Atheism and the Irony of Religion

Irony has always been, well, ironic. Take for example Aristophanes, great ancient Greek satirist of whom Nietzsche said ‘that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose sake one pardons all of Hellenism for having existed’, and his play The Clouds. In a famous scene Socrates muses on the origins of clouds, their possible genesis in the condensation of water vapour; the clown then goes on to ridicule Socrates, because everybody knows that the Gods give us clouds… The irony should be obvious to all of us: Aristophanes’ ironic and ‘ridiculous’ explanation, imputed to the sophistic and ridiculous philosopher, is of course the truth. Perhaps the above should be proposed as the actual logical formula for irony, that is, a reflexive turn on irony itself. So take instead, a short sketch I heard on the radio the other week. A man is listening to a program when he hears ‘this painting is truly iconic.’ The man then goes on a rant to his partner: ‘I hate the use of the word iconic. Everything is iconic these days (etc.) Nobody seems to know what the word iconic actually means!’ The program then, rather predictably, goes on to say ‘It depicts the virgin Mary and Jesus Christ…’ What this limp joke shows is that the simple take on irony doesn’t actually work – irony requires two levels to be effective. Because the fact is here, the joke is not simply on the disgruntled old man from the joke, it is on the joke itself, because what the joke fails to see is that the man’s criticism is simply wrong. What the correct and proper use of language fails to capture is that the incorrect use is precisely part of the impartation of meaning. Take the word ‘literally’, as in ‘I was literally dying’. The common sense criticism, ‘no, when you say literally, you actually mean figuratively’, misses the point: it is through the disjunction between the literal meaning of the word and its usage that gets the message across. And this brings me to my real point, the posters I have seen around Imperial campus saying ‘God’s not Dead – evidence for the existence of God’. Incidentally they remind me of another failed joke, a line of graffiti with the lines ‘God is Dead, Nietzsche’ followed by ‘Nietzsche’s dead, God’. Alenka Zupançiç correctly points out that a funnier version of the joke would be something like ‘God is Dead, and actually I don’t feel too good either…’ My initial reaction, and I suspect the initial reaction of many, was ‘How stupid. There is no proof that God exists, and if there were it would be self-defeating because God needs faith.’ This is of course the old Douglas Adams joke: the Babelfish is so mind bogglingly useful that God must have made it. This is proof for God so now we can know, instead of having to believe, God exists. But without faith God is useless, so God disappears ‘in a poof of logic’. But the true irony here is double: there is no such mind bogglingly useful thing as a Babelfish, so for Douglas Adams, perhaps God existed after all; when God disappears in a ‘poof of logic’ does not Douglas Adams open up the space for people to believe in God again? After all, we must recall that Wittgenstein’s famous ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ that closes the Tractatus was not an assertion of the impotence of the that-which-cannot-be-spoken, but rather an assertion of the sacrosanct nature of the super-linguistic (music, God etc.) If anyone doubts this just think of the meaning of You Know Who in Harry Potter. This is why I prefer the recent Pears and McGuinness translation to the famous Ogden one; the final line reads ‘What we cannot speak must be passed over in silence.’ Here the religious element of Wittgenstein’s thought is brought out fully (Passover/passed over). So when Douglas Adams kills off God, does he not really put him back in the proper place for mystical divine worship? What should be noted is that, despite the same conclusion reached (God can be worshipped), these two strands of irony at work in Douglas Adams’ joke (there is no Babelfish; if God is killed by logic, God can be resurrected for spirit) are formally at odds with each other. This is why we shouldn’t just dismiss the ‘God is not Dead’ poster because without faith God dies, Adams has shown that God is a tougher cockroach than that. This is why Dawkins always seems to miss the point in his criticism, cogent though it is. Neither is it correct to, as Nietzsche and the Romantics attempted, to adopt a heroic posture of anti-theological passion, with all of Satan’s ‘Evil be thou my Good’ and so on. This is clearly preserving the place of God by killing God off. Instead our attitude to God was properly described by Brecht. ‘If you were to find out tomorrow that God doesn’t exist, would anything change? If so, then you have your answer. You already need God. If not then stop worrying.’ Or as Chomsky brilliantly put it, ‘what exactly am I supposed not to believe in?’