It’s been a while since I’ve added an entry to this series of posts about moving toward theism. (The last time was just over a year ago.)
I’m prompted to write again by having just read an essay by Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger describing a progression closely similar, in many ways, to my own: How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian.
In his essay, Sanger, who has a doctorate in philosophy (with a focus on epistemology), describes a spiritual and intellectual journey from a Christian upbringing, to a skeptical agnosticism bordering on atheism, and finally back to Bible-believing Christianity.
I was drawn in at once by this passage, at the beginning of his post:
Throughout my adult life, I have been a devotee of rationality, methodological skepticism, and a somewhat hard-nosed and no-nonsense (but always open-minded) rigor. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, my training being in analytic philosophy, a field dominated by atheists and agnostics. Once, I slummed about the fringes of the Ayn Rand community, which is also heavily atheist. So, old friends and colleagues who lost touch might be surprised.
For one thing, though I spent over 35 years as a nonbeliever, I will not try to portray myself as a converted “enemy of the faith.” I never was; I was merely a skeptic. I especially hope to reach those who are as I once was: rational thinkers who are perhaps open to the idea, but simply not convinced.
“Open to the idea, but simply not convinced” is precisely where I find myself. In the previous posts in this series I’ve described my deepening dissatisfaction with the scientific-materialist metaphysics I embraced for most of my life. (Indeed, to describe such a worldview as “metaphysics” is obviously wrong, because it puts so much emphasis on the physics that it tries, unsuccessfully, to sneak past the finish line without the “meta”.)
Sanger makes some of the same objections that I did in the initial post in this series, noting in particular materialist science’s inability to account for both ultimate origins and the fine-tuning of physical constants:
Science says the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe. But whatever had a beginning has to have had an explanation. As this is the beginning of matter itself, it cannot have a material cause; thus it must have an immaterial cause (whatever that might be like). Similarly, certain features of the universe that are absolutely necessary to explaining how fundamental natural laws operate are physical constants. Physicists tell us that if the values of those constants were different, then various things could not have happened; for example, atoms could not have formed, or stars could not have ignited and given off light and heat. But scientists have never offered an explanation for these constants.
As for being what Sanger calls a “rational thinker”, I came to see over the past few years that both atheism and theism are rationally defensible positions. In my 2019 post The Parallel Postulate (has it really been over five years since I wrote that?) I compared them to Euclidean and non-Eulidean geometry, both of which are logically consistent and entirely rational, differing only in their choice of axioms. Just as Riemann and Gauss adopted new and plausible axioms to build a new mathematics of geometry, so may we, just as reasonably, adopt the axiom God exists to build a defensible “geometry” of fundamental reality.
Here’s how Sanger describes his understanding of this “God hypothesis”:
From the structure of galaxies to the orbits of the planets, from the movement of waves to the fates of mountains, from the origin of life to the complexity of man—there might well be an explanation of these things. Indeed it seems unsatisfying to say, “God flipped a coin” or “God picked a number” or “God just decided it would be that way.” But of course that is unsatisfying. That is hardly the point. Here is the real point: Even if we had a perfect scientific explanation of each of these things, the conjunction of the facts in our explanations seems to be driven by a purpose. If we could not state what these purposes were, then this would seem to be a merely superstitious, biased, religiously-driven claim. But the purposes are clear: The universal constants permit the existence of spacetime and the coalescence of matter, then stars and planets; certain unlikely chemical facts are absolutely necessary in order for life to exist; certain incredible leaps seem designed to lead life on earth ever onward to greater awareness and knowledge, culminating in man. If the very emergence of order seems to exhibit ends or purposes or designs, we may hypothesize a designer. Such a designer would not work against or within the order of the universe. That is not the point at all. Rather, such a designer would create the order of the universe. With the possible exception of miracles, there are no glitches in this created matrix… The emergent scaffolding of order in the universe is the miracle.
I have no objection to any of this.* It isn’t rationally compelling, but it is certainly rationally plausible, and so making it one’s default position is rationally defensible, and becomes a matter of intuition. Axioms are by definition unprovable (otherwise, they wouldn’t be axioms, but theorems) — and so, as long as they aren’t falsified by other obvious truths, we are free to adopt whichever ones our intuitions incline us toward.
Where, then — almost six years on from the first post in this series — does that leave me? Am I now a believer in God?
Looking inward, all I can say at this point is that I wish I were. I want to believe. I feel as if I’ve done the intellectual work to quell my rational objections, and the “upside” of genuine belief — intellectually, emotionally, and spritually — seems so clear to me now that I want to be able to go the rest of the way. In these past years I’ve read shelves of books making the case for Christianity — lots of Lewis and Chesterton, of course, but also much, much more — and I have meditated, prayed, and asked for help from above. But still the real leap of faith eludes me. (It’s as if I already believe in my head — because I can rationally justify it, and at this point have no good reason not to — but not yet in my heart.)
Maybe I expect too much. Maybe for some people it’s all just gradual movement, until one day, looking back, you realize that somewhere along the way you crossed the “event horizon”. (Astrophysics tells us you can do that without noticing it.) But I can’t shake the feeling that something is just blocking the path for me: some sort of obstacle having to do with the way I’m “wired up”.
Thinking about that the other day, it struck me that part of the problem may be related, somehow, to what C.P. Snow spoke of in his 1959 lecture The Two Cultures: namely, the idea that we can, broadly speaking, divide people into scientific and literary types.
That got me to thinking that my problem, as one of the “scientific” sort, might be that the Christian religion all seems so fantastic: that for my kind of mind, it’s just tremendously difficult to chuck out an entire, lifelong worldview based on abstract, utterly impersonal laws, rules, and generalities, and replace it with a story. It’s like a fundamental move from science to literature as the bedrock of all reality; a staggering recategorization of everything that matters. No wonder, then, that it would be hard for someone like me to go “all in”, even if the whole amazing story is literally, historically, and miraculously true — which I am increasingly confident that it is.
*See “Pilgrim’s Progress” for a brief discussion of the commonly given “Anthropic Principle” objection to this line of argument.
