The belief in God? It gets us out into the world to make a difference for the better indeed! What to say on this perennial? Human beings possess a cosmic longing for meaning. It doesn't mean that the world around us has meaning, it could just all be accident, and we just invest it with meaning to comfort ourselves with the illusion that it all makes some sense and that we are more than shaved chimpanzees clinging on to a barren rock in the middle of nowhere going nowhere (that was the thought I had when Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-1 in the last minute to deny my beloved Reds the title in 1989!). Wherever, whatever, we are here, here we are, and we're going to have to organise and act effectively if we are to get out the mess we are in. I'll say this, digging back into my old training in history - all substantial change is a combination of both material and moral/metaphysical motivations. If we lose sight of the one, we don't follow through with effective action. I’ll agree on responsibility, certainly. Actions have consequences, and we are charged with taking responsibility into our hands. And we can do it. I have to disagree at the dismissal of belief. I can say, from my own experience, that all the knowledge and achievement in the world, alone, meant precisely nothing, zero. There was a period in my life, 2006 to 2010, when I was passive, inert and utterly without hope. You name the philosophy, I’d studied it. But there was something absent in all the promises of a world enclosed in human self-reason. Every plan, ambition I’d had, everything I’d worked for was in ruins. Even the achievements seemed worthless.
'All men by nature desire to know', stated Aristotle in the opening lines of his Metaphysics. He then proceeds to differentiate between forms of knowing, with some considered superior to others. For my part, these ways of knowing need to be related to ways of being if knowledge is actually to mean something and count for something. In Book VII of Paradise Lost, John Milton takes up again this theme of the natural desire to know. Adam asks to be told the story of creation. In response, the “affable Archangel” Raphael agrees “to answer thy desire/Of knowledge within bounds . . . ,” explaining that
Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.
I had lived with a desire for knowledge, had filled myself with knowledge, and yet found life to be meaningless. Knowledge alone was empty. I took to my bed and lay flat out, unable/unwilling to move, stiff, in pain, hardly breathing, and picking my best green shirt to die in. But a belief in a Greater Love – you name it if you can – kept me going. And it inspired effort. I remembered my the values instilled in me at the local school and Church, and I got up, got back and got going. The words of Chesterton make complete sense to me. He was a man who suffered continuous depression, and was on the brink of giving up. “I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation [even] if he were a lost soul. I hung on to religion by one thin thread of thanks ... At the back of our brains ... there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man might suddenly understand that he was alive, and be happy.” I like the work of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman who, in Reinventing the Sacred, argues for agency, value, purpose and meaning in an endlessly creative universe. We are co-creators of this universe and we indeed charged with taking responsibility for our actions and taking morality into our own hands. He argues that this entirely naturalist account is ‘God enough.’ It’s the old immanence and transcendence argument, with transcendence accused of being a flight from responsibility. I try to balance the two. I’m with the old Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on this, whose politics of hope is based upon a transcendental ethic, something greater than our own self-legislated, and hence circular, self-validating reason. But, hey, Feuerbach said that God is really a mirror, we just see and worship ourselves. Isn’t that what our philosophy does, we impose our values on the world through an innate conceptual apparatus and thus confirm ourselves in our own self-made world. I need that “Great Being” that Voltaire spoke of serving, something outside of our limited reason. Reason alone won’t cut it. But Kauffman’s sacred existential isn’t bad at all. I just always found something missing in the ethics and philosophy I studied. Jonathan Sacks writes of the “great partnership”, human beings and God working together, that “Great Being” drawing us out of our passive state into becoming moral, knowledgeable beings acting in the world. Illusion? Maybe a necessary illusion, what Kant called a “necessary presupposition” of all moral action. Like the belief in democracy. Belief has achieved plenty, but only when allied with action. I always believed that one day the Truth about Hillsborough would be revealed and accepted by the world, and I was right. Knowledge and know-how gives us the ability to act, but it is Love that makes us want to act. We live in “loveless circumstance” said the poet Robert Graves. We admire our power, yet live in service to the purposeless materialism of the “mechanarchy”, a meaningless system world in which means have enlarged to displace ends. No wonder it is difficult to motivate people to act. We need more. I hear environmentalists talk about the need for “cathedral projects” to save our civilisation in an age of climate change. I agree. I’ve just been visiting some of the great cathedrals of Europe. And they were built by people who would never see their completion. They did so out of belief. I do think the theism-atheism debate is something of a side-issue, somewhat sterile. I have reached a position which could be described as a phenomenology of (religious?) experience based on interpersonal relations and communities of practice and understanding embracing each and all. Sacks writes this in his book The Great Partnership: “These things have brought many people to God. But they have also brought many people to worship things that are not God, like power, or ideology, or race. Instead I have sought God in people - people who in themselves seemed to point to something or someone beyond themselves.” The personal God, the God of love and of relationships, draws us out of our egos and into relation with each other. And that's an active belief, our relationship to God enjoins us to act and play our part as members of Creation. That's an existential and active condition of Be-ing. “God is the distant voice we hear and seek to amplify in our systems of meaning, each particular to a culture, a civilisation, a faith. God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love.” For our own sanity’s sake, we need an idea of something greater than our own power. I fully agree with the idea of developing the means, mechanisms and motivations for assuming individual and collective responsibility for actions and consequences, but this involves both hard and soft “technologies”. In the end, I think we can agree with the final words of Chief Rabbi Sacks’ book “The Great Partnership”. They are addressed to both believers and non-believers alike: "Let us join hands and build a more hopeful future." One thing we are sure of, we have this earth, it is a beautiful place, it enfolds and nourishes us, it is sacred, precious, and we are a part of it, and should play our part in its creativity. And if still in doubt, there are the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Ancient Sage” “Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son, Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,” I live on the sunny side of life. I think the world is alive, I think we live in a meaningful, animate and purposeful universe. I can't prove any of this, and the liveliest intellects of the age have dismissed such concerns as comforting illusions. It's just that it is comfort such as this that gives us the will to act, to take a stand on issues, express our deepest longings and values and, in the process, make a difference for the better in the world. With such comfort - let's call it Dante's Love - there is nothing in the world that is indifferent to us, and what we do and what we say makes a difference. Things matter. I can prove none of this, no more than the greatest scientists and philosophers and mathematicians can prove anything. I don't feel the need to. Love stands in no need of proof. We don't prove life in order to live, we live it to satisfy the quest for meaning. That's my belief. It gets me out of bed in the morning to greet a brand new day. And in doing that, I play my part in living up to nature's injunction to live. And it makes me want to face the future, knowing that I, we, each and all together, can do something with it.
So let's hear it for the "submerged sunrise of wonder". There's time for wonderment. Just ask Wittgenstein. Now, to work, boys! to work! I've just been immersing myself in feminist criticism, and all this peddling of words and demands for proof (hands up! I'm guilty as charged) is very much a male pursuit. Margaret Wertheim is very good on this in her book Pythagoras' Trousers, calling for an embodied reason and science, something down to earth. It feels good to be an Earthling with an eye on the Love that moves, turns and directs us to the true, the good and the beautiful in this wondrous place.