Tamames traces the afterlife between scientists and philosophers | Culture
Ramón Tamames, the economist who with only 27 years published, in 1960, a thick book on the economic structure of Spain (with that title) and became suspect for the Franco dictatorship because they did not stop buying it even university students who did not care about the economy , publish now, after 85, Looking for God in the universe. A worldview about the meaning of life (Editorial Erasmus). It is his book 76, "maybe 77, I lost count". Early student and communist activist (since 1956); leader and deputy of the PCE in the first Cortes after the death of Franco, first deputy mayor with Enrique Tierno Galván, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, long-term advisor of PRISA, the publishing company of EL PAIS, and professor always , Tamames (Madrid, November 1, 1933) was never as unbelieving as has been said because, like every boy of his time, he was educated Catholic Christian in a few years when other religions were severely forbidden. He makes it clear in this book, quoting the theologian Manuel Fraijó when, in Avatars of belief in God, it is remembered how the great Karl Rahner, asked why he accepted the promise that there is a beyond, said slowly: "Because I do not know anything better and because my mother told me as a child".
All religions, and there are about 10,000, twice as many languages on earth, believe in their own way in a beyond. The problem, very personal, is faith, which is held by grace, not by will. It is not worth wanting to have faith, let alone seek it. That's why, many times, as Camilo J. Cela once said, "God only knows if we believe in God." Tamames He reflects on the subject by quoting two of the greatest Christian theologians of the last century, the Protestant Karl Barth and the Catholic Rahner. Were they believers, without more? "Yes, but not full time," confessed the first. "Yes, but being a Christian is not a state, but a goal, an ideal". Tamames maintains that it is the attitude of a growing proportion of Christians.
You have to answer many questions before talking about God. Two and a half centuries ago, the best illustrator, Immanuel Kant, became four: What should I do? What can I know? What am I allowed to wait? And, in short, what is man? Tamames summarizes his thought by answering three in 384 pages: Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we? In ten chapters he tries to reveal why a series of cosmological events are in favor, or not, of the idea of a Higher Intelligence, that is, the possible God, when one reflects on the cosmos, space / time, the theory of the Big Bang, etc.
It would seem that Tamames He has sought God without fatigue, as a great child, through sciences of all kinds or, like the mystical Teresa de Ávila, among the pouts. The greatness of Searching for God in the universe, and it has several, is how it is shelling a long list of writers who have done the same. The ones he most seems to investigate is the critics, aware that, as Ernst Bloch says in Atheism in Christianity, The best thing about religions is that they produce heretics. This is the case of Baron Holbach, the Abbe Meslier, Voltaire, Marx, Feuerbach, Russell, Dawkins, Onfray, Hichens and so many. The "big boy" takes it from Holbach, one of the first radical atheists in history, and his idea, not negligible, that men trust in a God who has made himself known only by tragedies, ravages, disputes and crazy things that it has caused on Earth.
On Marx, the communist ruling cult stops at the phrase most manipulated by the anti-Marxist losers. "Religion is the opium of the people", it is said that Marx thought. What he wrote when he was still a believer (Tamames suggests) was: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a ruthless world, in which religion appears as an alkaloid to mitigate pain". After studying more thoroughly the economic structures and from his theory of the class struggle, Marx qualified: "Religion is the feeling of a world without a heart, it is the opium of the people".
Delicious is also the section entitled Death and resurrection of God. Tamames asks a logical question: What did God do before creation? The Bible presents him working six days and rested the seventh, and all that a few thousand years ago. The book, deeply scientific, goes further: "Where was God before the Big Bang? Mystery for theologians, he asks puzzled. Tamames, just in case, concludes with an irony: "God was preparing hell for people who ask questions like that."
