Deconstructing Bishop Baron’s Case for Christianity

Thomism, religious analogies, and the Church’s bait-and-switch

How would one of the leading Christian communicators explain what God’s supposed to be?

Bishop Robert Baron provides his answer in a popular podcast, turning to Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical abstraction of a necessary being to set God apart from everything in the universe.

Christianity and the philosopher’s metaphysical deity

“Anything in the world,” Baron says, “would be a being of some type or an event of some type, some particular mode of existence. And God is not an entity in the world.”

Indeed, he adds, “that’s one of the fundamental mistakes that atheists old and new make all the time. They think of God as a big being. When Aquinas says that God is not any genus, even the genus of being, it’s one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition…You’d say at the very least God must be a being, and Aquinas’s answer is no, he’s not in the genus of being. So, we talk about being beyond being.” Again, “what God is is the same as God’s act of to be.”

Mind you, Baron soon enough corrects himself, realizing that if atheists err in this conception of God, it’s only because they’re following most theists. Talking about the “fundamental mistake” of looking for God as a being in the world, Baron seems to surprise himself when he says, “Oh, well, I guess theists are those that believe there’s this being alongside the other beings in the universe, and then atheists say, ‘No, there is no such being,’ and that’s precisely wrong. That’s just a category error.”

For Aquinas and Baron, God’s “essence and existence” coincide, which means God’s “very nature is to be, and that can’t be true of any contingent thing in the world.” Such things are conditioned by their type or form. Cats belong to a limited category of mammal, for example, and everything else from trees and clouds to bicycles and planets likewise are limited by the specific characteristics and forms that define their identities.

God isn’t like any such specific thing which, in being, say, a cat is therefore not a bicycle. Specific beings are limited by their types, but God’s essence has no finite, exclusive character or limitations. God is that which just is no matter what, which means he’s “the reason why there’s a contingent realm at all.”

Baron turns to Exodus 3:14 in which God answers Moses’s question about God’s name and identity, by saying “I AM WHO I AM” and “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

And as the inexhaustible fount of being, Baron says, God is symbolized by the burning bush that’s not consumed, because God’s “not a competitive being in the world. If he were a big being, then he’d be competing for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid. But he’s not like that. So, God can come close, and we come more fully alive,” which he says, gestures towards the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. “God can actually become a human without overwhelming the human he becomes.”

Baron says a good analogy for this non-competitive transcendence is the relation between author and book. An author like JRR Tolkien is responsible for all the contents of his story, but the author isn’t a character in the story. The author is both present in and absent from his or her handiwork: the plot, the characters, the writing style are all due to the author’s creative decisions, so they may indicate the author’s intentions, but the author is on a different ontological plane from the world he or she creates.

Turning to Christianity’s core claim, Baron says that “in becoming a creature, God divinizes the world,” and Baron agrees with the Greek fathers of the Church who thought that God became human so that humans might become God. God thus inserted himself in the world, in the person of Jesus, to draw the Church and ultimately all scattered nature to himself.

According to Baron, this means that Christianity is “the greatest humanism imaginable,” since Jesus’s redemption and deification of humanity would mean “there’s a dignity to humanity which goes beyond anything any humanist of any stripe has said.” Our goal in life isn’t to succeed in mundane, secular terms, but to participate in the divine nature, and to be God’s “friend” rather than his servant or slave.

The comedic essence of Judaism

What strikes me about this masterful sales pitch is that it’s the result of two thousand years of accumulated sophistry and casuistry. The essence of Catholicism, of the foundational official church of Christianity which eventually split into Western and Eastern versions of the Christian assimilation, is the insistence on its message’s universal applicability. The very word “catholic” comes from the Greek “katholikos,” meaning “universally” or “according to the whole.”

Monotheism, or more precisely monolatry or henotheism is the original ideological expression of political totalitarianism. The elevation of one god above all the others, or the denial of the reality of all gods apart from that of the one, true god was typically, in Sumer, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, India, and Greece, a branding of imperialism. Wars of conquest are fought primarily on material grounds, to gather lands and slaves, to increase the society’s wealth and prestige or to distract from domestic political failings.

But religious pantheons and creeds have always also expressed a people’s ideals and national or ethnic character. An open, tolerant tribe would be animistic/pantheistic or polytheistic, assigning equal validity to all spirits, including those of foreigners. The imperial ambitions that follow from the entrenchment of a social hierarchy and from the enrichment of the upper class are codified by a shift in the dramas enacted by the society’s religious mascots. As an emperor takes command of foreign territories, so one god must stand supreme in the pantheon to justify that growing earthly tyranny.

Yet the Catholic’s appeal to Jewish monotheism in support of a metaphysical rationale for Catholic tyranny or for the hope for the one true God’s eventual dominion over the entire universe is misplaced. Jews were far from ever having imperial intentions or capacities. Suppose the world were a high school class in which you’d have such stereotypes as the leaders, the bullies, the followers or henchmen, and the rude jokers sitting at the back of the class, laughing at the folly of high school games. Throughout history, Jews were those knowing jokers.

The essence of Judaism isn’t an imperial threat against humankind, although Jews did project their resentment with the hope for a messiah figure who would elevate the Jewish people. That apocalyptic side, we can say, is the worst of Judaism, the least interesting aspect on philosophical grounds. The heart of Judaism stems, rather, from the all-embracing moral perspective which Jews derived from Zoroastrianism during their Persian captivity.

What Jews evidently wanted, above all, is to understand their apparent existential predicament of being the perennial losers. Jews were conquered over and over, but unlike other downtrodden populations whose cultures were lost, Jews were never destroyed. What role, then, did Jews seem to be playing in history? That of the wisecracking outsider who chastises all deviations from some ideal of righteousness or purity.

The purpose of Jewish monotheism, of defining God as a transcendent abstraction or great unknown was to eliminate religion from political affairs, not to identify godliness with an idol. That’s the basis of Jewish satire: just as the joker sits at the back of the classroom, mocking everything in sight for falling afoul of an ideal that can never be achieved, Jews sit with their God and with their scriptures outside nature, as it were, so that their enduring aloofness can serve as a lesson for humanity.

All idols, including all empires that supposedly embody the will of some chief god are ridiculous from a Jewish perspective. Jewish monotheism is a basis for mocking the temerity of assuming that anything we could perceive might be perfect or might be as it ultimately should be. The Jewish God is nowhere, which means there’s no Jewish justification for theocracy, for a tyranny perpetrated in some religion’s name.

And this is the meaning of God’s coyness towards Moses. God stymied Moses’s attempt to isolate this newfound inspiration for Jewish culture. God would be nothing on earth because Jews had learned long ago the lesson of Plato’s cave analogy and of Shelly’s “Ozymandias” poem, that everything in nature comes and goes. Moral ideals are eternal because they’re only imaginary or surreal. In earthly reality, empires, too, come and go, just as each round of high school bullies and bullied students is replaced by another round, as the teens age and graduate.

In the Jewish scriptures God identified himself with the tautology, “I AM WHO I AM,” to make a satirical or an existential point rather than a metaphysical one. The point is that the reason for all the ills Jews suffered in history, and for their unlikely survival, too, is unobtainable. The flow of natural and of historical events is absurd. Saying that God has his reasons is of no help if that deity is beyond our grasp since that only confirms in a roundabout way that the answers are nowhere to be found.

God established distance between himself and Moses, the leader of the Jews, to back the Jews’ comedic standpoint with a mythic drama. Humour, Mark Twain may have said, is tragedy plus time. Time is the distance needed for objectivity, which enables the humourist to appreciate the absurdity at the root of all events. God is distant from the world just as Jews are distant from their persecutors and admirers. God’s transcendence brands Jewish aloofness and enables the Jewish comedic perspective on history.

What could be funnier and more ironic than a downtrodden people’s overcoming of empires that have long exhausted and overextended themselves, when the deity of those cockroach-like survivors is invisible and apparently powerless? The empires of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Catholics, and Nazis had their mighty megaliths and halls of power, and they all crumbled or were humbled in the political arena. By staying out of the fray, by keeping their comedic distance along with the god of their satirical power, Jews survived the onslaughts by sublimating their comedic resentment.

The Catholic’s bait-and-switch tactic

Thomas Aquinas, though, was trying to reconcile the different absurdity of Christendom, of the Church’s inheritance of the Roman Empire, with what seemed like the impeccability of Aristotle’s naturalistic philosophy. As Anthony Kronman shows in Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, Aristotle’s First Cause is the summit of nature’s intelligibility, not a transcendent, supernatural being. Nor is that primary cause, for Aristotle, a person who intervenes in nature.

Indeed, speaking of an anti-thing — and thus of a nonperson — that’s the inevitability of there being something rather than nothing is hardly inconsistent with atheism. Nothing Aquinas or Bishop Baron says about the metaphysically necessary being favours theists in their dispute with atheists.

Let’s confirm this by returning to basics. “Theism” means “the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe, without rejection of revelation,” where revelation includes intervention in nature, distinguishing theism from deism. “God,” in turn, in the monotheistic sense refers to “the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.”

Granted, then, the metaphysical abstraction of a necessary being might be supreme in being primary or the source of finite things that come and go in nature. But that’s not enough to distinguish this special being as God. To justify theism, this necessary being must also be the ruler of the universe.

Baron’s Thomism, then, is part of a bait-and-switch ploy. The appeal to God’s transcendence is meant to neutralize the atheist’s attempt to falsify theism by showing that God is nowhere in the perceivable universe. God was supposed to be in the “Heavens,” but it turned out that the Heavens are as natural and as flawed as the Earth, not a paradise fit for the Supreme Being. If God is nowhere at all, the atheist’s scientific methods are irrelevant. Theism isn’t an empirical hypothesis, nor is a miracle story a scientific explanation.

To that extent, of course, the Christian theist only shoots herself in the foot by ceding the entire knowable, perceivable domain of the natural universe to atheistic investigations. Baited with the metaphysical abstraction of the necessary being, of there being a nonentity whose essence is just to be in general, the Christian cleric performs a switcheroo, exchanging that theistic redoubt for an old-fashioned idol, namely Jesus the Son of God.

Metaphysical abstraction and vulgar analogies

Baron proceeds with this switch in stages. First, he appeals to some analogies that Thomism licenses. He says God’s like an author of a novel who isn’t a character in the authored story. The problem, of course, is that storytelling is something only people do, and people aren’t necessary beings or mere metaphysical abstractions. People are limited, contingent entities that evolve from animals and ultimately from nonliving matter and energy. People are fallible and have finite, contingent bodies. If God as the necessary being has no such specificity, God’s not like a story’s author after all.

What, then, is the real purpose of such an analogy? Is it meant to increase our understanding of God or to distract from the irrelevance of the philosopher’s abstract “God” to religion, or from the irrelevance of that metaphysical talk that’s consistent with atheism?

Baron appeals to another analogy to make sense of the Catholic’s triune conception of God: God generates an image of himself, his “Son,” and the two have such (narcissistic?) love for each other that they express that adoration with a “sigh,” which is the Holy Spirit, the third “person” of the Trinity.

But again, what’s the real purpose of that analogy? If in mystical reality God is supposed to be that necessary being that isn’t any more specific kind of thing, such as a person, an author, a lover, or a creator, isn’t an analogy that indulges in such vulgar notions a mere falsification and a distraction? Isn’t the clergy appeasing vulgar religious expectations, assuring the benighted laity that the elite, philosophical conception of “God” is just an elaboration on the fundamentalist’s literalism?

As a member of that elite, Baron duly dismisses such literalism, saying, “The Bible will sometimes imagine God as a human being walking around. Now only the crudest fundamentalism would say that that’s a univocal, accurate description of God. It’s an image that’s catching something of God’s manner of being.”

That last assurance, though, that the religious analogy isn’t wholly useless or misleading is key to the Christian’s bait-and-switch. If God is the metaphysical abstraction, precisely no comparison of God to something more limited ought to be more suitable than any other analogy. God would be exactly as like or as unlike a human as he would be like or unlike a tree, a rock, a fish, a chair, a can opener, or anything else. All those theological analogies would be subjective projections of the religious person’s preoccupations. None would be more accurate than any other.

The Christian’s dilemma

But the situation is worse than that because Baron isn’t consistent in his demotion of religious analogies. Along with most Christians, he makes an exception of Jesus. On the one hand Baron says the Bible is only being metaphorical when it compares God to a human being walking around on earth. On the other, he surely thinks God literally became a creature. Jesus’s divinity and his resurrection from the dead are supposed to be literal facts, not just metaphors.

Which is why Baron is indeed engaged in a bait-and-switch fallacy. He leads you down the primrose path with his Thomistic red herring of the impersonal necessary being, only to contradict all of it with the Church’s dogma that God isn’t so transcendent after all. Far from being a supernatural nonentity that’s beyond all idols, God supposedly walked the earth as a limited being, as a man rather than a woman, as a first-century Jewish carpenter rather than as, say, a twenty-first century American big tech billionaire. God became a human, not a squirrel, a turtle, or a blade of grass.

Bishop Baron thus faces a dilemma:

• Either these claims that distinguish Catholic Christianity as a religion (the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Trinity, the Eucharist, etc.) are best interpreted as analogies, in which case the elites should dismiss them in recognition of the atheistic upshot of metaphysical reasoning, or use these analogies on the laity in the way that a pet owner uses toys to distract and to pacify her pets
• Or the Church makes an exception and an idol out of that creed, in which case Catholic Christianity is self-contradictory.

It’s true that Aquinas saw the difference between the elite, Aristotelian abstraction of the First Cause or Necessary Being, and the vulgar God of Christianity, the personal, benevolent, miracle-working ruler of the universe. Aquinas spent countless pages of his systematic theology trying to connect the two, to explain why we should expect that the former would express itself as the latter.

But it’s also true that Aquinas personally repudiated his entire systematic theology, due to a religious experience he had. Reportedly, he said, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” As a result, he wrote no more quintessential medieval sophistry and casuistry.

It’s worth adding that so-called Christian humanism only muddled the Greco-Roman precedent. The Christian notion that personhood is potentially sacred and divine derives from the Mystery Religions, Orphism, Hindu mysticism, and Egyptian theurgy. Christianity came shortly after the Axial Age and after Alexandrian globalization, after all. Moreover, the Christian doctrine of original sin conflicts with humanistic optimism, as does the Christian’s demonization of pride as the ultimate sin.

The greatest atheistic argument

Baron says that Aquinas’s steelman formulation of the argument from evil is the best atheistic argument. “God is described as infinitely good,” Baron says. “Therefore, if God exists, there should be no evil. But there is evil. Therefore, God does not exist. That’s a darned good argument. That’s a really persuasive argument and I’ve thought this for a long time in apologetics and in higher philosophy, that that’s the best argument against God.”

Lots of theists would agree with Baron, that the argument from evil is the most compelling reason for atheism. But that’s yet another bait-and-switch. Theists flatter the argument from evil, as it were, only to distract from theism’s much greater problem. The theist easily handles the problem of unnecessary suffering in the world, just by tinkering with her protean analogies, by positing a hidden divine motive which is naturally beyond our comprehension.

No, the much greater problem is the one we just saw in critiquing Baron’s case: theistic religion comes apart when scrutinized. The more powerful atheistic strategy isn’t to appeal to the existence of evil, but to deconstruct religious language to show that theism is a jumble of self-contradictions. Baron’s theism is evidently incoherent since he tries to combine Thomistic metaphysics with Christian literalism.

Hence there’s no Christianity for atheists to refute; Christianity refutes itself.