Published on: November 26, 2014

Comparative Theodicy
Is Atheism a Specifically Western Phenomenon? Peter Berger
We know atheism in its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What
would atheism mean in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?
Adam Garfinkle, the editor of The American Interest, asked me this question. He told me that
he had met a Saudi who claimed to be an atheist: What does this mean? We know atheism in
its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What would atheism mean
in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?
My short answer is: Yes, Atheism, as we know it, came out of a Judaeo-Christian context. But
I would slightly re-phrase Garfinkles question. The dichotomy is not western/non-Western. It
is Abrahamic/non-Abrahamic. It is a rebellion against the monotheistic faiths that originated
in the Middle EastJudaism, Christianity, Islam. It makes much less sense in a nonmonotheistic environment.
The rebellion is triggered by an agonizing problem: How can God, believed to be both allpowerful and morally perfect, permit the suffering and the evil afflicting humanity? This is the
problem called theodicy, which literally means the justice of God; in the spirit of the
rebellion it is also a demand that God has to justify himself. The most eloquent expression of
this atheist rebellion in literature is by Dostoyevskys Ivan Karamazov rejecting God, because
he allowed the cruel murder of one child.
Within the Hebrew Bible the problem of theodicy is of course confronted in the Book of Job.
Its happy ending (Jobs restored good fortune) is probably a later redaction, intended to
assuage the outrage at Jobs innocent suffering. If one brackets the ending, the message is one
of submission to Gods will, whatever it may be.
The most radical version of this theodicy (if one can call it that) in the history of Christianity
is that of Calvinism. God, in his inscrutable will, has ordained from eternity who will be the
elect destined for heaven, and who the damned going to helland nothing an individual can do
or fail to do can change the divine edict. There is a certain (if perverse) grandeur in such faith.
In the early days of the Calvinist Reformation in France, an individual seeking church
membership had to promise to obey faithfully all Gods commandmentseven if he knew that
he would be eternally damned! And this at a time when Protestants were severely persecuted
in Catholic France!
The dominant theodicy in the history of Christianity was, if you will, more humane than the
total submission to God preached by the Calvinists. The inevitable focus was the figure of
Jesus Christ: The incarnate God took upon himself all the sins and pain of the world and
thereby initiated its redemption. How do the divine and the human qualities in Christ relate to
each other? This question pre-occupied theology in the first five centuries of Christian history.
If the divine is over-emphasized, Christ becomes like a god visiting the earth, similar to such
divine tourists (in the words of the church historian Philip Jenkins) as proliferate in Greek
mythology. If so, what is lost is the belief that Christ fully shared the human condition. If on
the other hand the emphasis is on the human, Jesus becomes a great and exemplary teacher,
but unavailable for the cosmic redemption proclaimed in the Gospel. Some sort of balance
had to be found. This search is lucidly described in Jenkins recent book, Jesus Wars. History

is not a theological seminarHistory is not a theological seminar. The theological issues were
intertwined with very vulgar political interests, such as those of the Christianized Roman
Empire and the rival patriarchs of Constantinople and Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. The
Council of Chalcedon, in the sixth century, tried to ratify a compromise between the
competing theological parties (and their political allies). The Chalcedonian creed, which was
by no means accepted by all churches (especially in the East) contains complicated and
abstruse formulations based on categories of Greek philosophy. These formulations are hard
to grasp by a modern mind. They do make sense when one recalls the basic intentionto insist
that Jesus Christ was both man and God.
In the early history of Israelite religion, the concern was not the fate of the individuals but that
of the chosen people. The Book of Job dates from a later period, when an individual theodicy
was required in addition to the collective one. But it is probably correct to say that for most
ordinary Jews through the ages theodicy means the message of the unedited conclusion of the
Book of Jobit is not for us to question the ways of God but simply to worship his
overpowering majesty.
The same applies to most ordinary Christians. As Judaism became more theoretically
reflective, other ideas came to add up to a theodicy. One was the idea of tikkun olam, literally
the repair of the universe. The universe has been damaged, it must be repaired through the
good works (ritual and altruistic), which will hasten the coming of the Messiah. The idea
originated in rabbinical Judaism around the first century BCE, but it received its most
imaginative versions in the Kabbalah, the mystical undercurrent of Judaism. In a recent post I
mentioned the cosmological mysticism of Isaac Luria, who taught in the 16th century in Safed
(in what is now northern Israel). Luria developed the fascinating idea that God himself is in
exile from the universe because of a cosmic catastrophe in which the vessels containing the
light of creation were shattered. The exiled God has become silent. Tikkun olam is the
retrieval of the shattered light and its return to God, not primarily by good works but by the
mystical exercises taught by the Kabbalah. Then the creation will be restored to its original
glory and all will be well again.
In Islam, the most recent in the trio of West Asian monotheisms, the motif of submission to
Gods will is at the core of piety. The very name of the faith is derived from the Arabic word
aslamato submit. Every gesture of Muslim prayer is the bodily expression of this attitude.
Again, it is in Sufism, the mystical undercurrent of Islam, that the austerity of mainstream
piety is softened. (The parallel with the Kabbalah is instructive.) A poem by Jalaluddin Rumi
(who founded the Order of Whirling Dervishes in Konya, Turkey) expresses this softer piety:
I prayed to you in the morning, and you didnt answer. I prayed to you in the evening, and
you didnt answer. For many years I prayed to you, you never answered. Then one day I heard
your voice: In my silence I spoke to you. (Gods exileGods silencethe anticipation of his
redemptive return.)
Suffering is endemic to the human condition, and so is the urge to overcome or at least to
explain it. Different attempts to satisfy this urge are not neatly divided geographically.
Theodicy in its full force is unlikely to appear in contexts shaped by the religious imagination
of the Indian subcontinent, as manifested in Hinduism and Buddhism (the latter could only
arise from the former). I have long argued that the most interesting religious dichotomy is
between Jerusalem and Benares (now called Varanasi)the city in which the Jewish Temple
stood, where Jesus was crucified and resurrected, where Muhammad began his nocturnal
journey to heavenand that other city, where millions of pilgrims continue to immerse

themselves in the holy waters of the river Ganges, and near which the Buddha preached his
first sermon after attaining Enlightenment. Of course I cannot develop this argument here.
Only this important point: The fundamental assumption of the Indian view of the cosmos is
reincarnationthe linked realities of samsara and karmathe endless cycle of rebirths and
deaths, and the cosmic law that the consequences of human actions, good or bad, are carried
from one life to the next. I would propose that in this view the Jerusalem problem of
theodicy evaporates.
This is why Max Weber called Hinduism (the same applies to Buddhism) the most rational
theodicy: The individual cannot thank anyone but himself for his good fortune, or blame
anyone else for his miserywhat happens to the individual is the (so to speak) mathematically
precise result of all his own past actions. The ultimate redemption is being able to escape from
the endless death-laden cycle of rebirths. Of course there are very significant differences
between Hinduism and Buddhism, and between various branches of these traditions. Since I
mentioned Weber, let me mention his useful distinction between the religious virtuosi and
the religion of the masses. The differences appear most sharply in the most sophisticated
expressions of the traditionssay, between the Hindu Upanishads (which assert that the self is
eternal and ultimately identical with the divine essence of the universe) and Buddhist
conceptions of emptiness (which include the proposition that the self is an illusion). The
differences are less acute on the level of popular religion as practiced by the masses.
Ordinary Hindus may pray for relief to any of the estimated 300,000 gods, ordinary Buddhists
to the thousands of bodhisatvas (who have attained Buddhahood but stay in the world out of
compassion for all sentient beingsin effects gods by any other name). Yet, on whatever
level of sophistication, the notion of reincarnation is pervasive.
Some years ago I said in an interview that everyone has something to learn from interreligious
dialogue. The interviewer asked me what I had learned from Hinduism and Buddhism.
Without much reflection I repliedthe vastness of time. The following Hindu myth may
explain what this means, and why this vision is a terrible one. The story is of a dialogue about
reincarnation between a holy man and Ishvara, the mighty Hindu god of creation. It takes
place in Ishvaras celestial palace. Suddenly the holy man stops his explanation of a passage in
the Upanishads. He laughs and points to a chain of ants crawling across the marble floor.
Then he says: Every one of these ants once was Ishvara, and will be Ishvara again
According to the stereotype, ask a professor a simple question and you get a lecture in return.
I guess that I have lived up to the stereotype. I still hope that you found it somewhat
interesting. At least you found out what elevated matters are discussed in Adam Garfinkles
shop.

A Response to Peter Berger

Cross-Cultural Atheism and Social Capital Adam Garfinkle

If pluralization depletes social capital, then might cross-cultural non-believers find some way
to join together to create new forms of social capital, both in situ and virtually via the internet
for example?

I have been learning from Peter Berger ever since I was in graduate school, but back then I,
like so many others, did it through books. Lately I have been able to learn from Peter more
directly, in conversations and in letter exchanges. It has been a joy as well as a continuous
edification, as is Peters new book, The Many Altars of Modernity, which I read on a five-hour
airplane ride earlier this week en route to California. Reading Peters writings these days, on
his blog and beyond, is like talking to him. You know the wisdom will be entwined with
literary wit and judiciously placed humor, and it invariably is. You can hear him write.
In answer to my question about the possibility, nature and consequences of cross-cultural
atheism, Peter has produced a miniature tour de force on comparative theodicy. I see from his
answer, however, that I asked the wrong question, or asked it in a misleading way. So let me
re-ask the question in discursive form.
I suppose what I should have asked is this: Given the accelerating power of pluralization to
upset and cast into doubt most traditional forms of religious belief, how will different forms
of disbelief, emanating from different cultural contexts, differ (and not) from the forms of
disbelief we in the West know bestthat of atheism arising out of Christian and Jewish
religion? So what I should have asked is broadernot just about belief or the lack thereof in
an Abrahamic creator God, but about belief or lack thereof in any system of religious ideas.
And the question flows from the assumption that any given form of rejected belief will take
much of its shape from what it is rejecting. George Williams once noted that you should be
cautious when you choose your enemy for you will grow to be more like him; I think one
can apply this basic idea orthogonally to the question at hand in the sense that a former belief
system becomes the enemy, so that what results from rejecting it may be closer in form to it
than what the denier may suppose or hope.
I probably should have made more explicit, too, that what interests me has to do with the
social capital that faith communities invariably build and sustain. So I am interested not just
in individuals parting with traditional creedal propositions, but also with them parting from
the communities in which those propositions are consensually held. As a sociologist, Peter
knows a lot more about the social aspects of religious communities than I ever will. I put it
this way because it seems to me evident that pluralization not only makes traditional religious
beliefs harder to hold, but also that it rends faith communities. But since human beings are
social animals and crave company, it is natural that people will seek new associative ties if
older ones lose their captivating power (gerund chosen carefully).
It follows, I think, that the problem of theodicy is far from the only reason people reject
religious belief. Some may reject not so much belief as such as reject the stultifying or
obsessive-compulsive or restrictive or even painful rites and laws of a faith community. I
doubt all that many people, believers or otherwise, spend a lot of time thinking about the
theodicy puzzle. Some never even pose the question, and I suspect that most who do pose it
go through the turnstile pretty fast in order to deposit the question into the proverbial toohard box. Those who do ponder it at length are not like the rest of us, who prefer less taxing
entertainments.

This takes me back to a question I asked Peter some years ago, and that resulted in a blog post
on the improbability of religious myths. My point, for those who missed it, is that the highly
improbable stories all religions tell about origins and the like are not atavisms from mythic
times nor are they the dizzy but engrossing ruminations of pre-modern mystical masters.
Rather, they are both tests and terms of association: If someone can believe something very
improbable, or at least claim they do, their membership in an in-group is strengthened and
through them the group itself is strengthened. To hold highly improbable beliefs people need
help, and that is precisely why such stories form the glue for the social capital they build for
in-groups so that they may more effectively face out-groups.
So what I am trying to ask now is, if pluralization depletes social capital, then might crosscultural non-believers find some way to join together to create new forms of social capital,
both in situ and virtually via the internet for example? In short, I am asking a sociological
question about the sum of individual behaviors.
I think this may, just by the by, help solve a problem that pops up in Peters aforementioned
book. One of the commentators to the book (and there are three Peter allows to carp at him),
Detlef Pollack, tries to take Peters logic to the syllogism woodshed. Berger no longer
believes that modernization leads to secularization, Pollack notes uncontroversially, because
that is a given in the book. But, writes Detlef, if modernization provokes pluralization, as
Berger still insists, and pluralization undermines religious certainties, the consequence must
be that modernization is accompanied by a weakening of religious convictions. That
proposition is the core of any secularization theory. (pp. 115-16) Detlef thus poses a cakeand-eat-it-to challenge: Berger will have to make a decision between abandoning the
secularization theory or adhering to the theory of undermining. Only if he also decided to
abandon the theory of undermining would he truly overcome secularization theory. But this he
does not want to do
This appears to be a weighty challenge, but only if one conflates the creedal aspects of belief
with the associative ties than inhere in a faith community. The reason Peter, and many others,
do not accept secularization theory anymore is that it is manifestly empirically false, or seems
to be. But what if modern faith communities thrive not because people believe, but because
they want to but cant, except with a lot of help from others? Hence the surge in
Pentacostalism, it seems to me, with its highly improbable and, indeed, outlandish
propositions. So perhaps modernization can undermine religious certainties but strengthen
faith communities at the same time. I think that possibility allows Peter to have his cake and
eat it, too. (I would like a slice, please.)
Which brings me back to my question about atheism and why I asked it in the first place.
People want and need to belong, so that rising numbers of non- or ex-believers from nonWestern cultures are not all destined to either become Pentacostals or remain hermits or social
outcasts. They, together with Abrahamic non-believers, could form a new twelve-step
organization called Deities Anonymous, perhaps. The question is whether they will do
anything together or not. I suspect in time that many will. Who will do this, how, with what

enticements, and to what broader social consequences I have not a clue. I would probably be
better off pondering theodicy.