AA meetings are crowded with God Talk—you can’t just stop drinking, you have to endure, or rather solicit, a “spiritual awakening,” an acquaintance with a ”higher power,” a reckoning with “your own conception of God.” Every meeting, you’ll hear people announcing the surrender of their will to this variegated God (“I let go, I let God”) and enumerating the happy results, which typically center on an equanimity (“serenity”) retrieved from the anxiety-inducing chaos of unforeseen but everyday events. Everyone knows that sobriety can’t last without the peace of mind brought by “spiritual experience.”
It’s this kind of God Talk that keeps real alcoholics out of the rooms. They know they have a drinking problem, but they don’t want to subject themselves to irrational religious training and doctrines. They don’t want to be treated as if they’re little children being herded into Sunday school, and they sure as hell don’t want to surrender their hard-won adult will to invisible, inexplicable, maybe even extra-terrestial (“non-human”) forces—a.k.a. that old “higher power.”
The Big Book, the Bible of AA, acknowledges this resistance to the program, and goes to great lengths in addressing it, to the unlikely point where faith gets justified by reason (and vice versa). Chapter 4, called “We Agnostics,” is the most poignant moment of the argument (on its composition in September 1938, see William H. Schaberg, Writing the Big Book [2019], pp. 279-87). Here Bill Wilson, the founding father, nailed down “the God idea,” as he conceived it, by turning the tables on the claims of reason that atheists and agnostics always enter against true believers—for example, “You can’t prove the existence of God by scientific methods,” or “Anything you cite as an product of God’s presence or purpose can be explained by his absence, by the simple measurement of material cause and effect” or “Faith in God is by its very nature irrational, thus impervious to criticism or falsification—so it’s destructive of civil political discourse because demonstrable facts don’t matter to the believer.”
Five pages into Chapter 4, having aired all the familiar complaints against mere faith and organized religion, but insisting that spirituality is indispensable to recovery, Bill makes his move: “The reader may still ask why he should believe in a Power greater than himself. We think there are good reasons. . . . Everybody nowadays, believes in scores of assumptions for which there is good evidence,, but no perfect visual proof. And does not science demonstrate that visual proof is the weakest proof. It is being constantly revealed, as mankind studies the material world, that outward appearances are not inward reality at all.” (my italics) Then he praises modern scientific inquiry as the solvent of ancient and medieval aversion to, or abstention from, that world. He asks: “Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material?”
He avoids the question for a few pages more, and finally admits that we agnostics won’t be converted by faith alone: “We agnostically inclined would not feel satisfied with a proposal which does not lend itself to reasonable approach and interpretation. Hence we are at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe.” (my italics) How so? Any degree of belief (“confidence”) in the power of reason to shape the world is a species of faith, a conviction of things as yet shapeless and unseen.
Now Bill had cited William James in Chapter 2 of the Big Book; his latest biographer, Susan Cheever, herself the alcoholic daughter of a famous alcoholic writer, suggests that Wilson’s encounter with James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was the turning point in the development of Bill’s broad-gauged, pluralistic “God idea,” which both permitted all sorts of centrifugal spirits and required some steadfast sort of spirituality. Chapter 4 is a proof of James’s cheerful negative: “The absence of faith is a mental nullity,” that is, an unreasonable test of reason’s clear limits.
For me, the key passage is a way of quietly saying that faith and reason are moments on a lived continuum, not the abstract terms of an either/or choice: “The consciousness of your belief is sure to come to you.” In other words, if you make a careful, empirical study of your faith, you will eventually understand that your reason has equally unreasonable origins. And, finally, vice versa.
I use AA as an introduction to another kind of classroom, the one I used to teach in. Once upon a time, I regularly taught the survey courses, the 100-level introductions to American history (it was common practice in my department to have senior professors teach these courses). When I taught 512:103, Development of the US to 1865, my favorite three sessions covered the Great Awakening, the religious revival that convulsed the colonies, north and south, from the 1730s into the 1760s.
I argued that the Awakening was a cultural revolution, a rehearsal for the social-political revolution that followed, and demonstrated the proposition by examining the content, the style, and the effects of New Light preaching. (The “New Lights” were the schismatics, the unwashed, untutored , unruly men, women, and, yes, children who wanted to reinvent Christian doctrine and its attendant congregations; Jonathan Edwards, the learned theologian who was an enthusiastic participant in the Awakening, was the exception to this demographic rule.)**
Sandwiched between my two painstaking lectures along these lines was an 80-minute class discussion of God and his vicissitudes. My purpose here was not to convert anyone to a belief in God, but rather to make sure that students would not condescend to the New Lights—as the established ministry of the colonies did—when writing their midterm exams, or when thinking outside the classroom about other forms of religious belief.
So the question was, “Why is it rational to believe in God?” I explained at the outset that the God I believe in is the creation of human beings, but is no less real for being that artificial: the Hoover Dam is artificial, but quite massively real. Here are the answers we came up with (pretty much the same ones from year to year), which I offer as collateral, provisional support of AA’s position on that old “higher power”: ***
(1) Equality. In the eyes of God, all souls are equal, each endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. From this angle, he differences between princes and paupers, rulers and ruled, males and females, are meaningless. What matters is the pilgrim’s progress toward his/her soul’s release from sin.
(2) Liberty. “A man knowes no more of righteousness than he hath power to act.” That’s Gerrard Winstanley, chaplain of the Diggers, the first communist sect outside of the early Christian churches, and minister to Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, in 1650. “What is Liberty in all its beauties? Is it not the resemblance of the God whom we adore?” That’s from an anonymous pamphlet of ca. 1744, at the height of the Awakening, asking us to see God as a freedom concept—that is, the unity of desire and will, the ability to realize one’s purposes by taking action, by creating new truths on this earth. “The joy of the Christian not only arises in knowing and viewing, but also in doing,” as another sermon from the Awakening put it.
(3). Morality. On Judgement Day, the quick and the dead are sorted into good and evil, and sent to the places they deserve. Meanwhile, God watches and waits, and we judge ourselves by criteria we attribute to him. In that sense, God is useful as a stand-in for a conscience, a moral compass that no one needs until the 16th century, when self-mastering individuals unbound by custom or tradition become the standard of adult comportment. By all accounts, God equipped human beings with free will, which they are free to use or not, as they see fit and their circumstances allow, in choosing between good and evil. Morality as such is inconceivable absent this equipment. So we share with God an abhorrence of the servile will, which afflicts those enslaved by their own depravity rather than by some external force. (Notice the intersection here with God as a freedom concept.)
(4) “A preferential option for the poor,” as liberation theology would have it. The God of monotheism appears first as an agent as well as a symbol of freedom. His heralds, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, lead their people out of captivity and oppression by the regnant powers of their time. If all are equal in the eyes of God, the weak, the poor, the meek, and the enslaved deserve his special attention, for their will has been bound not by their own devices—they have not chosen to be servile—but by an external force. All fundamental changes in moral climate come from this constituency. As Jonathan Edwards put it, in “Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival” (1742): “When God is about to do some great work for his Church, his manner is to begin with the lower end; so that when he is about to renew the whole habitable earth, it is probable that he will begin in this utmost, meanest, youngest and weakest part of it . . . and so the first shall be last, and the last first.”
(5) Love. Belief in God teaches us that every person deserves our attention, kindness, and respect, because all souls are equal in his eyes. This belief also teaches us that God loves us not because we deserve it, but because we need it. That is what Edwards told his congregation in his most famous (and most misunderstood) sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (also 1742). It is still what we need to know about love more generally—that it’s a gift freely given, and that, like faith and hope, it thrives on the conviction of things unseen, on things evident yet unknown.
(6). Revolution. If God is a man, a mere mortal—this notion is implicit in Judaism (the messiah) as well as Islam (the prophet), and made explicit in Christianity (the Son of Man)—why then the Kingdom of God is here and now, on this earth, in this lifetime, and no other. To love God is to love your neighbors, even the meanest, the youngest and the weakest among them, and, if they are still in bondage, to free yourself by unshackling them. Friedrich Schlegel was right: “The revolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God on earth is the elastic point of progressive civilization and the beginning of modern history.” (Philosophical Fragments, 1797-98, trans. 1991)
**I will elaborate on the content, style, and effects of New Light preaching if anyone is interested. When I was a mere youth in graduate school, I thought I might write a dissertation on the Great Awakening, in part because the untutored itinerant preachers (Gilbert Tennent, James Davenport, et al.) who reinvented the Gospel were so interesting and exciting, in part because writing it would let me study Jonathan Edwards more carefully. Not to mention Perry Miller and Alan Heimert, the two historians who never condescended to the New Lights.
***There are other answers, of course., all of which begin with “No, it isn’t rational to believe in God, and that irrationality accounts for the murderous history of monotheistic religions.” In conducting these class discussions, I was trying to let students understand the vital, central role of religion in American history, without the debunking attitude that most historians bring to the subject.
One wonders too if - or more likely, when - it's rational to believe in reason.
Which reminds me if a story...
I've been somewhat immersed in writings and thinking of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a pioneer of systems theory, family therapy (including addiction and schizophrenia), cybernetics, ecology, and biosemiotics.
My understanding is that he derives a Jungian-influenced dichotomy regarding natural phenomena into realms of Pleroma (the non-living: rocks, dirt, water, minerals & elements, etc) and Creatura (all living beings: humans and other mammals, birds & reptiles, microbes, aquatic life, etc). Oversimplifying, the Pleroma world is reliably measured and observed using tools of empirical reason, ones in which breaking subjects into constitutional parts is valid and yields accurate results. Reliably observing Creatura requires a different set of multi-contextual tools, ones focused on relationships among living constitutional processes, systems, and sub-systems. We can measure and predict states and motion of rocks using scientific methods. In Creatura we can only apply scientific rigor to states and motion - stimulus and response - in the relations among living systems and subsystems. We can't accurately understand living systems by breaking into parts.
There's more, obviously. Gregory Bateson is no hack.
Skipping to a conclusion: humans experience harm (ultimately manifesting in chaos or collapse - including for ex., alcoholism/addiction) when we apply tools suited for Pleroma to contexts in Creatura. To misapply thusly comprises what Whitehead & Russell characterize (_Principia_Mathematica_) as errors of logical typing.
Avoiding logical typing errors in Creatura leads to inquiry in which it's impossible(!) to ultimately derive everything. There's always another subsystem revealed below. In those spaces beyond, ecologies- both within systems and within subsystems- are phenomena understood and treated only in ways that Gregory Bateson (thoroughly and unequivocally atheist) related to "sacred" and "God".
How does one criticize AA without demeaning the efforts of those struggling with alcohol addiction? This person does a pretty good job. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/