Armstrongism, Popular Atheism and Their Shared Concept of God
This topic must be introduced by stating that while there is a theme here, the categories are not clean. Is Armstrongism the same thing to every follower? Some Armstrongists would contend that it is not. But for this topic, all forms of Armstrongism are sufficiently similar. And certainly, atheism can take on a variety of guises. In the apophatic realm, the various forms of atheism are nearly identical in their denial of the existence of god or gods. In the cataphatic realm, it is difficult to identify what atheists do believe in, if not god. For this writing, I will use the views of pop atheists such as those found in the Dawkins-Hitchens-Dennett class.
Forese and Bader have identified four principal Judeo-Christian gods that North Americans believe in. So it should not be surprising that Christianity and its parasitic cults would not be united in a single viewpoint on god. The assertion of this article is that among these views of god, the god that pop atheists do not believe in is the same class of god that Armstrongists do believe in.
In Brief: The Pop Atheist God
Garrison Keillor made the statement once that in the Scandinavian communities in Minnesota even the atheists are Lutheran because it is a Lutheran god that they do not believe in. One cannot merely state that god does not exist without explaining who the rejected god is. Otherwise, we do not know what they are claiming to reject. For example, I am a Christian but I do not believe in the god that pop atheists write about with such vitriol. This would be, roughly, the Dawkins-Hitchens-Dennett god. In that narrow scope, I suppose I could be designated an atheist in relation to that particular god. I don’t believe that god exists either.
In brief, the Dawkins-Hitchens-Dennett god is not the god that the Bible claims created all things ex nihilo. They seem to be mechanistic materialists and, I believe, have fashioned for themselves a god that conveniently succumbs to materialist arguments. This is why they mistakenly believe that evolution or Memetics disprove the existence of god. For them, there is the material universe and nothing else. They can apply the scientific method to this universe and make discoveries but there is nothing that transcends materialism. The only thing they address is the contingent (made and sustained from outside; having no capability to self-create; not required logically) universe because that is the only thing they permit. And their concept of god, their “straw man”, is a powerful, mythic being who may fabricate and manipulate things such as phenomenal artifacts, energies, and physical processes and by examining materialism they may disprove this god’s existence.
The notable flaw in this line of reasoning is that the pop atheists mistakenly believe that god is like a contingent object among other contingent objects and not a necessary (uncreated, self-sustaining, logically required) being. They are barking up the wrong tree. For example, Dawkins’ view is that that the existence of god should be treated as a scientific hypothesis like any other. He does not recognize that when Christians, and others, speak of god they are speaking of the Being who created “being” itself. These atheists assume being or existence as a part of the ontological baseline and focus on lower order discernible artifacts, energies and processes like evolution. Then they mistakenly believe that a sufficient accumulation of such contingent physical phenomenon will make god unnecessary in order to explain the universe. It is fundamentally a category error – the god they conceive of is like a powerful man, Zeus rather than Yahweh, immanent in and subject to the universe but not transcendent.
The result is that these atheists do not disbelieve in god but in an anthropomorphic concept that they call god. Hence, for them, god becomes a sort of demiurge (q.v. Wikipedia) in Platonic philosophy.
In Brief: The Armstrongist God
Herbert W. Armstrong defined for his followers a god that has the characteristics listed below. These ideas do not seem to be Millerite in origin. It is possible that this profile of God was developed by HWA in the public library in Des Moines, Iowa or progressively over the years in the Worldwide Church of God with input from others. Here we might have “The Seven Principles of Armstrongist Anthropomorphism”:
1. God has a body in human form, not an acquired body but an essential body – he has always had a body. When it says in the Bible that God lifts his “hand” in wrath, he literally has a hand. God is anatomically male. This is based on a primitive interpretation of the word “image” in Genesis.
2. God is not omniscient but must acquire knowledge. God must figure out things by experimentation and modeling. According to Herman Hoeh this is why there are so many hominid forms in the fossil record. God developed many test models prior to Adam’s creation.
3. God is not omnipotent. He is creating other gods who will be just as powerful as he is. Humans will one day be “God as God is God.”
4. God lives inside this universe, inside space-time; he does not transcend it. In fact, he lives in a specific location called “the sides of the north” – somewhere in the northern sky. As Garner Ted Armstrong once stated, if you had a rocket ship you could fly to where God is.
5. God did not create time and does not know the future; he is limited by time just as we are.
6. God’s eternity is a sequence of moments instead of timelessness.
7. God has a racial type. He is a White man. Adam looks like God and Christ who look like each other. And Shem looks like Adam. And Shem is the putative progenitor of all White people. So all Whites belong to the same special, supreme, eternal race that God belongs to.
The result is that Armstrongists do not believe in the god of the Judeo-Christian tradition but in a god that is like a powerful human. Hence, they relegate god to a status much like that of a demiurge in Platonic philosophy.
God in the Image of Man
Both pop atheism and Armstrongism have converged on the concept of god as an anthropomorphic being of limited capabilities. Nowhere to be found in their philosophies, and hence their inquiry, is the infinite, transcendent, necessary God who donates being to those things he creates. Armstrongism has created for itself a much smaller god perhaps as a misunderstanding or to be contrarian, who knows. Pop atheism has also circumscribed god closely perhaps to sell books on the mass market rather than develop a comprehensive opposing case. Pop atheism is a more apt denial of the Armstrongist god than the Christian God. In any event, Armstrongism and atheism, over divergent routes and with different maps, have arrived at the same destination – God as Anthropomorph.
submitted by NEO
