WHY GOD
CAN'T SPEAK TO HUMANS

Alan Soffin with Herbert W. Simons

Here begins an unusual three-way conversation among an atheist, an agnostic, and a Christian, in which each clarifies his own perspectives while respectfully engaging differences in the others’ positions. The hope is to explore the value of interaction across viewpointss rarely placed in direct conversation with each other.

God is infallible. Humans are not. Theism seeks “the Word of God not man” to invoke an authority for thought and action higher than that which human thought can provide.

But humans unavoidably determine which words are God’s. One cannot coherently say, “This is God’s Word—but I am not stating that ‘This is God’s Word.’” And if humans are responsible for selecting them, religious dicta or faith claims occupy their place, claim their hearing, based on the authority of humans.

Hence, such words do not rest on the authority theism requires: the authority of God not man. Moreover, the quest for God’s Word is cognitively useless. Consider that when we already know a thing, God’s word is superfluous: We don’t ask God if the earth is round or whether we should kill people for sport. We don’t need the Bible to know such things.

But where we don’t know a thing, we cannot determine the truth and therefore cannot judge whether any proffered word (even one inexplicably broadcast) is God’s Word. The Word of God is intellectually useful, then, only if we can know it without using human judgment. But as noted, it is nonsense to conclude or state, “This is God’s Word and I have made no judgment on the matter.”

Theism’s standard rejoinder is that God can, miraculously, communicate unilaterally. Thus we can know his Word without ever using human powers to determine that what we heard, saw, felt, or read was God’s Word. But this rejoinder is itself a human judgment and therefore can supply, at most, only the authority of the human mind as the guarantor for whatever word theists then say is God’s; the same holds for all theology.

In any case, the argument fails. The idea that God does a thing so as to tell us his Word already assumes we can know God’s Word, that is, know God’s intent. God’s “Word” would then be, “I want you to know my Word.” The foregoing assumes we can know God’s Word to conclude we can know it. The argument is circular.

For all these reasons, theism’s basic dicta cannot rise above human authority. Religion cannot escape the responsibilities of human thought. But it tries. Since God’s intent or Word is cited only where we think we lack knowledge, the judgment that some word is God’s is always intellectually irresponsible. One asserts that a statement is infallibly right or true when one admits one’s inability to judge whether the proffered statement is right or true.

In sum, the God’s-Word dilemma stands: God’s-Word theists must disavow responsibility for the content of their basic preachments. But they cannot, for in professing that “This is God’s Word” or “Here is God’s Word,” they are unavoidably responsible for what they claim.

Postscript: “God not man” is not like “laws not men.” Law refers to the authority of human rules, precedents, and factual determinations; not men rejects law’s circumvention by power, will, and desire. Law is about objective judgment; God is about transcending judgment.

Postpostscript: The rejection of human arguments about God by the human argument that God is not bound by human logic is not only circular, but if true, would render false any statements as to what God’s goodness, or any property of God, entails.

—Alan L. Soffin, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, earned his Ph.D. in philosophy of education from the University of Illinois in 1963 and taught at Michigan State and Temple universities. An award-winning private film-maker, he is retired and writing on philosophy of religion plus teaching at the Center for Learning in Retirement, Delaware Valley College.

God’s Word,
Man’s Word, or Soffin’s Word:
Herbert W. Simons Responds

I see my job here as critic-provocateur, raising questions and objections that might advance consideration of the important issues raised in Alan Soffin’s essay. Readers should know that we’re old friends; indeed, we met at an orientation for new Temple University faculty over 40 years ago! For nearly that long we’ve argued over how to argue: he the logic-chopping rationalist; me the muddleheaded complexifier.

Readers may also benefit from knowing that my appearance in a Christian magazine is perhaps nearly as strange as the presence in it of my friend Alan’s writing. If he is an atheist, I follow not too far behind as one whose heritage is Jewish but whose views are agnostic. Still, we have been lured into these pages by my former student Michael King, a Mennonite pastor—and the oddities multiply!

I think both Soffin and I would agree that our ongoing conversation has been productive. Soffin’s current contribution provides a case in point. Crisply argued, unrelenting in its exposure of the fallacies in what “theism says,” it reinvigorates an age-old controversy, prompting mere mortals and perhaps God himself to wonder: who invented whom? But Soffin’s reductive logic-chops may be a source of the problem in accounting for variations in religious belief. He may also be embroiled in a logical conundrum.

(1) Consider such phrases as “theism seeks.” (See also “theism’s standard rejoinder” and “theism’s basic dicta.”) Theism who? Seekers of what? Do Soffin’s arguments apply equally well to all religious believers and to all theistic beliefs? To those who personify God and those who don’t? To those who are certain of God’s existence and to those who make the leap of faith while at the same time acknowledging the plausibility (in purely intellectual terms) of agnosticism or atheism?

Does Soffin’s case apply to those who claim literally to have heard God speak, or to have been touched by God, as opposed to those who refer to God’s Word, and even to God, metaphorically or mystically—e.g., God as prime mover, God as celestial mechanic, God as Holy Other; God as Wholly Other? To those who see Her/Him/It as redeemer or as righteous father, or as earth-mother, or as the cosmos itself?

Surely Soffin’s line of argument applies best to viewpoints of those who are literally minded, unhesitating personifiers. I believe it applies less well to other believers and even to other “God’s-Word” believers.

(2) Now consider Soffin’s own commitment to taking responsibility, as in not escaping or disavowing responsibility. Does not taking responsibility presuppose mind, sentience, free will, choice—all requiring a belief in something beyond determinism, something beyond the material, something beyond evidence in the scientific sense?

Is not this belief itself an act of faith, given the absence of scientific evidence for mind or will, and even in the face of evidence that these may be self-serving, hubristic illusions? Of course one can retort that mind, will, responsibility are useful constructs, but then so too can believers in God and in God’s Word take the path of pragmatism in defending their theistic commitments.

My appreciation to Michael King for agreeing to the inclusion of this exchange in his magazine. I invite Alan Soffin to have our next word and encourage readers to join in the conversation.

—Herbert W. Simons, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is professor of speech communication at Temple University and widely published in the fields of rhetoric and communication.

Alan Soffin Responds

Surely my friend, Herb Simons, knows that logic-chopping is as essential to a healthy mind as wood-chopping is to a healthy hearth. Oh, to take an axe to a conjunction of incompatible assertions and split it, unlike Solomon, into two viable, consistent claims.

But let us now move from the delights of conversation—whose success criterion is entertainment and which ends by petering out—and into the realm of dialogue, whose success criterion is truth and which ends by some improvement in thought.

Provocation and complexification are valuable in testing our movement toward solutions. But if there can be no solutions, there can be no tests for being closer or further away. Maybe we are here just for fun, but, religiously speaking, I don’t think so.

(1) Simons tells us theistic ideas differ widely and asks to whom we can apply the idea that God’s authority cannot be claimed by any person. The short answer is: to the many who claim it, not to the few who do not. Our culture swarms with claimed access to God-not-man, from the Barthian claim that we passively hear God to the argument of columnist Cal Thomas that modern troubles began when the Enlightenment followed the ideas of man, not the ideas of God.

As for the presumed gulf between literalists, voice-hearers, and those who see God as mysterious, ineffable, and so forth, my criticism fails to apply only to those non-literalists, non-voice-hearers who would feel no loss of wisdom or moral direction if they came to believe a God of whatever sort never existed. If, instead, mystics or non-literalists would feel a loss in wisdom or direction, then they must have felt themselves authoritatively informed by a source not themselves.

This thought-experiment may help uncover the covert God-speaks-not-man thinking which undergirds not only the talk of mystics who manage to extract from “ineffable” moments an entire guidebook to right living but also the talk of those who believe in “inspired” thoughts or texts. My contention here is that wherever a text differs from what man alone would have written, then the difference is written by God-not-man. “Inspiration” is inerrancy dressed for sophisticated company.

(2) Simon’s second comment addresses the whole philosophy of mind. I shall attempt a useful response, given the constraints of space: Yes, responsibility presupposes “free will, sentience, choice”; is inconsistent with universal determinism; is not a physical condition; and is technically difficult to argue for. But our lives seem to turn on non-physical realities (like rights, decency, beauty, truth, logic).

Here I merely note that God’s-Word theorists must agree with me that responsibility is a real condition. It would be unintelligible for a theist to say “God spoke to m; I wonder who is responsible for his speaking?” or to say, “I praise God for what he says but I don’t know whether he is responsible for what he says.” Most theists cannot reject my insistence on the reality of responsibility.

May I say I greatly value a magazine courageous enough to entertain challenges to its readers. And let me add that my disagreements are aimed not at the heart of religion but only its chains.

Michael A. King Responds

At about age 12, perhaps because how else does a missionary kid declare independence, I concluded God did not exist. My reasoning was by no means as complex as that offered by Alan Soffin, but it followed similar lines. Returning to belief in God took me years and involved pondering again and again to the types of concerns Soffin raises.

What I currently conclude is this: at the level of logic, Soffin may well be right. Soffin may help us understand, for example, how it can be that millions or even billions of people say that God speaks to us, often through that form of God’s Word called the Bible, and yet what we hear God say is so different that we are ever prepared to kill each other’s souls and sometimes even bodies in our dismay at the other’s inability to hear God speak as we do.

But if I may also honor the insight of my former dissertation adviser Herb Simons (even now that I need no longer attend to his perspective to earn my degree!), I believe Simons, agnostic though he is, offers a fruitful way forward. Simons speaks for those of us who want to claim a meaningful relationship with God yet who also believe Soffin rightly underscores that typically to say “God speaks” is to say something along the lines of “This is how I, in my frail humanity, understand God to speak.” As I understand Simons, he doubts Soffin’s case is as strong when applied not to those who claim to hear an actual voice but to those who understand that whatever of God we may hear is inevitably mediated through our own frail personhood.

I concur. But what then of Soffin’s reply on this point, which is basically that no matter how we believe God speaks, those of us who believe are still caught in the impossibility of ever truly hearing a voice beyond our own?

Here it seems to me the main way forward for those of us who want to affirm that we hear God speak is that age-old word: faith. The New Testament book of Hebrews memorably states that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith involves leaping beyond the evidence in a gamble that sometimes what cannot be pinned down is as real as what can be.

Faith for me, then, means very nearly agreeing with the central argument Soffin makes, since I too believe that, so long as we remain human, none of us can ever be sure we have heard God speak. But faith also means risking my life on the possibility that breaking into my humanness, in ways I can never entirely prove or validate, comes that Voice from beyond.

Whatever our respective conclusions, what a pleasure it is to have opportunity to clarify perspectives with Alan Soffin and Herb Simons. My thanks to both of them for readiness to be published in a very different venue than they would normally inhabit. With them, I echo the desire that the conversation continue, and in fact if, as we hope, replies are forthcoming, it will be a pleasure to print them in future issues of DreamSeeker Magazine.