesthetic life is concerned with pleasure.  The ethical life is concerned with living by principle.  If married, I should follow the principles of marriage, which are loyalty, care, and love.  The ethical man acts in a way he would want others to act.  It’s actually pretty close to the golden rule, which in turn is pretty close to what Immanuel Kant called the categorical imperative.

The religious stage is where it gets complicated, because Kierkegaard subdivided the religious stage into A and B.  We reach the religious stage when we see that the principles that guide our lives are not merely a product of human reason, but a divine imperative.  Failing to live up to these principles is not only unethical; it is an insult to God.

Kierkegaard makes a big deal out of the difference between what he calls “religiousness A and religiousness B.” (CUP, p 494)  The main difference is that in religiousness A, God is thought of as comprehensible by humans, and understandable by reason, at least to a certain degree.  There is continuity between the ethical and religiousness A.

Stage B, which Kierkegaard sometimes calls simply Christianity, is where God is beyond human reason, infinitely different and utterly inexplicable.  Kierkegaard frequently uses the term “absurd” to characterize this God and his commandments.  The experience of God as absurd is good, for it means we have abandoned trying to understand him.   To act on the absurd is to act completely on faith (Journal).

“Religion B” is a bad idea

In Isaiah 55:8, God says “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”  This makes sense.  We should not expect God to be a larger and more powerful version of a human.  To fail to recognize and appreciate God’s otherness is a mistake.  Nevertheless, God’s commandments, his presence in our lives, must be recognizably good, decent, and moral, or he is no longer a God that humans can worship.

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Christianity and technology

Christianity and technology.

Beginning in 1943, a small group of Christian intellectuals began to think seriously about the post-war world.  The United States and Britain had talked about victory since the beginning of the War, but no one was certain, and many had grave doubts.  But by 1943 victory was in sight, even if its details were not. 

These Christian intellectuals included Jacques Maritain, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and T. S. Eliot.  Auden and Eliot were poets, and Lewis, an Oxford don, is probably best known for his for his children’s fiction, Chronicles of Narnia.  I’ve posted about Lewis and Weil  elsewhere on this blog.  The relationship among these men and woman was rich, complex, and varied.  Some worked together, some alone.

The Problem

The problem they worried about is what sort of people the winners of this war of civilizations would become.  What values could substitute for that of winning the war?  Would the technological thinking that won the war destroy the values we fought for?  It might, they argued, and they only thing that could stop it was an education that fosters humanity, sensibility and pity.

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