Leap of Faith
Nothing worthy proving can be proven
The painting is Leap of Faith by Jon Morro. He describes it thus:
I took a detail of “The Creation of Adam,” the fresco painting by Michelangelo, which forms part of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, and added a figure leaping from the human hand to the hand of God. Reminding us that though the Divine may seem universes apart, it is closer than we think and always one step away. May we learn to walk, leap, bound, fly and soar onward, upward and Godward. Always.
The argument I present here is a contentious one: God. But I have met too many whose political ideals and causes I share, and yet who are bereft of hope and mired in despair to budge on this. I have no proof and no evidence to support my claims on God, no more - and no less - than those without God have in support of their own claims. Of course, they will claim a whole lot less about ‘the real world’ than I will, and if victory goes to the most parsimonious explanation, then victory belongs to them. But what they win by such a victory isn’t worth having. We live in a world of constant philosophical negation, a world of claim and counter-claim without the ability to resolve arguments philosophically. You think it's Plato who has the answers, I think it's Aristotle, he thinks it’s Augustine, she thinks it Aquinas, some take their stand on Descartes, others on Leibniz, or Pascal, or Spinoza, others think it’s Kant, yet more others think it’s Hegel, whilst Marxists are still debating which Marx has the truth of the matter. The argument which explains the most with the least assumptions is the one to opt for if you want to play safe. But playing safe is to refuse to play in the first place. What can be said in terms of logic and fact isn’t much, and it is the more that the cosmic longing for meaning and belonging requires.
We live in uncertainty. That’s the conclusion I have drawn after a lifetime searching for certain grounds for the good and the good life. Under the sway of the advance of natural science, the moderns came to downgrade ontological questions in favour of epistemological obsessions, breeding the false impression that science could, one day, explain everything and that this would constitute certain grounds for governance, politics, and life. We live in a ceaselessly creative universe and since this is so we will never have that complete knowledge. The idea that we could establish grounds rationally is a chimera. The idea that logic and fact alone are sufficient is a delusion. We should go with reason as far as reason will go, but reason does not go anywhere near far enough when it comes to a rich and meaningful life. Love takes up where knowledge leaves off, wrote St Thomas Aquinas. That is what faith is all about.
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 meet their objections and prove my points. Their critical negations are philosophically effective. I have on occasion accompanied theologian and theistic philosophy friends as they present and debate their work in public. I loathe these public meetings. They are endlessly frustrating. They attract the same group of atheists who advance the same destructive arguments. The atheists seem to win the debates so often the same way. Because the debates are framed philosophically. Religion is an ethos, a practice, a way of life, something that people do. It can’t win a philosophical debate, merely offer itself up for intellectual slaughter. There was nothing I could say, philosophically, to check critics and dissuade them. Such critics win nothing, of course, since all that they show by their victory is the ultimate meaningless and purposelessness of the universe and of human life. They leave us with truth and value as a human projection and imposition. Of course, within asymmetrical relations and resources, some humans have much more power than others and hence are able to project and impose their views of truth, meaning, and value much more than others. That victory delivers us to a Sophist world in which justice is the interests of the strongest.
‘Where there is nothing,’ Max Weber wrote, ‘then both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ Weber knew that the only meaning in a Sophist world was one attained by existential imposition – but all such choices are substantively and objectively empty and arbitrary. Where there is nothing, we have all lost our rights. In winning their point, critics of theism have merely shown that there is no point to life, other than the one humans impose. So why are they so passionate to debate? It doesn't matter, and there is no objective standard by which to evaluate truth claims. The world should just settle into indifference, proclaim the god of Einstein/Spinoza that unfolds itself harmoniously in the universe, in complete indifference to human concerns and human affairs. It sounds rational, liberating even, but it isn't. If human society comes to mirror the objective valuelessness, meaninglessness, and purposelessness of the universe, then it will dissolve in a mutual indifference. But if the view that there is no point to life other than the one humans impose, then one view is as good as another in the absence of objective standards. If some people choose to believe in God, however much you may consider such an entity to be a human invention, then invention cannot be a reason to repudiate such a God – since all values and standards can only be invented in an objectively valueless and meaningless world, including your own. If you are confident enough to reject any system of invented values or gods, then demonstrate your objective foundations. You will find that these are subject to the same decisive destructive criticism as the negation of God.
I have spoken many times to people of such persuasion over the years. I really don't care how they read science here. They are not doing science at all. Because this is not a scientific question. They are indulging in scientism. And they have it wrong. At least atheist scientists that I have great respect for, such as Christian de Duve, recognize that once we move into questions of value and significance, then science has nothing to say since it is incapable of answering such questions. These are not scientific questions, but they are not thereby non-questions. Those who press science into those areas to assert insignificance and valuelessness are guilty of mixing their logics.
Neither side of this “debate” can refute the other, for the simple reason that different logics are involved. The question, then, boils down to which side can make the most of human life in all its richness, its quest for meaning, its longing and desire, its suffering, frustration, and joy. I've met too many mired in misanthropic despair and negation of all hope to be swayed away from the search for God and God's love for want of empirical evidence and logical proof. I have plenty of psychic and moral ‘proof,’ backed by practices and solidarities that pull people together in systems of mutual support. I can't prove the truth of this, and I can't say at any point that I have the truth. But I can say that that truth-seeking is so eminently nourishing that I am willing to offer it as indicating the existence of a transcendent source of nourishment, some anarchic excess that subverts and transforms the empire of facts to redeem all things.
There is a wholeness and a wholesomeness that is beyond analytical reason. Philosophically, the ontological status of all things is uncertain. That applies to Nature every bit as much as God. Those who think the former can replace the latter are deluded on this point. Of the three transcendentals I would proceed from Beauty as something that people respond to immediately. Beauty is the supreme political category in that it lights the way to truth and goodness and invites the heart to follow. Beauty is the bridgehead of evangelisation in the modern world since it is one of the few things most individuals respond to any more. Whether we refer to the beauty of the natural world or the beauty of human cultural artefacts, beauty moves us and inspires us. Beauty speaks to us. Beauty has a central place in people’s lives. Present people with beauty, and they will respond; the lives of people can be turned around and turned on to truth and goodness. The three great transcendentals are all qualities of God and exist in interconnection: in accessing one, you will be drawn to the others in short order. I cleave to this through the thin, because I know by experience it will bring me to the thick.
“The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.” -Sri Nisargadatta
The demand for proof and evidence for God is a double-edged sword. Scientific and technological advance has generated the illusion that we may attain certainty on the deepest of questions. Knowledge and know-how concern explanation of the physical world and the ability to manipulate matter and even people on or about the Earth's surface. This is not the same thing as understanding. Once we move into questions of meaning and significance, the remit of such power ends. When hooked on misplaced presumptions of certainty, philosophical reasoning undercuts itself, ruling out anything beyond itself. People are crying out for hope and meaning, for belonging and healing. Many have discarded faith for any number of reasons, many of which are understandable; people have been damaged by dogmatism and false certainties revealed to be falsehoods without support, and they have also suffered abuse at the hands of the institutional church. But philosophical critique can be acidic, dissolving all supports to leave human beings alone in a world that is objectively valueless and meaningless, impassive in face of their cries of pain. I have reflected on this for years and will take that leap of faith, that heart-leap, into the view that there is a good God that has created a good world, a world that is objectively good, a world that enjoins us to act accordingly, conform ourselves to, and confirm in our actions, thus making conscious and manifest the goodness that exists within and without.
In the end, this issue boils down to the question of which view is capable of offering the more plausible account of human nature and human life. There is a distinction to be made between natural law - nature seen through the eyes of a moral reason common to us all - and a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism, which derives morals from natural imperatives (or just dissolves ethics into biology). The former encompasses more than physical explanation with respect to natural functions and involves the correct understanding of desire, the quest for meaning, the cosmic longing for healing, wholeness, and belonging; it encompasses family, community, society, polity, productive activity, and all forms of human bonding. In this respect, the issue pits the natural-law and virtue ethicist – myself - against the expressivist or emotivist, all those positions which dissolve ethics into mere value judgements, 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, my good self) against Hobbes and Hume and their very many successors in the modern world. The Hobbes-Hume position has held sway for some time, but that 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. It's a pointless victory, if victory it is. If life is indeed meaningless, then nothing is more meaningless than the science and philosophy which says it is so. Nothing has been won this way, since nothing can be won, only destroyed. 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 the issue is to judge which side of this divide provides the most satisfying account of the richness and rawness of human life as it is experienced in the real.
The question is: Which side makes most sense of the lives of ordinary men and women?
I answer plainly in favour of the natural-law and virtue ethicist tradition and those praxis philosophers who sought to embody the ideal in the real through a dialectical unfolding in history – transcendent truths incarnated in the historical process. We need to call back the transcendent standards which buttress 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.'
Sacks is right. His point counts against not merely those who use science to argue that we live in a universe that is devoid of objective value and goodness, but also those who seek to employ science to demonstrate that the universe is objectively meaningful. Such claims tend to turn out to be no more than whatever the latest fad and fashion in physics, biology, and neuroscience claims. It’s the wrong approach. Science is the best reality check we have in terms of the facts of life, and the better the science, the better the information it yields us. But science can only inform our search for answers, it cannot give us those answers. Those answers deal with the meaning of life. Those who stick rigidly to logic and fact will say that the question is meaningless, a chimera that always runs to ground seeing that there is no objective meaning to be found. They don’t see the value of asking questions that cannot be answered in such narrow terms.
Can we prove life has a meaning? Clearly not. Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved. Consider trust. It can’t be proven. But it doesn’t stop us trusting each other. The same with love. I have been writing at length on this in my forthcoming Dante book. For now, another poet, Tennyson, suffices to make the point:
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’!
“The proof in love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.”
St Gregory the Great (540-90)
The grounds that people, under the sway of natural science, search for and find lacking in God, are absent too in Nature. Hence the somewhat hysterical reaction to a postmodernism that, in pointing out that there are no foundations in the way that we thought that there were, is accused of allowing ‘anything goes.’ As the dust settles, we come to see that the search for grounds in nature, as revealed by natural science, has been misplaced, an attempt to replace not God but a misreading of God. Scientists are now giving up the God-trick, abandoning the idea of ever having complete knowledge in a world that is always in the process of (co-)creation, little realizing that God and the universe was always the ‘great partnership’ in the first place. (Sacks 2011).
Monotheism expects great things from us, and by doing so makes us great. It calls us the image of God, the children of God, God's covenantal partners. It challenges us to become co-builders with God of a gracious society and a more just world. It tells us that each of us is unique, irreplaceable, precious in God's sight. We are not just the phenotype of a genotype, a member of a species, to a biologist a specimen, to a government a source of income, to an employer a cost, to an advertiser a consumer, and to a politician a vote.
Sacks 2012: 187
The meaning of a system lies outside the system. Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. That is why Abrahamic monotheism, belief in a God who transcends the physical universe and who brought it into being as an act of free creativity, was the first and remains the only hypothesis to endow life with meaning. Without that belief there is no meaning, there are merely individual choices, fictions embraced as fates. Without meaning there is no distinctively human life, there is merely the struggle to survive, together with the various contrivances human beings have invented to cover their boredom or their despair.
Without belief in a transcendent God - the God of freedom who acts because he chooses - it is ultimately impossible to sustain the idea that we are free, that we have choice, that we are made by our decisions, that we are morally responsible agents. Science leaves no space for human freedom, and when freedom ceases to exist as an idea, eventually it ceases to exist as a reality also. Those civilisations built on the abandonment of God and the worship of science - the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, the Third Reich and Chinese Communism - stand as eternal warnings of what happens when we turn a means into an end. Science as humility in search of truth is one thing. Science as sole reality is another. It can then become the most pitiless and ruthless of gods.
Without freedom, there is no human dignity: there is merely the person as thing, a biological organism continuous with all other organisms. The discovery of human dignity is perhaps the single most transformative idea given to the world by Abrahamic monotheism. That faith was the first to teach that every human being regardless of colour, culture or creed is in the image and likeness of God, the first to teach the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person, and to show how these ideals might be honoured and made real in the structures we build for our common life.
Religion and science, the heritages respectively of Jerusalem and Athens, products of the twin hemispheres of the human brain, must now join together to protect the world that has been entrusted to our safekeeping, honouring our covenant with nature and nature's God - the God who is the music beneath the noise; the Being at the heart of being, whose still small voice we can still hear if we learn to create a silence in the soul; the God who, whether or not we have faith in him, never loses faith in us.
Sacks 2012: 190