Paying Attention To The Sky

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
Albert Einstein

The Christian faith presupposes certain truths of reason and of history. Without these it cannot make sense and its theology cannot take root. The first of these is that the Christian faith presupposes that there is a God: it’s of little use telling people that Jesus is the Son of God if they do not believe in God in the first place. Of course, the concept of God which a pagan possesses will need to be modified in the light of the account of God offered in the Church’s preaching. So for many atheists were they to wish to embrace the Church, they arrive at the scene without even the presuppositions of faith.

Within the Church there is no general consensus among Catholic writers as to the best way of establishing the existence of God, the supreme presupposition of our faith. To complicate matters more, The First Vatican Council, in the course of the document Del Filius declared “The one and true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known through the creation by the natural light of human reason.” The council’s teaching is that images of the divine found in natural religion in all cultures can be modified or purified so as to produce a concept of God as the Creator Lord, the source of nature and history alike. At this point our hypothetical atheist (ever snarky) is probably thinking: “Ah, so there is a God and it can be proved by human reason, but nobody has found Him yet. Nice.”

The biblical materials for a concept of God do not organize themselves. They do not automatically arrange themselves into a satisfactory form. They achieve that form only when the human mind, seeking to understand its own faith, begins to work on them and to set them out in more intelligible ways. To organize the biblical materials, we soon find that we need to draw on such philosophical categories as good and evil, freedom and necessity, person and nature, mind and will, essence and existence, being and knowing. Of course, the application of these notions to God is an attempt to speak of what lies beyond the world within terms drawn from this world, and so is only justified if we always add a postscript to that effect.

But as Karl Rahner once put it, definitions are much less an end than a beginning. Where the atheist might see the beginning of a practical joke, the theologian sees the right to choose those materials from which he or she hopes to construct an approach to God’s existence. Some choose not to even engage the question — particularly if their right to reason is restricted to the scientific method (which bans the supernatural or the metaphysical from hypotheses).

Yet over the Church’s history the reasoning from the Scriptural sources of revelation to the nature of the divine has brought us several approaches to God’s existence. The great Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, is famous for his five “proofs” of God’s existence but his proofs are not scientific: there are no calculations or verifiable experiments one can run to establish the existence of the divine. They too are approaches to the divine.

Blaise Pascal once wrote: “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd. Jesus Christ and St. Paul possess the order of charity, not of the mind, for they wished to humble, not to teach.” (Pensées 298)

Peter Kreeft has offered by way of interpretation: “It is a prejudice of rationalism (not reason) that rational order, the order of the mind, is the only kind of order. In fact, the heart’s order is just as much order, but a different kind. The head seeks truth, the heart seeks goodness. This is why reason’s order is that of a map or outline of truth, while the heart’s order is that of a journey to its goal, its heart’s desire….How can humbling be better than teaching? …In regard to nature, the highest stage of knowledge is knowledge. But in regard to God and his images, the highest stage of knowledge is love. We know God and man only by loving them.

St. Thomas says that it is better to know a stone than to love a stone but better to love God than to know God, because love conform the lover to the beloved, while knowledge conforms the known object to the way-of-knowing of the knower. When we love a dog, we become more doggy, but when we know a dog, we raise it up to our own level: thought. When we know God we drag him down to our anthropomorphic level, we make God more humanoid than he really is; but when we love God, we are raised up more closely to his level, we become more God-like than we were (for ‘God is love’).”

So Fr. Aidan Nichols cites in his magisterial work The Shape of Catholic Theology. six approaches to God’s existence, experiential signs and a kind of argument, that we hope the atheists among us can drop their narrow insistence on scientific method and try to relate to arguments of the heart for a change.

The Experience Of Wonder There is the experience of wonder at the fact that there is a world at all. All of us are familiar with wonder before certain particular things: the colors of dawn, the grace of an athlete, the intricate workings of an organ like the eye.

But sometimes we generalize this sense of wonder and extend it to the fact that there is a world at all. In this case the object of wonder is not the particular world we live in, which is a sum total of the particular things that exist, but the consideration that there should be any particular world at all. After all, there is nothing logically entailed in the concept of a world which makes us say, Of course, I realize that there had to be a world.

Writers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. K. Chesterton have regarded this sort of experience as philosophically important. From it there emerges the argument that since the world is not self-explanatory, or ontologically self-sufficient, it requires us to postulate a ground for it. Such a ground would have to be transcendent vis-à-vis the world; that is, it could not be less than the world itself. But the notion of the transcendent ground of the world is at any rate a part of what people mean by God.

The Experience Of Moral Obligation Second, a very different kind of experience relevant here is the experience of moral obligation. From time to time we do things not because it is in our interest to do them but because they are intrinsically right. If we left them undone, we might say, we could not live with ourselves. The voice of conscience would not let us be.

In such a case, it is not just that as a matter of rational ethics we would knowingly have done the wrong thing. Beyond this, our sense of what is involved in doing -the wrong thing can be at times terrifying. It is almost as though we were in the presence of a judge of irreproachable character who saw us and was obliged by his own righteousness to condemn us.

Expressed less pictorially, the values we put into our system of values (whatever these may be) do not entirely behave as things we have created. We seem to be tributary to them, rather than the other way round. Those who do not care for the implications of such experiences of moral obligation may hypothesize that they derive from the effects of parental conditioning upon us. Either our own parents or that corporate parent we call society has put a taboo on certain ways of behaving, and the taboo sticks. When we defy it we are covered with feelings of guilt, just as if we have offended a wonderfully good and sensitive person.

But on the other hand, some of the most interesting examples of conscience must surely be those that occur to individuals who, having assessed facts and arguments, feel obliged to depart from some prior moral consensus and break through to a new level of moral awareness. Think of Lincoln’s appeal to conscience concerning slavery. So the experience of obligation is not so easily cut down to size, and it points toward the existence of a supremely holy one as its own ultimate explication. This was Newman’s own preferred approach to transcendence. C.S. Lewis uses this also in his landmark book Mere Christianity.

The Experience Of Our Own Dissatisfaction A third kind of experience relevant here is the experience of our own dissatisfaction. This may seem a strange sort of starting point for an argument in metaphysics, but dissatisfaction with any of the objects we can attain in this world must surely be the greatest single source of religious belief. Genetically, we are not programmed in such a way that we can know from the outset what objects will bring us satisfaction.

Of course we have certain drives—toward physical nourishment, sexual intimacy, and so forth. But the satisfaction of these drives is not exactly our satisfaction. We may satisfy them as much as we will , and yet when we are finished we are still left with such questions as What is the meaning of life? Where will I find lasting happiness? and so on. None of these questions, it may be said, finds any full solution within the world.

So the further question suggests itself, If a being exists who has no goal within the world, a being whose desire to know and need to love appears to be in some sense endless, then perhaps the goal of this creature’s striving lies beyond the world in what the religions of the world call God. The Greek Father Gregory of Nyssa already came near to this conative argument for God (vocab: from the Latin verb conare, “to strive”: we are striving for something beyond this world, and it seems more reasonable to posit that something as the ground of our striving rather than to write off our striving as absurd, something strictly unintelligible.) On Gregory’s crucial notion of epektasis.  

A modem form of the same notion is found in F. C. Copleston, Religion and Philosophy (Dublin: 1974), who writes that the search for a metaphysical ultimate is based on “an experience of limits, coupled with a reaching out towards that which transcends and grounds all limits.”

The Experience Of Hope A fourth dimension of human existence that fits in here is the experience of hope. We all have hopes for particular things. We hope for peace in our time, for nice friends, for a better website on exploring Catholic faith. But this is not the experience of hope Christians think of when they use the word “Hope”.

What Christians have in mind is that general attitude of hopefulness as a response to the future which so many people evince in quite impossible situations, and which seems almost a necessary condition for the survival of humanity in hard times. People hope against hope that tyranny will be ended; that their children’s children will live to inherit this planet.

But even if the worst happened, even if an evil government possessed itself of the world or a nuclear holocaust devoured the earth tomorrow, people would still go on hoping amidst the ruins. They would crawl out of the holes and burrows and start to pick up the pieces. This is natural to us because it is natural to us to hope. The question is, Does this point to anything metaphysical? It could be argued, as did French philosopher and dramatist Gabriel Marcel, that it suggests an unconscious grasp of the reality of God as the ground and guarantor of human history, of human destiny.

The Mystical Experience Another area that repays investigation in this regard is that of mystical experience. A large number of people in various cultures have laid claim to direct experience of the divine. Some of these people may have been mad, and some may have been bad. Their claims may have been made through self-delusion or by the deliberate desire to obtain power, prestige, or money. But where records are copious, in the case of figures who most impressed, therefore, their contemporaries, the mystics give an impression of integrity rather than its opposite.

Certainly, mystics have described their experiences in terms drawn from the religious tradition in which they were at home: Muslim mystics encounter Allah; Jewish mystics the Shekinah, or “Glory of the Lord”; Christian mystics the Trinity. But this does not necessarily invalidate their witness. We would expect that they would use concepts and images already familiar to them to interpret a reality by definition beyond concepts and images, namely God. Whether the concepts and images used by one mystic, for example St. Teresa of Avila, correspond more to the nature of the true God than do the concepts and images of another mystic, say, the Muslim al-Hallaj, would have to be decided on other grounds.

But all the mystics share the assertion that they have encountered what we can call the eternal reality — however they pictured the reality in question. Such a weight of human testimony from so many different cultures cannot easily be dismissed. This is, in part, the approach to God’s existence favored by the English Benedictine philosopher Iltyd Trethowan.

The Knowability Of The World Sixth and finally, I would draw attention to the epistemological argument for the existence of God associated with the late Fr. Bernard Lonergan of the Society of Jesus. Lonergan proposed that the main cue we need to move toward an affirmation of God’s existence is found in the very knowability of the world.

For some reason, the world has a structure such that the human mind can penetrate it by means of his own processes of thought. How can we account for this fact? It might have been the case that human beings had intelligence but that the world was not amenable to exploration by that intelligence. There could have been a lack of fit between the world and the human mind.

But in point of fact, there is not; on the contrary, there is considerable harmony between them as, among other things, the fruits of scientific knowledge in technology demonstrate. It is argued, therefore, that the world’s intelligibility requires us to posit the existence of a creative mind, analogous to but infinitely transcending the human mind, by which the cosmos was brought into being.

John Henry Newman’s Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Consent  So much for the six main kinds of approach that have historically been popular. The list is not exhaustive. It could be extended by, for example, reference to the fact that we have a language for perfection — better known as the “ontological argument.” Nothing prevents our combining these approaches on the principle that the sum total of a number of individually less-than-convincing arguments may be a convincing case. This was, as it happens, John Henry Newman’s strategy in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Consent, published during the First Vatican Council, in 1870.

There Newman offered a new context in which to display the various argumentative strategies and the strata of experience that are relevant to belief in God. Earlier, Newman had worked out a distinction between explicit and implicit reason, pointing out that in ordinary everyday affairs we make judgments about people and events without following arty strict logical progression, any mode of explicit reason. Instead, we gather together a whole series of experiential clues and pieces of argumentation. These fragments of experience and argument then act as signals that point us in the direction of a true conclusion, which is attained, therefore, by implicit reason.

In the Grammar of Assent Newman further refined this idea in relation to the basic tenets of Christian theism, dubbing such a manner of arriving at certitude about something or someone the “illative sense.” In a jigsaw, when you spread out the pieces on a table, all you seem to have is a complete jumble, an accidental collection of bits and pieces that tell you nothing. But put them together and you have a picture. So Newman’s suggestion is that we can defend belief in God by putting together a number of experiential signals and lines of thought, which converge on the conclusion that there is a God.

Following Newman, it may be suggested that while none of these arguments taken singly might be wholly compelling, taken cumulatively they amount to a very strong case. This case may fall short of strict demonstration. But no matter: at least it shows that it is more reasonable to believe in God’s existence than not. Clearly, if we were unable to show that it is at least as reasonable to believe in God’s existence as it is not to, being a believer at all would be an irrational exercise.

But more than this, as Catholic Christians with a duty to the Church’s conciliar tradition, we are expected to say that it is in fact more reasonable to believe in God’s existence. For whatever force is given to the assertion on this topic in Del Filius, it surely cannot mean less than this.

Argument From Evil And may I offer, finally, my own experience – one that I have explored in various pieces here in consideration of the nature of evil. There is no satisfying Christian theodicy, no one great argument that explains the coexistence of an all powerful loving God of goodness with the evil of this world. St. Thomas posed the problem in his Summa Theologiae: “It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the name ‘God’ means that he is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.”  

Man has wrestled with explaining the nature of evil in the world and the “justice of God.” But were they in themselves an adequate and total vindication any form of “Justice,” it would be exceedingly hard to find room for the idea of redemption, a concept which lies at the heart of Christian faith on the Cross. Jesus died for our sins. He died to redeem us. If there were some way, any way we could redeem ourselves or find justice in this shit hole of a world, I’m sure I would have found it. I’m a very resourceful guy, brighter than most and modest as all hell.

Atheists would have us believe you can get up each day and create your own meaning out of a meaningless void of scientific materialist matter. It works for a while. Until you get dragged kicking and screaming to the foot of the Cross and tears streaming down your face mumble those first words of prayer…”Please, God”….