Theology Matters — The Last New Atheist
An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God by Robert Garland
This book will make you dumber by reading it. It is part of the “New Atheist” oeuvre, published 20 years after New Atheism went past its “sell by” date.
This is a very disappointing book. I have been watching Robert Garland’s presentations on the Great Courses. Garland is an emeritus professor at Colgate University. He teaches courses on daily life in ancient Greece and Rome. He is currently teaching a course on Polytheism and Monotheism, which I am watching. Garland has a winsome delivery, and I trusted him to deliver factually accurate material.
Now, I am not so sure.
I was willing to put up with Garland’s approach in this book, where he claims to be just asking questions. The questions are shallow, and he exhibits not the least scintilla of charity when presenting the Christian position as anything other than a strawman. He quotes several sources to set up his chapters or as provocative springboards for launching into some thought, but they are invariably atheists and New Atheists. On the other hand, he quotes Richard Bauckham — which is fair enough — and there is one quotation from Aristotle. Aquinas, Augustine, and the other great Christian thinkers go completely missing, even though he raises what he thinks are new and unanswered questions about Christology. It is entirely weird that a professor of antiquity is not aware or interested in the fact that his questions were answered in antiquity.
I always question whether I am being uncharitable, but there was a particularly weird and obnoxious set-piece that convinced me that Garland is singularly ignorant about the subject he is writing about. At one point, Garland writes:
Perhaps we should start with how Your son came into the world. Even as a child I had a very hard time believing in the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. The Immaculate Conception is the belief that the BVM was conceived without sex, whereas the Virgin Birth — a better term would be “virginal conception” — is the belief that the BVM gave birth to Jesus without having sex[lxxxviii].
Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God (p. 96). Kindle Edition.
Note that Garland wrote: “The Immaculate Conception is the belief that the BVM was conceived without sex……”
I will grant that a lot of people confuse the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, often thinking that the Immaculate Conception has to do with the virginal conception of Jesus. It doesn’t take much fact-checking to discover that the Immaculate Conception involves the conception of the Virgin Mary, who Catholic doctrine teaches was conceived without original sin. It doesn’t take much in the way of research skills to go to the Catholic Catechism and learn:
491 Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, “full of grace” through God,134 was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:
The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.135
The Immaculate Conception had nothing to do with the absence of sex. It had to do with the absence of original sin.
I was going to be charitable to Garland and assume that this was a typo. Perhaps Garland meant to type “sin,” not “sex”
However, two paragraphs later, Garland lays this abomination on us:
In addition, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and of the Virgin Birth remove the messiness of sex from the equation, and we all know what Christianity thinks about sex. So, we don’t have to think of the BVM or her mother screaming, “God, oh God, oh my God!” in the throes of ecstasy, as the BVM conceives Jesus or her mother conceives the BVM.
Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God (p. 97). Kindle Edition.
Garland doubled down and told the reader that the purpose of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was to let Christians — presumably Catholics since Protestants don’t accept that doctrine - not think about the mother of Mary having an orgasm.
So, Garland was quite serious when he instructed his readers that the Immaculate Conception involved the mother of Mary conceiving without sex.
This is ignorance on steroids. Garland is a professor. He is writing a book that is highly critical of Catholicism and Christian doctrine, and he gets something basic like this completely wrong. Needless to say, if he gets this wrong, what else does he get wrong?
Beyond Garland’s ignorance, there is Garland’s creepy shallowness. He assumes that Catholics don’t want to think about Mary or her mother having an orgasm. However, concerning Mary’s mother, we know sex was involved.
We can all hope that Mary’s parents, St. Joachim and St. Anna, orgasmed contently in conceiving their daughter.
Mary being overlain by the Holy Spirit sounds like a mystical experience, and mystical experiences are often quite ecstatic. If Garland left his narrow comfort zone, he could read bona fide Christian texts like “The Dark Night of the Soul” and “The Song of Songs” on this point.
And does Garland often think about whether his mother had an orgasm on the night he was conceived? Is that a big issue for him? This is creepy projection on his part about his potential hang-ups; it has nothing to do with Christian doctrine.
Garland’s view of God is a complete strawman. Garland does not seem to be acquainted with Augustine, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, or Aquinas, none of whom gets a mention, although Dawkins is cited like Holy Writ. In contrast to orthodox Christianity, Garland seems to treat the Christian God as another being in the world rather than being itself on a completely different plane of existence.
He explains the Incarnation as being motivated by God’s desire to experience existence from within, as if God’s omniscience was somehow limited. He does not seem to know the many Christian theologians who reasoned that God was immanent within existence, in that God’s knowledge and will bring and keep everything into existence.
Garland treats God as a being with limited bandwidth who is overtaxed by having to monitor trivia:
They seem to think You’re equipped with an insatiable appetite for trivia, as well as with an inexhaustible passion for judging absolutely everything that everyone does or merely idly thinks about. Bor-ing is what I say. Surely variety is the spice of eternity? I also think it makes You look rather, well, for want of a better word, like a lower-level administrator.
Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God (p. 28). Kindle Edition.
Good grief, this is lame. Aquinas answered this nonsense in the 13th Century:
For God knows things not by receiving anything from them, but, rather, by exercising His causality on them. Hence, since God is of an infinite power in understanding, as is clear from what has preceded,1 His knowledge must extend even to the most remote things. But the gradation of nobility and lowliness among all things is measured according to their nearness to and distance from God, Who is at the peak of nobility. Therefore, because of the perfect power of His intellect, God knows the lowliest possible among beings.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 232). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
In other words, God is not some person looking down from Heaven who might not notice what you are doing in the bathroom. God is causing your existence at all times, which means that His knowledge extends to what He causes, including you in the bathroom. Maybe that creeps you out, but that’s the logic of the argument.
Concerning the “bandwidth problem,” this is what Aquinas had to say:
[5] Again, the lowliness of the things known does not of itself redound to the knower. For it belongs to the nature of knowledge that the knower should contain the species of the thing known according to his own manner. Accidentally, however, the lowliness of the things known can redound to the knower. This may be either because, while he is considering lowly things, his mind is turned away from thinking of more noble things; or it may be because, as a result of considering lowly things, he is inclined towards certain unbefitting affections. This, however, is not possible in God, as is clear from what has been said.4 The knowledge of lowly things, therefore, does not detract from the divine nobility, but rather belongs to the divine perfection according as it precontains all things in itself, as was shown above.5
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 233). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
God will not be distracted by considering one thing rather than another; he considers all things at all times. Moreover, it is not as if God will be affected by lowly things.
Garland then floats this blimp:
How likely is it that Universe exists solely for the sake of human beings? Not very. And if it doesn’t, that will be a very big disappointment for all the world’s religions. It means that lots and lots of dogs have been barking up lots and lots of wrong trees for millennia.
Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God (p. 93). Kindle Edition.
I am sure that this sounds pretty sophisticated relying as it does on the presumed naivety of “ignorant Christians.” The problem with this bit of nonsense is that this is a strawman. It is not what classical Christianity teaches. Here is Aquinas again:
Moreover, the good of the order of the universe is more noble than any part of the universe, since the individual parts are ordered, as to an end, to the good of the order that is in the whole.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 232). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
Got that? The good of the order of the universe is more noble than any part of the universe. This means that the order of the universe as a whole is higher than that of human beings. This was taught in the 13th century, but Garland builds a strawman with nothing to do with anything more than what he thinks the people he holds in contempt think.
Sad.
Here is another bit of “deep thinking” that Aquinas answered in the 13th century:
If You do have friends, who are they, apart from Moses? Are all good people Your friends? And how many is that? At least 144,000 according to the Book of Revelation.[xiv] But how can anyone, even You, be friends with 144,000? Don’t You like certain people more than others, even if they’re all good? And don’t You like some bad people more than You like some conventionally good people?
Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God (pp. 17–18). Kindle Edition.
The answer is that God loves everyone equally but that some people get greater gifts, which is tantamount to a greater love in practical effect:
I answer that, Since to love a thing is to will it good, in a twofold way anything may be loved more, or less. In one way on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense. In this way God does not love some things more than others, because He loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same. In another way on the part of the good itself that a person wills for the beloved. In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will a greater good, though our will is not more intense. In this way we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God’s love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said (Article 2), no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another.
Notice the difference in approach between Aquinas and Garland. Aquinas defines the issue and then analyzes it. Garland makes uncharitable assumptions and then reasons like a shallow seventh grader.
None of this means that anyone has to accept Aquinas. The point is that Garland’s essential picture that Christianity has never addressed his questions is entirely false. If you’ve read Augustine, Dionysius, or Aquinas, you realize Garland’s approach is shallow and childish. If you haven’t read those authors, don't write this book for the love of God!
Beyond that, for all his winsomeness, Garland is a “wanker.” He forefronts his own nasty, narrow bigotry as it suits him, and then he preaches tolerance. No one has to believe in Catholic saints, but is it too much to ask that something other than a strawman be presented? That would be the fair approach, but New Atheists were never interested in fairness. This is what Garland writes about Catholic saints:
Talking about saints, here’s the first question I want to put to You. Has the Catholic Church correctly identified the very best people who have ever lived or even the very best Christians or, more limited still, even the very best Catholics? Surely there must be one or two crooks and lowlifes among the 5,120, whom the Church, in its less than infinite wisdom, has sanctified?
Garland, Robert. An Ordinary Man’s Rather Long Letter to God (p. 11). Kindle Edition.
Of course, saints are not the “best persons.” They are persons who are in Heaven. There are saints you would not invite to dinner. But all saints had some love of God that was recognized as exceptional.
Was Maximillien Kolbe — who traded places with a man going to a starvation cell — the “best person”? Not necessarily, but his love for his fellow man was exceptional.
Was St. Damien of Molokai — who took care of lepers until he contracted leprosy — the best person? Maybe not, but there is something there that we ought to admire. [Read this defense of Father Damien to slanderous attacks on him. ]
In addition, the Catholic Church believes that it is prevented from making error by the Holy Spirit in declaring that a given person is in Heaven. The Catholic Church may be wrong, but Garland’s strawman is not a response to that belief — it is narrow minded bigotry.
If Garland has a problem with some saint, let’s hear it. Instead, he relies on Catholic baiting, inviting other anti-Catholics to share in the joke. He double downs throughout the book with cliché attacks on the priest scandal, supposed Catholic hostility to sex, hostility to homosexuality, and various imagined Catholic crimes throughout the ages. None of this has anything substantive to do with his thesis, but it must feel empowering to lash out in this way.
The problem is how I assess Garland’s other work in light of this weak and misleading book. If he doesn’t know what the Immaculate Conception is but makes statements about it, which he clearly didn’t research, why should I trust him as a scholar on anything?
