One of the first Arab Christian theologians lived in Edessa in the late eighth and early ninth century. His name was Theodore Abū Qurrah.
It would seem his day was little different from our own. In his work called Theologus Autodidactus (which, roughly translated means “the self-taught theologian”), he writes about the situation in which he finds himself:
I grew up on a mountain where I knew no other people. One day, a certain need compelled me to descend to civilization and to the community of my fellow human beings, and I observed that they adhered to a variety of religions. One sect, adherents of the religion of the first Hanifs [i.e., pagans of the surrounding region], invited me to join their religion. They say . . .
I left them and was met by some Magians [i.e., adherents of Zurvanism]. They said, "Don't pay them any attention! They're not correct! Join us instead, as we have the truth." They say . . .
I left them and was met by some Samaritans. They said to me, "Pay them no regard! Join us instead, as we alone have the truth. We are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the beloved of God, the God of heaven and earth . . . As long as we keep his law, he is kind to us. When we disobey it, he punishes us and makes us suffer distress in this world . . ."
I left them and was met by some Jews. They said, "Pay them no regard! Don't join them, for they are in error! As for what they told you . . . "
I left them and was met by some Christians. They said, "Don't let what the Jews say lead you astray. God has already sent this Christ about whom they speak . . . . The only true religion is ours. Let no one deceive you."
I left them and was met by some Manicheans, who are also called Zindiqs. They said, "Beware! Don't follow the Christians or listen to the words of their gospel. We have the true gospel, the one that the twelve apostles wrote. The only true religion is ours, and we are the only Christians. Our master Mani alone understands . . . ."
I left them and was met by some Marcionites. They said, "Don't join them! Their error is great! Join us instead, as we have the true gospel. About it and its interpretation our master Marcion was the most knowledgeable . . . ."
I left them and was met by [a] Bardaisan [i.e., a follower of the Syriac Christian poet and philosopher]. He said to me, "Don't listen to them! They're not correct! Join me instead, for I have the truth. . . ."
I left them and was met, lastly, by some Muslims. They said, "Don't listen to any of those you just met! They're just a bunch of infidels who associate partners with God. The only true religion is Islam, which God sent to all people through his prophet Muhammad . . . . For those who do good, the reward is paradise. . . . In it, for pleasure, there will be women with black eyes, ones that neither jinn nor men have touched, as well as whatever other good things a person desires . . . . For those who do evil, he has promised hell, the fires of which are not extinguished."
- Lamoreaux (trans.), pp. 1-6 (§D200-210)
Is this not the situation of our day? We also have Jewish, Christian, and Islamic options, and various divisions within each, and perhaps a slightly different array that includes Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, but we find ourselves in the same boat on the same river of confusion. Perhaps we have fewer opportunities to descend from a mountain, but Theodore encountered the same bewilderment that accompanies competing religious claims.
How should one approach such a situation? Many modern people adopt a calloused skepticism, rejecting all options for a variety of reasons: because no one option immediately stands out as superior, because of a belief that there is no such thing as truth, or sometimes just because they simply don’t know how to proceed.
This is certainly an understandable response to so many competing options, but how might one actually move forward? Theodore began by comparing those options:
After meeting all these people, I began to reflect on what each had said and realized that all of them both agreed and disagreed about three things. As for what they agreed on, each claims to have a god, to have something permitted and forbidden, and to have a reward and a punishment--with one or two exceptions. As for what they disagreed on, they disagree with one another as to the attributes of their gods, as to what is permitted and forbidden, and as to what the reward and the punishment will be. Again, I reflected: Because God is kind and generous, when he saw his creation deviating from the true worship, he would have sent them messengers and a book, both in order to show them the true worship and to return them to it from their sins. And yet, there are many messengers and many books, and they disagree with one another! One of two things must be the case: either not even one of these messengers has come from God, or there is among them just one true messenger. -- ibid., p. 6 (§D211-212)
Theodore understood the option that appeals to many modern people, that perhaps none of the options on display were true, but he was not as ready to jettison the promise of religion nor the idea that the truth might exist amidst various falsities. Perhaps it was the relative harshness of life, but ancient people were more likely than Americans to accept the idea that the pursuit of truth should be difficult. They were also less likely to see happiness and truth as pursuits that were at odds with one another.
For Theodore, it was a non-negotiable that if God existed, he must be kind and generous. Modern people might find this perplexing or problematic. Here, however, was the way Theodore thought about it. If God exists, he must be the source of all life, and he must have made people in a way that reflected his own attributes. That is, a God who values goodness will not create people who value evil. In other words, there is a genetic argument here. To say, as Christians do, that God created people in his own image and likeness is to say that God created people with virtues similar to His own. At odds with the flimsy validity attached to the merely philosophical (and sensational) possibility of the Cartesian Deus deceptor, why should God do otherwise? If people value generosity over parsimony and kindness over meanness, we should expect God to value generosity and kindness, and therefore to take action on behalf of people.
One need not be Christian to make this move. One only need to posit a creator who would create in accordance with his own values. This is not an unreasonable expectation, if God exists. And remember, all the religions surveyed by Theodore (with just a few exceptions) agreed on that.
Theodore’s Parable of the Hidden King
Theodore frames our situation with a parable:
[The] situation was like that of a king's son, one with a father . . . whom no one had ever seen, apart from his closest and most intimate friends. When a need arose in a certain country, he sent his young son to take care of it. To protect him from disease, he also sent one of his physicians, whom he appointed his son's wazir [i.e., advisor or minister]. (Neither the son nor the physician had ever seen the king.) The youth went to that land, where he neglected the physician and fell gravely ill.
On learning of this, the father's love for his son would let him neither leave him in this state nor neglect him. He thus wrote his son a letter. In it, he spoke of three matters. First, he described himself. Secondly, he described for the youth his disease and what habits had brought it about, forbidding him also from continuing to practice them. Thirdly, he described for him a medicine and how it would heal him, as well as how to conduct himself in the future in order to enjoy health and ceaseless felicity, that no illness might befall him ever again. . . . The king then summoned one of his messengers and gave him the letter, ordering him to travel to his son and deliver it. The messenger took the letter and set off to take it to the youth.
The king had many enemies . . . . Because of his might, however, there was no way for them to harm him. When they learned that the king's son had taken ill, that his father was disturbed by this, and that he had thus sent his son a messenger and a letter--when they learned . . . that they may have found an opportunity to hurt the king through his son, each of them quickly got ready a messenger and forged a letter in the king's name. In these letters, they described the king, but falsely, and forbade the king's son from what is helpful while at the same time ordering him to do what is harmful. They also sent him a medicine, which would kill him if he drank it. Their messengers took the letters . . . overtaking the king's true messenger before he could deliver his letter.
Having arrived together at the residence of the king's son, the messengers delivered their letters. On reading their letters, the king's son found that all disagreed with one another--about the description of the king, about what his father had commanded and forbade, and even about the medicines. He thus summoned them . . . [and they] declare[d] one another and all the others to be liars, while at the same time affirming themselves to be the true messengers. As for the true messenger, he was right there among them, declaring them liars and being declared by them to be a liar.
-- ibid., pp. 6-7 (§D212-214)
Is this not the very situation modern people find themselves in? Are not its contours the same? Is not the focal point here the dizzying confusion? In the parable, the king’s son became confused because he did not know whom to believe. The distant king whom neither the son nor the physician had met is God. The son represents each of us. The various messengers represent Moses, Christ, Muhammad, Buddha, Hindu teachers, etc. Their various books represent the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Tipitaka, the Vedas, etc. But then there is the mysterious physician:
The physician then said to him, "Send them away for now. I'll find a way to distinguish among them. After all, I'm a physician and I understand these matters, which fall within the purview of my profession . . . . I too understand the habits that cause illness and the states that lead to health. Further, I know your father's attributes from your own likeness, for you are his son--even though I've never seen him. Come, let's first examine these messenger's medicines, what the king forbids and commands you in his letters, and his description of himself. If someone has a medicine that does good constantly; if there is in someone's letter a description of the habits that I know lead to illness and these he forbids you, while at the same time he commands you to do what leads to health; if there is in it a description of your father that, on comparison, is found to agree with your likeness--if all this is true, I say, he must be the true messenger of your father." -- ibid., pp. 7-8 (§D214-215)
Obviously, the physician is here playing a critical role, but who is he? According to Theodore, the physician is the mind, and each must apply it to problem at hand using some key questions. Theodore will go on to evaluate the religious options of his day, addressing both Judaism and Islam, according to these key questions. The rest of his work is worth reading, but what interests me most here is the way he frames the problem. To help us discern the true from the false, he poses questions a physician would ask: What medicine is recommended by each option? Does it suit the problem, and does it actually heal? And a physician is also well-postured to answer the question of genetic similarity, namely, which descriptions of God are most consistent with the world he created, especially people? Where identifiable (and appropriate) likenesses may be discerned, that God is more likely the true God.
Let’s apply the physician’s questions to a worldview. If one criterion is to measure a system by the lasting efficacy and suitability of the medicine it prescribes, then it becomes rather easy to evaluate a system like atheism. Since it lacks any basis upon which to differentiate the good from the bad, indeed, to even allow for a good and bad, we are faced with an immediate problem. Since there is only preference and power, competition and evolutionary advantage, unless the employment of such categories fulfills our highest sensibilities for the treatment of our young and for helping them to find meaning and purpose, the system can be discounted as a non-viable alternative. Indeed, it would seem that there is only moral disadvantage.
Moreover, under such a system, there is no God who creates, and therefore no semblance may be had with people (for how could there be?). According to Theodore’s genetic criterion, this also disqualifies atheism from serious consideration.
Now, the atheist will not appreciate the flippancy of this disregard, but if he is right, there is no true good or bad, no objective truth or falsity, no transcendent and universally-binding principles of rationality (only variant subjective perspectives of the individual), and no accepted standard to which we can appeal to establish that something is reasonable, so why should I care to do justice to his position? It is neither right nor wrong to do so, and even to make my case or his is to appeal to a fictitious, or in any case untrustworthy and subjective, rationality. In the competition of ideas, it is not a matter of which is more reasonable but which I prefer.
Moreover, amongst the options, the atheist represents that category of exception that is discountable (by Theodore) simply because it clearly does not appeal to the majority. And this is a stronger argument than it may at first seem because, if we truly came into being according to mere natural processes, it would stand to reason that many more people would find meaning in that origin story. People tend to have a sense about their mothers.
On the other hand, if the idea of nature as our mother is so commonly found to be unpalatable and existentially bankrupt, doesn’t that lack of congruence suggest that our origins and teleology lie elsewhere? That is, why should we assume that mother nature’s accomplishment was to “beget” most of her children without the ability to recognize their true origin, and without the ability to accept from her any viable meaning or purpose? That seems a rather strange assumption.
Why should the majority of us accept the proposition that the small minority of people who are atheists are the only ones privileged by nature to reliably recognize their mother? This strikes me as both ridiculous and elitist.
Upon those premises, rather than assume that that minority represents the next stage in evolutionary development, as they would have us believe, doesn’t it seem more likely that they represent that type of mutation that is infertile and vestigial, which angrily kicks against its natural demise by hoping to forge a place for itself by overturning the stability of the majority’s intuitions–intuitions given to them, mind you, by the same mother?
I should think these people would tread more carefully. Their system undermines objective right and wrong, good and bad. Advantage is gained through competition; existence through proving superior to and outlasting the old, sometimes even by literally eating the old. In this setting of amoral competition, atheists should count their good graces that built into the perspective of the majority (whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, or otherwise god-fearing) is an inherent resistance to employ the atheist’s own principles against him. Elsewise, why not view him, in his minority station, as a mutated virus or bacterium that’s harmful to the majority? Isn’t it quite convenient for them that we don’t do to them what befits harmful viruses and bacteria? I have little confidence that they would return the favor. While we exercise restraint, they leech off the majority’s goodwill with no acknowledgement or gratitude. Figures. There is little evidence in nature that parasites, exhausting their host’s life with insatiable appetites, are grateful to their hosts. We should not be surprised. Is it any wonder that they feel no compunction about denuding the majority, when their moral and ethical compasses have no true north, pointing only toward the magnetism of personal preference?
Theodore’s approach flicks away skeptical and atheistic worldviews with little regard–with a certain lack of compunction that is as offensive to the atheist as we find the atheist’s ingratitude when we thwart his tenacious attempts to saw off the branch upon which he sits. Theodore, at least, may be forgiven, for his perspective owes to his historical circumstances. The atheist’s lack of scruples is contumelious and impolite–the bitter product of a recipe that mixes elitism, ingratitude, and myopia with a few dashes of scorn. It is simply not the medicine for what ails us.
Theodore’s method may have casually made mince-meat of atheism, but it will not so readily dismiss all the religious options before us. While its evaluative power and prowess remain, its application will require greater skill and nuance. It may very well require some medical and pharmacological training–a comprehensive study of mankind, his ailments, and what remedies are fitting, effective, and permanent. May your physician discern the true king, avoid the poisons, and find healing that lasts.