Si Dios no existe...: sobre Dios, el diablo, el pecado y otras preocupaciones de la llamada Filosofía de la Religión

by Leszek Kołakowski

Leszek Kolakowski discusses, in a highly original way, the arguments for and against the existence of God as they have been conducted through the ages. He examines the critiques of religious belief, from the Epicureans through Nietzsche to contemporary anthropological inquiry, the assumptions that underlie them, and the counter-arguments of such apologists as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal.

His exploration of the philosophy of religion covers the historical discussions of the nature and existence of evil, the importance of the concepts of failure and eternity to the religious impulse, the relationship between skepticism and mysticism, and the place of reason, understanding, and in models of religious thought. He examines why people, throughout known history, have cherished the idea of eternity and existence after death, and why this hope has been dependent on the worship of an eternal reality. He confronts the problems of meaning in religious language.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Essays, Nonfiction, Faith

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Distinguished Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analysis of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism. In his later work, Kolakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

In Poland, Kołakowski is not only revered as a philosopher and historian of ideas, but also as an icon for opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski "one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture".

Kołakowski died on 17 July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England. In his obituary, philosopher Roger Scruton said Kolakowski was a "thinker for our time" and that regarding Kolakowski's debates with intellectual opponents, "even if ... nothing remained of the subversive orthodoxies, nobody felt damaged in their ego or defeated in their life's project, by arguments which from any other source would have inspired the greatest indignation."

Reviews

[Judyta Szacillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book left me with very mixed feelings. I enjoyed it very much, but reading it was a struggle. I like most of what it says, but I disagree with the conclusions!

It is a journey through the history of religious fundamental questions and controversies, and of the unavoidable clashes between the ways of thinking conditioned by the Sacred and the Profane. This is not a book for the impatient: the narrative is florid, rich in metaphors and in philosophers' jargon; but it is also beautifully written and well-structured.

As a notorious fence-sitter, I was not surprised to discover that I often happen to agree and/or sympathise with both sides of the conflict between the sacrum- and the profanum-oriented ways of thinking. I was amazed to find the astonishing similarity in the phrasing used by the historical mystics, quoted by Kołakowski, and the modern particle physicists - more precisely, Brian Cox in his Quantum Universe, which I have read recently.

Brian Cox, apparently unaware of this likeness, deprecates any association of quantum physics with mysticism. I guess he did not read many mystics. Kołakowski, on the other hand, probably did not read much about evolution, as evidenced by his argument against one of the radical naturalistic theories of religion, a theory that suggests that religion evolved as a replacement for inborn mechanisms facilitating the survival of (pre-)human communities. I don't think it is a particularly convincing idea myself, but Kołakowski's argument against it is refutable: he thinks that the theory is made invalid by the existence of such religious tenets as the Christian demand to love one's enemy, or the Buddhist contempt for life. But I think there is no contradiction there. The history of evolution, and especially of all the inbreeding facilitated by human culture, is full of cases of very popular evolutionary traits that in time turned to be dysfunctional.

Yet the most important part of Kołakowski's conclusions that I don't agree with is his assumption that human dignity cannot be validated within a naturalistic concept of man, or that the lack of faith devoids the perceived world of any true meaning. With this I don't agree on the basis of my own perception of the world, which does not involve any elements of faith in higher powers, but it is not devoid of dignity, meaning, or sense. I believe in no gods, yet I am far from assuming that the nihilistic 'impersonal game of atoms' is all that there is to our lives. What science tells us is that, as a result of that game of atoms, we can (more or less) consciously watch ourselves and the world around us be. We are the eyes of the Universe, for gods' sake. How much more dignity can you want?

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Religion by Leszek Kolakowski

Fabulous! I will read this again



Religion is an extremely important issue, even for people who are still looking for definitive answers, like me.

In a world where people are killed in the name of religion, by the mindless IS extremists and the terrible gunmen in Paris who have murdered people the other day, understanding faith is vital.

And this fabulous book helps you make sense of an intriguing and exhaustive subject.

It is not a work that will just present various dogmas and let you figure them out, but an interesting analysis.

From the start we are presented with a point of view that contests the existence of God:

- Since the world is full of evil, then God is either evil, or powerless, or both”

- A God that is omniscient, all powerful and infinitely good would have been capable and willing to create a world without evil…

But then we live in the best of possible worlds runs the opposing argument of Leibniz.

We read on and find the opinion of Martin Luther and many other great Western or Eastern thinkers. This book is a gem.

- God is the One whose wish needs no cause or base- nothing is at the same height or above it, for it is itself the order of all things

- If there would be a cause, then it wouldn’t be the will of God. What God wants is right because He wants it.

- Causes are for creation not for the Creator, unless we place another Creator above Him…

Then we find some wisdom and keys to happiness and absolute bliss from the Eastern teachings, attributed to Buddha:

- The origin of suffering is desire, the end of suffering is giving up desire

But in this extraordinary book, the author does not limit himself to scholars of religion, for we listen to Nietzsche as well:

- The weak will perish…this is the first principle of our philanthropy…what is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the weak- Christianity

- Pity is depressive- when you feel pity you lose strength…pity is against evolution and the selection law…

And then back to Buddhist teachings:

- If we use our intelligence not to satisfy an ever increasing need for more things, but to try and suppress those useless desires and see the illusion-

- We can reach a state of plenitude!

Another interesting fact that for me demonstrates the variety of angles used to look at religion in this marvelous book has to do with animals:

- The suffering of animals is unjustified and therefore hard to explain. Why did God let the animals suffer, since they have no blame, no original sin?

CS Lewis is referred to here as dealing with this issue although not in entirely satisfactory terms.

Saint Tomas says that the core of Christianity lies in Revelation.

Others claim that the proofs of His existence are so overwhelming that it is like seeing Him in front of our eyes.

Dostoyevsky makes an excellent point:

- If there is no God, then everything is allowed

Someone else said that the idea of God is such that He must exist.

The world needs God to be what it is.

Angelus Silesius makes yet another poignant remark:

- The essence of God must exist even in the devil!!



Again- this is a mesmerizing book, full of wisdom, references and excellent analysis of various points of view, from across the world and spanning various cultures and beliefs.

[cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-balanced look at secular and religious (mostly Christian) claims to epistemological validity. TL;DR both must assume presuppositions--re: the existence of evil, the structure of 'truth', the comprehensibility of the infinite, the normativity of language--and thus neither are ultimately provable. This book helps both the atheist and theist reader take a step back from their meaning-making framework to better acknowledge their own (tacitly assumed) presuppositions and understand how others validly arrive at differing conclusions.

A generous, expansive read written in a flourishing hand. Way more interesting than my philosophy of religion course at King's because Kołakowski excels at drawing natural arcs with his ideas and writes better than many of the philosophers he quotes.

Lastly, as a theist, I wish this sort of meta-level discussion could (should? must?) exist more in religious spaces, but that's an essay for another day. :')

rec: Rachel L

A well-trained sceptic may see with his own eyes all the miracles reported in Jacques de Voragine’s Golden Legend and remain as untouched as a stone in his incredulity. He may always plausibly state that any natural explanation, however unlikely, of the supposed miracles is more likely, after all, than an explanation in terms of God’s interventions. This is a quaestio iuris, not facti: the point is not that some inveterate sceptics might, in fact, foolishly turn their eyes away from the irresistible evidence, but that they would have a perfect right to do so in terms of the intellectual patterns of modern knowledge which simply cannot assimilate such an event as a ‘miracle’. Consequently one is bound, in terms of this way of thinking, to assume that any explanation from ‘natural’ causes, no matter how implausible, is better than a supernatural one. (76-77)

Throughout the history of scepticism and of empiricism the legitimacy of this concept has been questioned. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the signs whereby we recognize truth and falsity are governed by normative rules which in their turn require justification; these rules cannot be inferred from the empirical material which, precisely, is subject to epistemological examination. Therefore, in defining an operative notion of truth we face an unpleasant choice: either an infinite regress or a discretionary decision, and in the latter case everything is indeed permissible. Consequently an empirical epistemology founded on psychological or physiological investigation is in principle, and not just contingently, ‘inconceivable’; strictly speaking it is an absurdity. (83)

But seemingly analogous trends in modern times usually pursue the opposite end: to shield the Sacred from the rapacity of the Profane, to uphold the legitimacy of faith in its encounter with rationalist doctrines, to assert the rights of religious life within a culture which has canonized its own secularity… Apart from those who–like the Modernist thinkers just mentioned–drew a line of demarcation between two realms in the hope of their future non-interference, our saeculum illuminatum et illuminans has begotten more searching and rebellious spirits who realized that the clash was real and not merely the result of conceptual misunderstanding or logical sloppiness. They opted for God against, and not in addition to, the world. They did not try to appease secular Reason by finding a modest enclave sheltered from its voracity and by begging for permission to survive, they attacked its intrinsic inability for to cope with worries which are bound to be crucial in our life–unless they are concealed mala fide–and they expressed the revolt of faith, well aware of its status as a foreign body, indeed a fearful disease, in this civilization. The Russian Jew, Leon Shestov, and the Spaniard, Miguel de Unamuno, belong to this category; their way had been paved by the great nineteenth-century foes of Enlightenment–Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche–people who refused to negotiate with a self-satisfied rationalism and progress, who refused to patch up the antagonism. (135)

Thus the language of myth is in a sense closed or self-supporting. People become participants in this communication system through initiation or conversion and not through a smooth transition and translation from the secular system of signs. Whatever people say in religious terms is understandable only by reference to the entire network of signs of the Sacred… Whoever says seriously ‘I have sinned’ does not mean merely that he has committed an act which is contrary to a law, but also that he has offended against God; his words are not meaningful unless they are referred to God and thus to the whole area of faith, hence they are bound to be considered unintelligible by a consistent non-believer… This is not to say that the sense of such a sentence is purely ‘expressive, ‘exclamatory’ or ‘prescriptive’; it does include a ‘factual’ statement, an assessment of the ‘fact’ in the full context of faith, and a personal emotional attitude. These three aspects of meaning can be singled out analytically, yet they are not separated in the speaker’s mind, they are merged in one undifferentiated act of worship.
To admit that the language specifically designed to express the realm of the Sacred cannot be translated without distortion into the language of the Profane does not suggest at all that the latter, as opposed to the former, is natural, genuine, objective, descriptive, presuppositionless and apt to convey the truth. First, everyday profane speech teems with words which are value-laden or refer to unverifiable facts, in particular to our ‘inner’ states. A strictly ‘empirical’ or behaviourist language has never existed, it is an artificial concoction of philosophers and psychologists… The moral qualities of human actions as well as their intentional background are not intellectual supplements to perception, they are perceived directly as aspects of a human sign system (my perception may be wrong, of course, as no perception is by its very content safeguarded against error). (178-179)

Everything goes back to the same anxiety: is the world of our perception the ultimate reality which people have embellished with a non-existent ‘meaning’ according to their various psychological and social self-defence mechanisms, thus preventing themselves, by those artificial adornments, from seeing the world as it is? Is the eternal reality a dreamy fabrication of our yearning after security? Or is the world more like a screen through which we dimly perceive a meaning and an order different from that which rational investigation can provide us with? Is the very quest for security, far from being a phantasmagoric sublimation of the natural and universal fear of suffering, a sign of our share in the eternal sense-endowed order, of our status as meta-physical beings, a status we may almost, yet never entirely, forget? Does a phantom-God blur our vision of things or, on the contrary, does the world veil God from our sight? (209-210)

[Rhesa]

I bought the older Fontana Masterguides edition of this book in a secondhand bookstore in a remote city of Australia called Tweed Heads, which is in the border of New South Wales & Queensland. What made me buy this is because I know Leszek Kolakowsi is a Polish Marxist philosopher, he authored the reputable 3 volumes of Main Current in Marxism.

But to my surprise, in this book he is somewhat is in favor of religion. I haven't really read this book, but I hope someday I will cuz I'm always interested on knowing what how the non-believers percieve religion, God & faith. Sometimes they are more honest & articulate than those religion leaders.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to read if you are not a theologian or philosopher. But the author does provide a lot of points for the validity of believing in God. I enjoyed his chapter on God of the Mystics the most. It was the most readable in my opinion.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I don't agree with the premise in this book that religion is necessary for moral foundations, the arguments for and against a religious existence are quite compelling.

[Ioana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The law of infinite cornucopia

”Everything good or bad which happens to us down here in this world is written up yonder.” used to say Jacques the fatalist, the star of the eponymous picaresque novel, to his master. He then went on to add: ‘You may preach as much you like, and your reasons may perhaps be good ones, but if it’s written in me or up yonder that I shall find them bad, what would you have me do?’ I am to this day, 15 years or so later, still heartened by Jacques unequivocal (at least discursive) complacency. Its author was an unmistakable obstinate atheist, who (street word goes) didn’t shy away from calling Voltaire “an enchanted castle whose various parts are falling apart,” but whose corridors were “still inhabited by an old sorcerer.”
What could sway Jacques' conviction? As long as Jacques' epistemological system is consistent with its own rules, it remains doubtful that Jacques could ever vet a system that would be tautologically bulletproof. Say you rrreally want to sway good ol’ Jacques, impervious to Gödel's sentries. Maybe Jacques would utter some sanctimonious nonsense like “God is the prime mover” or “man is a featherless biped”. Here comes running your barrel-philosopher - he just spat at you and plucked the feathers from a very (now) unhappy cock. “Here’s your man”, he boastfully intones while showing off his cock, for all to see and hear. But Jacques is unperturbed; steadily, he shares an addendum: ”with broad flat nails”.

[Rakeela Windrider · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a stimulating but frustrating read. The cognitive nihilism that the author sees in atheism is faulty, but that was far overshadowed by the end of the book, wherein the author seriously defended the appalling concept, "Without God, everything is permissible." Has this author never heard of empathetic constructions of ethics? Furthermore, though I cannot find the page among the many that I marked, I remember him as asserting that moral prescriptions are arbitrary and of unknowable origin. My discussions of the book with my husband made my husband wonder of the author, "Is this a high-functioning sociopath?" The presence or absence of God simply should not impact moral convictions. A benevolent god would favor benevolent convictions, and a person who would be benevolent should do likewise!

[Lazarus-II · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5 or 9/10

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Le asserzioni di verità delle religioni istituzionalizzate sono state ripetutamente accusate di essere i più rozzi circoli viziosi: la parola rivelata deve essere creduta perché la Chiesa dice che è vera, e quello che la Chiesa dice è vero perché la sua autorità si basa sulla Rivelazione (questo dilemma venne forse meglio esemplificato dalla vecchia barzelletta ebrea dei due chassidim che contestano la bravura dei rispettivi tsadik. «Ogni venerdì sera», dice uno di loro, «Dio conversa con il nostro tsadik». «Come lo sai?», domanda l’altro. «Ce lo ha detto lo tsadik in persona». «Ma forse ha mentito?». «Come osi accusare di menzogna un uomo con il quale Dio conversa tutti i venerdi?»)." (p. 201)

[Jamey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first chapters are a thrill, as is the last, with its lucid demonstration of the ease with which one can flip the frame of reference in a discussion of what religion “really” is. Freud says theism arises from our projection, onto the cosmos, of our fantasy of a strong father who will protect us. But as Kolakowski shows, one could also say the reason God gave us human parents (i.e., invented sexual reproduction) was to equip us to appreciate the Divine. And so on.

[Paszko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Książkę można przeczytać w 2 dni, jednak zostawia człowieka kompletnie bez energii. Kołakowski używa zaawansowanego języka naukowego, stawia nas w pozycji student pierwszego roku - wykładowca fizyki.
Całość rozważań można podsumować prosto: na dowolny temat, można przedstawić dowolną liczbę argumentów za, jak i przeciw.
Książka daje na pytanie czy religia czy sceptycy mają rację daje jednak odpowiedź: 42! To są dwa różne światy i nie ma sensu ich mieszać :D