‘God’ and Ideology

Extract

Francis Barker’s argument to prove that Christianity is always ideological, and never scientific, won’t do. Since the reason for this is of some general theoretical importance, it is perhaps worth pointing out what is wrong with it.

Barker’s thesis is that being tautological is a mark of the ideological. (‘all ideological discourse is ... strictly speaking tautological’ p. 476). But he also wants to argue that not every utterance within an ideological discourse has to be tautological: some of them may be just false. Fair enough so far. So ‘God exists’ is not tautological after all, but just false. But this, he says, doesn’t stop Christian discourse in general from being tautological—i.e. from being set within a framework of tautology. Barker’s reason for saying this is that in Christian discourse, words like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ are not used (as in science) in a diachronic way, but merely to ‘conjugate’ or ‘spatialise’ the optative paradigm. This dark saying is then illustrated by an argument that purports to show that ‘God made the world’ certainly is tautological. The reason for choosing this example is presumably that it is the fundamental case of a Christian discourse in which the use of ‘because’ is crucial. For ‘God made the world’ can be construed as equivalent to ‘the world exists because God made it’; and presumably in this sentence, according to Barker, the ‘because’ is simply ‘paradigmatic’. Now I think it is a fairly simple matter to show that this is quite wrong: pace Barker, ‘because’ in this sentence is used in just the same way as it is commonly used in ‘science’.