Happy Easter. I attended the Easter service at Mt. Baldy Village Church, Mt. Baldy, California and heard a wonderful message concerning how we are called upon to respond to Jesus' ultimate love and ultimate sacrifice.
I attended the 8-00 am outdoors service before attending the regular 10-30am service. In between was a very fine breakfast and opportunity to socialize. I've seen first hand the combination of hard work and love that goes into making such a service possible here at Mt Baldy Village Church. There was fun to be had, too. I was involved in organizing the children's Easter Egg Hunt at the Mt. Baldy Cross on the hill. I was hoping that the kids would miss the odd egg or two, but no, expert egg hunters one and all. Of course, being closer to the ground than I am, they see the eggs before I do and get to them quicker. Thanks to Pastor Ron Thomas for putting it all together, week in week out, inspiring the care, love, and effort of all around, working in devotion to common ends, creating the active space in which we may come to participate and share in the Greater Love that is the origin and end of all good things.
There was much food for thought in today's message concerning the power of humility. I write frequently of reclaiming power. That restitution of power from alien bodies and institutions is something I support in my emancipatory politics, but it needs to be tempered by the humility of the Love that is expressed through sacrifice and service to others, lest it degenerate into prideful self-worship and idolatry. True emancipation is salvation.
On the lines of this morning's services, I'd like to offer some thoughts for this divided world, a prayer really, directed to all men and women of good will in the troubled times that are sure to come.
The world we live in, the political world, is a world of division between people in terms of their interests, positions, and perspectives. Politics is a means of mediating those divisions to ensure the representation of all voices and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The possibility of such mediation is dependent upon a common ethic that is binding upon and, in turn, binds each and all, a sharing of common ground or common language. This is something increasingly in doubt in the modern world. Without that wider ethic, though, we are a house divided and will fall for that reason. Division can only be mediated when set within a wider ethic. We have lost this common ground and common language, leaving politics as a world of different sides shouting over and against each other. It's a world of incommensurate values and irreconcilable demands and divisions. Instead of unity, in the absence of common ground, each side has no option but to take to the trenches and assert their positions against all others, persuading no-one but their own side. Instead of a mutual learning, society comes to tear itself apart in a mutual antagonism or simply fade away in a mutual indifference. And my point is this: we have lost the common ground. We are well used to political leaders and concerned citizens calling for, or claiming to stand on, a moderate middle ground as against a world that is being sent to extremes. Such things are much more easily said than done. In fact, we have spent a century witnessing the demise of this centre ground politics, for the very reason that ground has long since been emptied of meaning, hollowed out, annexed and driven to the margins. Part of the predicament of modern politics is the failure of people, politicians and citizens alike, to understand that the common ground they yearn for has gone away; neither do they understand that it is this very centre ground politics that is complicit in sending the world to extremes, asserting a commonality that exists as no more than a cover for exploitation, iniquity, and division.
But there is a deeper problem than social division, and that is the problem of the stataus of morality. We have lost not merely the physical commons, but most of all the ethical commons.
This past century or more, human beings have thought themselves capable of taking morality into their own hands to go it alone as authors of their own destiny. The upshot has been that we have found that, yes, we are indeed alone, in possession of nothing, the masters of nowhere. As Max Weber wrote over a century ago: "Where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights." We have gained a whole world of material quantity far beyond the wildest dreams of the political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but have lost the world as home. The danger is that, further and further removed from the source and the end that we share in common, that is precisely where we will end up, alone and pitted against each other on account of our overriding devotion to the particular interests and loyalties that separate us. 'Men as gods' taking morality into their own hands, and taking possession of the world in the process, are merely the masters of nowhere.
This notion of human beings taking morality into their own hands is problematic. Ethically and politically, there is no 'humanity' in general. Human beings are real, live individuals, not abstractions. I have learned not to trust abstraction in politics. Or, rather, I have learned to set ideals and principles in their true context, as transcendent standards that are independent of the particular laws, institutions, and practices of time and place, serving as a critical tool with which to evaluate human affairs. There is no 'humanity' as such and no human morality in any simple and discrete sense. Particular flesh and blood human beings live within social relations that are unequal and divided. There is no unity of purpose within such asymmetrical relations of power and resources. And there is no commitment or devotion to common ends within such divisions and inequalities, for the very reason that the individuals composing society and the body politic exist on divided ground. On our own, divorced from the transcendent source, end, and hope that is God, human beings are divided each against the other. And politics ceases to be able to perform its mediating function. Instead there is an entrenchment, extension, and intensification of division.
Unless we succeed in setting that division in a wider context embedded in common ground, then we are a civilization that is divided to fall. My fear is that, on present trajectories, we are going to fracture, we are going to turn against each another. For the reason that too much of politics is absorbed in power and power struggles. That is the very stuff of politics, I can hear critics of my view say. Yes, insofar as it goes, but a very firm no, because it doesn't go remotely far enough in terms of the ancient conception of politics as creative self-actualization.
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx wrote of a “world still to win.” Such a notion presumes the existence of a world that is worthy of winning, and such a world is beyond human self-creation, beyond possession, and beyond the controversies over the terms of that possession. We need to emancipate ourselves from notions of winning as human possession and use. To return to Weber's statement, 'where there is nothing both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.' It doesn't matter which side wins in such a political world. Where there is 'nothing,' we have all lost our rights and the social struggles between us is merely a sophist power struggle where might is right and justice is the interests of the strongest. Human beings as authors of their own destiny end up as the masters of nowhere in possession of 'nothing.'
This is all very antithesis of Jesus' example and message. This is the message I heard at the Easter service today.
In a world that is riven by conflict, hatred, and animosity, we have a mission to be the living agents of the Greatest Love of all, the Love that bridges all divides, heals all broken relationships, and releases the joy implanted within the hearts of each and all.
So I offer this prayer that throughout the troubled times that are sure to come in this political world in which we live, facing issues which threaten to divide us against each other, that we cleave to the Love of a God that enfolds, nourishes, moves and redeems all.
Because without that, we have nothing and we are nothing.
That Love is the “something” that is the true ground of our being, the “something” that we need to recover and hold on to as against Weber's bleak existentialist “nothing.” As against the objectively meaningless and valueless world revealed by a disenchanting science, I affirm the world as objectively meaningful and valuable, a world of purpose and meaning, with an end point, that we are enjoined to understand by a Creator God as transcendent source, end, and inspirational hope.
I have been writing on the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the need to rebuild more than the physical Church. May more than the physical Church arise from the ruins. That spiritual and ethical rebuilding is precisely what the world is in desperate need of today. Should we start from that premise, this world would be a better place than it is today.
There's an important lesson in all of this about human beings being created in the image of God, but not identical with God. We ought to aspire to be like God, drawing out our moral capacities in the process, but not to be as God, which is a self-destructive perversion of those capacities. There is a great partnership between God and humanity. We do not rule the world as gods ourselves, no matter how powerful our technics; that's a delusion and a dangerous one that backfires against us and against the world we seek to dominate - we end up as the masters of a wasteland created in our own image.
I shall offer a few words on my own position on this. I am well aware that, in terms of philosophical reason, logic, and evidence, I am out on a limb on this. If these are the standards by which we separate truth and nonsense, then my position is nonsensical. Except that there is a world outside of logic and evidence. It may not be a world on which reason can speak, at least not a reason that is bereft of any emotional component. But such reason possesses an incipient inhumanism that itself makes a nonsense of human life. Questions of value, significance, and meaning lie outside these domains. So, too, do love and beauty and pretty much everything that enriches and rounds out a human life. I have met far too many people whose political ideals I agree with and whose causes I share, yet whom I find to be bereft of hope and mired in despair. Too many tell me about a meaningless universe devoid of purpose, about the world as an accident that came from nowhere, for no reason, and is going nowhere. Too many proceed from there to tell me about there being too many people in the world, about human beings as greedy and selfish, divided between warring tribes. Too many without point, purpose, and hope for me to budge on this. I will continue to make the transcendent commitment, because I see that without it, humanity becomes self-absorbed and soon degenerates into a destructive, despairing nihilism. I have no proof and no evidence to support my claims on God, no more than those without God have in support of their own claims. But I can, quite reasonably, ask which side of this divide makes most meaningful sense of the richness of human life, love, and experience?
We live in uncertainty. That is what faith is all about. I support the moderate realism of St. Thomas Aquinas on this: Reason as far as reason will go, but reason does not go anything like far enough when it comes to a rich and meaningful life. Love takes up where knowledge leaves off, wrote St Thomas.
I could have made life so much easier for myself in my relations to friends, people whose politics I share, had I kept quiet on God. I have no great philosophical argument to prove my points and answer their sceptical questions. I am more than content to concede that their negations are philosophically effective. I have on occasion accompanied theologian and theistic philosophy friends as they present and debate their work in public. It's not something I enjoy doing, because I know the objections that will be sure to be made, and I know that, philosophically, there is no way to meet them. I guess that God is a great song and dance man, but just such a poor philosopher. These events attract the same group of atheists who advance the same destructive arguments. The atheists continue to win the debates so often the same way with the same arguments that I should just give in and accept that they must be right. But, of course, these are arguments proceeding within the field of philosophical reason. I wonder why people provide a platform to them to rehearse and recycle the same old arguments in this way. They win nothing, of course, since all that they show is the ultimate meaningless and purposelessness of the universe and of human life. In winning their point they have merely shown that there is no point. I have elsewhere in these blogs shown how philosophical reason here is a double-edged sword that undercuts itself. There is not a philosophical position that cannot be negated in the same way.
So why are folk so passionate to debate questions that, according to philosophical reason, are non-questions. It doesn't matter. The world should just settle into indifference. Let's all just proclaim the god of Einstein/Spinoza that unfolds itself harmoniously in the universe in complete indifference to human affairs. Such a belief may sound rational, liberating even, but it isn't. Because if human society does ever come to mirror the objective valuelessness and meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe, then it will in time dissolve in a mutual indifference. I openly declare for an objectively valuable, meaningful, purposive and good universe with an end-point, one of which we are a part.
I have spoken many times with people of such persuasion over the years. I really don't care for how they read science here. They have it wrong. At least atheist scientists I have great respect for, such as Christian de Duve, do recognize that once we move into questions of significance and value, then science has nothing to say. These are not scientific questions. Those who press science into those areas to assert insignificance and valuelessness are guilty of mixing their logics. Science can, of course, inform debate, but that is a different point.
I'll go further on this. Neither side of this “debate” can refute the other, because we are talking incommensurate logics. So the question, for me, boils down to which side can make the most meaningful sense of human life in all its richness, its quest for meaning, its love, longing and desire, its suffering and frustration, it's pure nonsensical irrational ecstatic joy, its divine madness and delirium. I have met far too many with scientific and philosophical reason on their side, and yet who are mired in misanthropic despair in negation of all hope for want of empirical evidence and logical proof to swayed me away from the search for God and God's truth and love.
I can't prove the truth of my position philosophically; and I can't say at any point that I have the truth. I can live it. That's what religion is, an ethos and a way of life, something people do, not an intellectual proposition. That's why the debates on this are always beside the point. I can live the truth, as in living the gospel. And that truth-seeking is so eminently nourishing and meaningful that I am willing to offer it as a proof of sorts of the existence of a transcendent source of nourishment and meaning, of some anarchic excess that subverts and transforms the empire of facts to redeem all things.
I cleave to this through the thin, because I know by experience that, sooner or later, but always eventually, it brings me to the thick.
The demand for proof and evidence for God is a double-edged sword. Scientific and technological advance has given the illusion that we may have certainty on the deepest of questions. This is a delusion that conflates very different orders of truth and meaning. Knowledge and know-how concern explanation and the ability to manipulate matter and even people. These are not the same things at all as understanding. Once we move into questions of meaning and significance, the remit of such scientific and technical power ends. Philosophical reasoning, when hooked on misplaced presumptions of certainty, merely undercuts itself. People are crying out for hope and meaning, for belonging and healing, too. Many have discarded faith for a number of reasons, many of which are understandable; very many people have been damaged by dogmatism and false certainties which have all too easily been revealed to be falsehoods without support. There is a reason why many have abandoned faith for reason (and remember that my argument is based on reason and faith, not faith against reason). But philosophical critique can be acidic, dissolving all supports to leave human beings alone in a world that is objectively valueless and meaningless. Hence the despair I see in the words and deeds of many I meet. I have reflected on this for years and years and will take that leap of faith, that heart leap, to affirm the view that there is a good God that has created a good world, a world that is objectively good; that God enjoins us to act accordingly, conforming ourselves to, and confirming, that goodness within and without.
In the end, this whole issue boils down to the question of which of the alternate views offers or is capable of offering the more plausible account of human nature and human life. There is a distinction to be made here between natural law, nature seen through the eyes of a moral reason common to us all, and a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism. The former encompasses more than physical explanation with respect to natural functions and refers to the correct understanding of desire, the quest for meaning, the cosmic longing for healing, wholeness, and belonging. It encompasses also family, society, polity and all forms of human bonding. In this respect, the issue pits the natural-law and virtue ethicist – myself - against the expressivist or emotivist, against all those positions which dissolve ethics into mere value judgements, into irreducible subjective choice, opinion, and preference. You can line the combatants up either side of this divide: those who affirm transcendent standards and norms as against the conventionalists who assert that truth and meaning are human projections in time and place: Plato and Aristotle and their successors (St Augustine and St Thomas and various other Saints, Pascal, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, myself) on the one side, up against Hobbes and Hume and their very many successors in the modern world on the other side. The Hobbes-Hume position has held sway for some time, and remains dominant; but it has never ruled without challenge; its hold is weak and weakening, succeeding more by negation on the basis of a positivist science that is untenable.
Philosophical reason and science cannot settle this question, only cut the foundations from under the position which cleaves to purpose, meaning and goodness in the universe. If victory it is on these terms, then it is a pointless victory. For nothing has been won, since nothing can be won. All this triumph gives us is Weber's world as 'nothing.' All that has been achieved is the destruction of the cosmic hope and longing that inspires human beings to carry on living and loving when the facts of life seemingly contradict our highest goods and deepest truths. Neither side can refute the other side clearly and directly with the tools of philosophical reason. The only way to decide is which side of this divide provides the most satisfying account of the richness of human life as it is experienced in the real.
I answer plainly: The natural-law and virtue ethicist tradition and those praxis philosophers who embodied the ideal in the real as it unfolds in history – transcendent truths unfolding in the historical process. We need to call back the transcendent standards which buttresses all things; we need to call back the soul. The Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and carries all, the Love 'that seeketh not its own.'
One of the books that really swayed me on this when I was still an atheist philosopher was Jonathan Sacks' The Great Partnership. He writes:
'The search for God is the search for meaning. The discovery of God is the discovery of meaning. And that is no small thing, for we are meaning-seeking animals. It is what makes us unique. To be human is to ask the question, 'Why?'
Scientists of a certain type seem to take perverse pleasure in declaring that life is in fact meaningless. Here, for example, is Jacques Monod:
“Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world, a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes.”
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, New York, Vintage, 1972., p. 160
And, more bluntly, Steven Weinberg:
“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe ... It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, New York, Basic, 1977, pp. 154-5
As a mood, most of us have experienced times when that is how the world seems. In the midst of crisis or bereavement, the fabric of meaning is torn apart and we feel strangers in an alien world. Yet a mood is not a truth; a feeling is not a fact. As a general statement of the condition of the universe, there is nothing whatsoever to justify Monod's or Weinberg's conclusions. To grasp this, listen to perhaps the most eloquent account of atheism ever given, by Bertrand Russell in A Free Man's Worship:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.
Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship', in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, London, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 39
C'est magnifique. One can scarce forbear to cheer. But one can produce almost exactly the same peroration in praise of faith:
“That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten - all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding hope, can the soul's salvation be safely built.”
I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. Freud said that religious faith was the comforting illusion that there is a father figure. A religious believer might say that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure, so that we can do what we like and can get away with: an adolescent's dream. Why should one be considered escapist and not the other? Why should God's call to responsibility be considered an easy option? Why should the belief, held by some on the basis of scientific determinism, that we have no free will and therefore no moral responsibility, not be considered the greatest escapism of them all?
There is absolutely nothing in science - not in cosmology or evolutionary biology or neuroscience - to suggest that the universe is bereft of meaning, nor could there be, since the search for meaning has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion. We now need to see why.'
Can we prove life has a meaning? Clearly not. Almost none of the things for which people live can be proven. Consider trust. Consider love. Demand proof of someone in either of these areas, and you have lost those very things.
I have been writing at length on this in my forthcoming Dante book.
For now, another poet, Tennyson, suffices to make the point. In The Ancient Sage he writes:
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,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!
In fine, we need to take justice back to source rather than subordinate it to political ideology. We do this by establishing the true relations.
I'll end on this: "Participating in social justice is a Christian tradition inspired by Jesus, not liberal causes, populist agendas, media platforms, lawmakers, or mainstream fads. It’s a deeply spiritual practice.
Instead of being motivated by political affiliations, financial gain, power, pride, control, or our own secular motivations, we should be active participants for the sake of following Jesus — for the purpose of glorifying God by through acts of justice, empowerment, and love."
I call it living the gospel, and you don't need the clever theology to do that. Properly understood, and the true understanding is only in the living, Christianity is hardcore - does it feed the hungry, does it satisfy the soul. In terms of economics it involves a commitment to producing goods that are truly good and services that truly serve - the common good, each and all as equals.