An Open Mind In A Secular Age

We’ve featured the work of poet and critic Michael Robbins on the Dish before – notably, this broadside against the New Atheists, which spurred a few rounds of debate over Nietzsche and religion. In an interview about his new volume of poetry, The Second Sex, Robbins explores how his engagement with philosophy informs his poetry, and much else:

I return often to those who recognize that there are historical and cultural constraints on what it is possible for us to believe—“a background,” as [philosopher Charles] Taylor says, “to our thinking, within whose terms it is carried on, but which is often largely unformulated, and to which we can frequently, just for this reason, imagine no alternative”: Marx and Freud, despite their unsophisticated views of religion (the result of just such a background, which no one’s thinking can entirely escape), and Heidegger and Lacan. Such thinkers teach us that people like [Jerry] Coyne are not only mistaken that their beliefs are “obvious” and “rationally grounded” but literally incapable of imagining that they could be wrong about the nature of reality.

They always demand “evidence” for God’s existence, but, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it in a discussion of Thomas Aquinas, “if we could have the kind of evidence of God the evidentialist desires, then we would have evidence that the God Christians worship does not exist.” It’s not simply that the evidentialist doesn’t grasp basic theology and epistemology, but that the notion that the concept of “evidence” is itself not neutral or ahistorical could never occur to him, given the picture that holds him captive. And of course I’m not denying that the language of evidence is proper to its sphere or that my own thinking (or anyone’s) is not subject to all sorts of constraints I don’t recognize. But even if we cannot attain to a view from nowhere, we can recognize that we cannot, which allows us to avoid, to some extent at least, the epistemic arrogance that characterizes scientism. I do not know that God is the creator of heaven and earth, or that Jesus Christ is his only son, our Lord.