On Metatheism And The Metatheist

My score on the philosophy test two posts back includes a “0%” for belief in “divine command.” You might conclude that means I’m an atheist, but I’m not. I’ve been a theist, an atheist, and an agnostic. As an agnostic, I struggled for a better term, because I was more comfortable with the language of religion than many agnostics. I understood what people meant when they said, “I’m spiritual, not religious.”

But was I a pantheist? A panentheist? A metaphorist?

I’m a metatheist. Literally, metatheism is “beyond theism.” It’s beyond atheism and agnosticism, too, not in a superior sense, but in the sense that the metatheist is spiritually utilitarian: what matters is what your belief inspires you to do. Call the desire for goodness and justice “God” or “morality” or “something ultimately unknowable” if you wish. To the metatheist, all of those positions are fine. We’ll talk about goodness in your terms—that’s just being polite. What helps you do good is good to us. We’ll only object if part of your belief makes you hurt others, and then we’ll only object to the hurtful part. What’s good is good, no matter its context.

The name is new, but the concept is old. Thomas Paine and Albert Einstein have both been claimed by atheists, but they had a profoundly spiritual and moral concept of the world:

“The creation is the Bible of the true believer in God. Everything in this vast volume inspires him with sublime ideas of the Creator.” —Thomas Paine

“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.” —Albert Einstein

later: Trimmed “spiritual and moral concept” to “spiritual concept.”