Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, “Noam Chomsky: God, Morality, & Consciousness” (2021), on God

Curt Jaimungal: Does this mean that you also take an agnostic view when it comes to God? That is, who knows?

Noam Chosmy: When it comes to?

Jaimungal: God.

Chosmky: God? I don’t even know what I’m supposed, what I’m being asked about. What is it that I’m supposed to believe in or not believe in?

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, “Noam Chomsky: God, Morality, & Consciousness” (2021)

More or less, this fits the view of God for me. When individuals come forward and work to declare some version of a God, I am left to reconsider the degree to whcih a God exists or not only insofar as one is precisely defined.

Yet, I tend to only get abstractions commonly such as “God is love” or “God is the laws of nature” or “God is Jesus Christ in the flesh who died under Pontius Pilate and rose on the third day and rose to Heaven to be at the right hand of the Father, as told in the Bible.”

These can give the veneer of sophistication, when, in fact, they’re a little bereft of significant intellectual content. It presents the oft-lazy intellectuality of a common agnostic position while, at other times, presenting the certainty through linguistic confusion: “God.”

It is a filler for argument. When it enters into the formal arenas of intellectual disputation, we come to the ad hoc construction of the attributes and values of “God.” I do not take the arguments in much seriousness, in all honesty, but I do take religious believers, deists, and theists, and theologians seriously. Arguments are thin; people are sincere.

Their conversation went on:

Peter J. Glinos: If possible, then just to give you a certain dimension, something to question. Because we understand that the word, like a coin that’s lost its face and become nothing but sheer metal, loses its value. And to sort of put aside ambiguities, there’s a certain move now towards understanding, or maybe even rediscovering the idea of God, not so much as a man in the sky, but you could argue it’s the highest value as to how things should be and the principles that we should abide by. Certainly in your life, you’ve…

Chomsky: Yeah, I certainly think we can talk about the principles we should abide by.

Glinos: What do you find your most driving principle? Just even if it’s something personal in your own life experience?

Chomsky: We all have principles. We don’t want to torture children. We don’t want to slaughter people. We want to bring justice and mercy to people who need it. There’s all kinds of values that we share. Nothing is added when we give them the name God or give the name anything else. Sure, we have values. We can look into where these values originate, how they’ve developed over time. We can discuss and debate how they can be sharpened and applied in particular circumstances. That’s what we can do constantly. Nothing is added to this discussion if we say there is an X and I can’t tell you what X is.

I see the striving Glinos seems to be driving at now. However, the purported renewed search for God in wider society is not on an individual basis. It’s on a larger popularizaton basis. Christian advocates, such as Dr. Jordan Peterson, amount to the re-propagandizing of the public with Christian iconography and language.

The reframing is, commonly, done. God isn’t the God as presented literally in the Bible. God is the God of our values. In fact, our highest values are God. Everyone has those. None of those necessarily relate to a social reformer dying in the Middle East on a cross. That’s what Chomsky was ordinarily — speaking in ordinary language — was trying to conveny.

“We can talk about the principles we should abide by… we all have principles.” By which he means, ethical principles or moral precepts, the foundations of actions in mind, what seem like rationale’s after-the-fact. To attribute this to something supernatural or transcendent, it doesn’t do anything. It adds unnecessary premises and so detracts rather than adds to the argument and for acting in what is deemed a moral or an ethical way.

God adds nothing here; Chomsky would agree.