Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built upon, despite its protestations to the contrary, nevertheless required the very thing it claimed so ardently to reject: faith. Moreover I’d come to see that it explained the Universe by explaining away the very things that constitute almost the entire universe of human experience. The resulting explanandum was a rump Universe, shrunken and dessicated, and in human terms hardly worth explaining (or living in) at all.
In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton sums this up:
I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.
In my earlier post I wrote:
Where, then, does all of this leave me? It seems there is no process of pure reason that will settle these ultimate questions, and so I must either believe nothing, or rely on faith. To believe nothing, though, is a good deal harder than it sounds: it’s easy, perhaps, when one is young and can defer the question while focusing on practical matters, but as one’s shadow lengthens, and the distractions of youth and middle age fall away, the great mysteries come increasingly to the fore. I would like very much, in the time I have left, to be able to believe something. But if pure Reason cannot tell me what to believe (and it is Reason itself that has convinced me it can’t), and so belief must be built upon Faith, then where should Faith be placed? Such are my stubborn habits of mind that I am still, in some way, hoping that Reason will help me adjudicate between the competing prospects. But I’m starting to see that this isn’t really how it works — the harder I try, the more I see the limits of Reason.
My secular friends are horrified that I would even be asking these questions; it is to them self-evident — a matter of faith — that there can be no true account of things that extends beyond the naturalistic model. I understand this well, because it was exactly my own position until very recently; and even now I am making no certain claim to the contrary. But there is faith on either side: the choosing of axioms is, by definition and by logical necessity, prior to reason. This means — and such is the power of habit, especially habits of belief, that it has taken me all my life to see this — we are radically free to choose such axioms as do not lead to obvious contradictions with truth.
So, at this time, feeling rather exhilaratingly liberated, I am simply re-examining my axioms, to see where it leads. Trying the other day to explain this to a shocked friend, I hit upon an apposite metaphor:
For roughly two thousand years, we understood geometry according to Euclid’s Elements. Even in the fourth century B.C., the basics of formal reasoning were understood: you adopt a foundation of unproven axioms, and then build upon them an expanding (and potentially limitless) structure of theorems. That the axioms themselves are unproven is a matter of logical necessity; were they provable, it would have to be in terms of even more fundamental postulates, and so your original axioms would now be theorems. At some point, the regress has to bottom out in postulates that we simply take as given — or, to put it another way, that we take on faith.
The theorems of Euclidean geometry rest on a set of five postulates. They are:
1) A straight line segment may be drawn from any given point to any other.
2) A straight line may be extended to any finite length.
3) A circle may be described with any given point as its center and any distance as its radius.
4) All right angles are congruent.
5) If a straight line intersects two other straight lines, and so makes the two interior angles on one side of it together less than two right angles, then the other straight lines will meet at a point if extended far enough on the side on which the angles are less than two right angles.
One of these — the fifth — has troubled mathematicians from the beginning. It can be restated as:
In a plane, given a line and a point not on the line, at most one line parallel to the given line can be drawn through the point.
This postulate feels true, but it seems so much more complicated than the others that it ought to be a theorem, not an axiom. But try as they might, geometers were never able to derive it from the other axioms — and it was so deeply embedded in the centuries-old theoretical edifice of geometry that everyone just left it alone.
But in the eighteenth century, mathematicians (beginning with Lobachevsky) finally found the courage to attempt a geometry that rejects this postulate. It seemed like a crazy experiment, expected to lead in no time to absurdities and self-contradictions — but it turned out to be internally consistent, and enormously fruitful. What’s more, it has since turned out that this “non-Euclidean” geometry appears to be the actual geometry of the Universe. Who knew?
Well, that’s all I’m trying here: I am, late in my life, questioning the “fifth postulate” that has been a part of all of my theorems to date. That postulate is the one shared by all of my secular friends: there is no God.
I have no way of knowing whether this postulate is true or not; the essence of postulates is, after all, that they are unprovable. Such was the depth of my embedding in the secular, scientistic model that it has taken me till now, believe it or not, fully to understand that this was in fact just an axiom like any other; an unprovable thing to be taken on faith for the sake of theorem-building. Even now, my faith in the postulate has been displaced, not by certainty in its opposite, but only by doubt.
Doubt is not faith. But it can be awfully liberating — and now, at 63 years old and with plenty of time on my hands, I find myself free to try out, if only provisionally, a different postulate: God exists.
Why not see what sort of world-geometry that leads to? What can I possibly have to lose?
26 Comments
Pascal beat you to this a long time ago with his wager; as one gets closer to that time when the answer becomes pressing, the wager starts to make a lot of sense.
SW,
Well, right, of course. Until now I was so sure of my axioms that I was never able to take Pascal’s Wager seriously.
But I should say that even now I don’t feel that I’m motivated by the fear of annihilation. Yes, the time is approaching, but then life is so short that it’s always been approaching. It’s more just dissatisfaction, at last, with the old geometry — I’ve finally seen enough, and thought about it all enough, to have worn out the old postulates.
I was about your age when I rethought my long-standing agnosticism. (I had rejected atheism for the same reason that you do: it’s a faith that has no scientific basis.) Anyway, here’s a link to one of many posts in which I spell out my position, which is that a Creator who stands outside the universe is a necessity, though I have no idea as to the Creator’s role in unfolding of the universe that He created: https://politicsandprosperity.com/2011/06/15/probability-existence-and-creation/
Loquitur Veritatem: your post reflects the argument of Aristotle and others. The book by Edward Feser, “Five Proofs of God” gives the details of Aristotle’s and four other philosophers’ proofs of God. I applaud you on arriving at your demonstration on your own. The first cause argument is the only one I have found to be compelling.
Pascal’s wager fails to specify *which* gods you ought to worship “just in case”, and the fact that most gods get extremely angry if you worship any other god.
The problem with logical deduction is Gödel’s theorem that any consistent axiomatic system complex enough to describe basic arithmetic is necessarily incomplete, containing infinitely many true statements that cannot be proven. It’s even worse with people, as a rule set that works fine in one population might fail horribly in another.
Instinct and tradition are better guides, for they pass down the desires and beliefs of people who may not have been perfect but at least managed to reproduce. Thus you should usually practice the same faith (and eat a similar diet) as your ancestors, because it worked for them.
You may have been at a meeting where a colleague proposed a plan that sounded wrong to you, at a gut level, but since he was stubbornly committed to the idea and you couldn’t immediately produce a concise mathematical proof that it wouldn’t work, the team decided in his favor, to much grief later.
Heh.
Such that are among the “rewards” of Grandparentshood I’ve come to think.
Sometimes recognized at the moment sometimes after.
One thinks to oneself:
Where’d that come from?!!!
Then sometime after that realization it’s How’d that come?
Only later come the rationalizations.
After that it’s either ‘Women and children first’ or ‘Every man for himself.’
The anatomists advise us our brains are composed of mostly fat (so too the restaurateurs and the hillbillies) but then the thinking man questions ‘Whither from all three of that expert class might the ultimate be discerned’?
I’ve come to the personal opinion it don’t matter much whether any of or all the enumerated and mentioned expert classes – among which depending on what blog I’m momentarily following – will be mattering in my end it’s rather how the first child I took on a fishing trip explained to me how to improve our luck.
His exact words?
“We can’t take our chances on luck.”
Dave,
Yes, that was my usual objection in earlier days. It hardly seems worth bothering about at the moment.
Maybe God doesn’t like for people to gamble on His existence.
Jeffery Hodges
I’m glad to hear this Malcolm. The best thing about deleting that postulate is that the world doesn’t have to be just geometry anymore. I also feel what Chesterton described. The bleakness of the “wonder” the naturalists try to sustain. And that feeling would be evidence, or could be, if naturalism were false.
Hello! Hope you are well.
I must say, Malcolm, that like most atheists, you’ve got things the wrong way round, i.e., you’ve simply switched to the positive pole of the atheist’s irrational postulate, thus continuing to see the existence or not of God as a postulate. But the rational approach to the existence (or not) of God does not make his existence a postulate. Rational belief in his existence is a conclusion, and the arguments (or more normally, the vague but reasonable inklings) that lead thereto have as their postulates things you would rationally accept: the validity of logic to the world (i.e., that logic is not mere word-games, but is embedded in reality); that causation exists (i.e., that it is not something to be dismissed simply because it is not empirically observable in itself, for reason dictates you believe in it); and (relatedly) that the world does not operate on random chaos, with things possibly popping into existence out of nothing, a la Hume’s silliness. Science, reason, and everyday reasonableness depend on these very things, as does a rational belief in God, and yet they are rejected by atheists strategically (but not when no-one is looking) because their rejection allows them to wriggle out of arguments for the existence of God.
The non-existence of God is a powerful postulate! It would overthrow reason itself, given the chance. Contrary to the thoughtless and yet regrettably now popular belief, it is theism that has been the guard of reason and reasonableness and atheism its mocker.
Deogolwulf! What a pleasure to hear from you. It’s been far too long. Are you writing anywhere these days?
Thank you for this penetrating comment. Of course we are all familiar with the arguments that make a theorem of the existence of God. (Good atheists — and I was a very skillful one — have to be, in order to argue against them!)
I am guilty as charged, I think, of a sort of reaction here. The atheist’s world-model is based on the nonexistence of God as a postulate, as it cannot possibly be a theorem — and when I decided to try abandoning it I quite naturally moved to its opposite. (It’s the Law of Excluded Middle, I suppose; and given that I had for so long taken ~p as a postulate, then I’d be inclined to treat p as one also.)
So perhaps you are right: I should have said only that I am provisionally rejecting the old postulate, not that I am replacing it with a new one.
It’s an interesting question, though: must the existence of God be (for us at least) a theorem, and not an axiom? I do understand that a thing cannot be both, but can one not start from the premise that God exists, and work from there to the existence of causality and logic? Perhaps not, as an omnipotent God could do what he likes, and would not be constrained to create an orderly, causal, or moral world. (That’s not God, but Allah.)
This is a curious topic. If God exists, and is the ground of existence for all the rest of Creation — including logic and causality — he is in fact the ultimate “axiom”, no?
In an ontological sense, how can God be a theorem?
Yes, it has been too long.
Not publishing anywhere else. Can’t be bothered! Just plodding on.
“must the existence of God be (for us at least) a theorem, and not an axiom? I do understand that a thing cannot be both . . .”
Well, one doesn’t have to bother one way or the other. But if the matter at hand is whether or not God exists, then God-as-an-axiom is not the right way to go about it. And God — more properly: a statement about God — can be an axiom and a theorem, but of course not in the same argument. One could come to the conclusion that God exists and then make that conclusion a premise in another argument. What I find interesting, though, is rationality as the basis (forming the premises) and the rational steps to the belief in God. The tendency of theists to say: “if there is no God, there is no reason (and morality, etc)” is all very well, but it’s not in itself very interesting — though the social and cultural effects most certainly are! Much more interesting is: “if there is reason (and morality, etc), then there is God”. (I am not presenting that as an argument, by the way, just an illustration of the way the direction should run.)
“(That’s not God, but Allah.)”
Nicely said.
“If God exists, . . . he is in fact the ultimate “axiom”, no?”
Yes, but here we’re switching to an ontological axiom, the ground of all being and so on, whereas we were dealing with arguments, our beliefs, and their epistemic axioms and theorems.
“In an ontological sense, how can God be a theorem?”
He isn’t, or rather, I don’t know what that would mean. Theorems belong to epistemics. They are statements. It’s rather like asking how my front-door can be a theorem. It can figure in a statement, there can be a theorem about it, but it is not itself a theorem or any other particular kind of statement, but rather it is a particular kind of being in its own right.
D,
Right, fair enough. What I was doing, then, was simply saying to myself: “I will assume that God exists, and see where that takes me.” Whether or not that assumption is epistemically primary (axiom), or a little ways in (theorem), the point was that one can, taking that as a starting point, build a very different system from the atheistic model that I’d worn all my life. I want to try it on.
“one can, taking that as a starting point, build a very different system from the atheistic model that I’d worn all my life. I want to try it on.”
Fine, but isn’t that approach to theism itself built on the atheistic model? It seems all too mechanical and not at all rational, with a rather obvious result: not theism but atheism. You might tell yourself that you sincerely tried to be a theist, but couldn’t see how it works, whilst I would say the approach was doomed to failure from the beginning: the thought-pattern of the means will inform the end. (I don’t mean to speak out of turn, and if I am off the mark, do not hesitate to upbraid me.) Of course if one believes in God, one has a different “model” and builds a different “system”. But this is not systems-engineering! One cannot engineer oneself into theism (nor into atheism, I suppose), nor try it on. Trying it on is not belief*, and the “experiment” works only in the case of belief one way or the other.
*Well, belief is a complex and slippery thing.
Deogolwulf,
Duly noted, but at this point it’s the best I can do. After all, what are my choices? I can’t just flip a switch and start believing. I’ve known the familiar rational arguments for God all my life, and they didn’t get me there; one can rationally believe or disbelieve.
Pascal recognized this, and advised people who wished to believe, but didn’t, to do exactly what I’m doing: to try it on, and pretend they do believe. “Fake it till you make it”, that’s called these days, and it is surprisingly effective for all sorts of things.
Fair enough.
As you know, belief is a complex thing.
(There may be more depth to those arguments than you realise. Modern metaphysics tends to misread them.)
Anyway, bedtime.
It’s been a pleasure talking with you again.
D,
I promise to think about that.
And yes, I’m very glad you came by. Sleep well.
Deogolwulf,
I have to quibble over this:
“the rational approach to the existence (or not) of God does not make his existence a postulate”
Definitely this is one rational approach, appropriate for intellectually oriented grown-ups. But what about people who simply trust in God, feel God’s presence (or think they do)? Most ordinary religious people don’t get to the belief that God exists from any chain of reasoning–or, at least, nothing so sophisticated and philosophical as what you seem to have in mind. People believe because their parents told them, because it’s how they were raised, because God-belief ties in emotionally and culturally with all kinds of things they care about. For most theists, I think, belief in God is something like a “postulate”. Could that also be a rational approach?
I don’t see why it couldn’t be. Compare with moral beliefs. Most people simply believe–on the basis of no serious reasoning–that we should care for our children, that it’s wrong to steal, etc. Then they reason about specific problems on the basis of these moral “postulates”. It’s notoriously hard (and probably impossible) to provide some compelling rational argument for common sense moral value judgments. But that doesn’t prove that such judgments can’t be reasonably treated as “properly basic beliefs”. (I’m borrowing Alvin Plantinga’s term.)
So while it’s definitely important that a reflective rational thinker CAN arrive at theism, and this might even be the most rational conclusion possible, it’s also worth considering that theism could be a perfectly reasonable “postulate”. There might not be any mistake there, even if there’s also no mistake in arriving at theism from other postulates.
Right, Jacques, this was the point of my comment (at 5:47) above. Thank you for unpacking it so clearly.
Jacques,
Yes, I agree that that is how things largely go. And I think it is a reasonable postulate if that is what it is. It is hard to untangle and to give a general overview of all the threads that go into the belief, and I wouldn’t characterise the belief as either postulate or conclusion except in the context of argument. But, as you say, argument, let alone formal argument, seldom has much to do with it. Both theism and atheism tend to hang together with other beliefs within a particular worldview which in itself may be rationally coherent, or at least may sit well together and not be self-contradictory.
I am not speaking against what might be called (and I don’t mean it condescendingly) simple or effortless or “natural” belief in God. Likely the best kind, in my view. My points were ad hominem — towards Malcolm in particular, since clearly simple belief is not his thing!
You might find this of interest. Albert Einstein made very good use of the new geometry developed by Riemann in rejection of the parallel postulate. He was certainly not observant or religious in any way. Yet in a letter of condolence to the family of his friend Michele Besso he wrote. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
In “After Virtue” by Alasdair MacIntyre, MacIntyre took what I think is a very helpful approach when contrasting two incommensurable paradigms of moral evaluation.
MacIntyre was comparing Virtue Ethics over and against the succession of proposed ethical systems which arose after Scholasticism was rejected by the early moderns. But I think the problem may provide a helpful analogy for comparing the God/No-God postulates.
MacIntyre began by stating the problem, which was this:
THE PROBLEM
When Paradigm X establishes a certain measuring-stick for evaluating all things, and succeeds in providing insight in certain areas but not others, and seems self-contradictory helpless in certain areas, critics of Paradigm X will certainly point to the latter areas as reasons for doubting Paradigm X. But what if Paradigm Y, the alternative to X, has the same problems? What if it, too, establishes a measuring-stick, and thereby provides insights, but those insights also have limitations and problems? Proponents of Paradigm X will certainly take the failures and limitations of Paradigm Y as reasons to doubt Y. Assuming that X and Y are mutually incompatible, both sets of critics may be correct: X is wrong, and Y is also wrong. They can’t both be right, but both can be wrong.
But proponents of each paradigm usually don’t admit that their own favored theory is just wrong. They phrase it this way: “We haven’t figured it all out. Difficulties remain, but as long as we keep working at it, we believe we can resolve them in time.”
This, of course, might be true. In spite of the problems in Paradigm X, it may still be closer to the truth than Paradigm Y. Perhaps we should abandon consideration of Y, in order to focus on resolving the last remaining problems in X.
But the proponents of Y could, of course, make the same claim in favor of Y! Perhaps Paradigm Y is closer to the truth. Perhaps the proponents of X are wasting time trying to prop up a theory which is already fatally wounded. Perhaps we should all abandon X to wholeheartedly perfect Y….
It appears, given this scenario, that there is no way to resolve the problem. Either of the paradigms, or both, might be dead ends. Or, they might not. They both establish competing measuring-sticks for understanding reality, so it would be begging the question if you evaluate Y by the terms set by X (or vice versa). You could establish your own third measuring stick (Z); but proponents of X and Y would (rightly) complain that you’d merely added your own proposal, without giving them time to locate all the holes in THAT.
What, then, should we do?
Is there any way to discover whether we should prefer Y (or Z) over X? Or do we just have to flip a coin?
MacIntyre proposes a solution.
THE SOLUTION
MacIntyre says that when Paradigm X and Paradigm Y are incommensurable, the only way to break out of the deadlock is by asking which paradigm gives insights that the other can’t even in principle ever give, and about a wider range of phenomena, while simultaneously explaining why the competing paradigm can’t, even in principle, resolve its own holes and contradictions. If we can’t find anything in Y able to do this to X, or anything in X able to do this to Y, then perhaps they’re both equally wrong and we need to look elsewhere. But if Y can show, from outside of X, exactly why it is that X has the problems it has, and why X can never resolve them, but Y can, then even if Y is itself incomplete, it in some sense “encircles” X, and is a more holistic way forward.
How MacIntyre applies this to Virtue Ethics is interesting, but off-topic.
But I think it applies wonderfully to the competition between the Classical Theist worldview and the Mechanistic Reductionist Materialism that Ed Feser calls “Scientism” (as an ideology, distinct from the methodology called “Science”).
The Mechanistic/Scientistic view says: “All is matter and energy in space-time. Anything not reducible to these explanations is illusory. And since these are the first principle of all real things, but are in themselves brute facts (lacking not only an explanation known to us, but actually lacking any underlying causal principle at all), the whole of reality is not, in the end, explainable.”
The Classical Theistic view says: “Matter and energy in space-time exist, but are only part of the show; there are other things (‘…more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio…’) which are not reducible to matter and energy in our space-time, or even in any other kind of space-time. All these contingent things, including space-times themselves, are contingent upon more fundamental-realities, and ultimately one most-fundamental reality. Metaphysical demonstration permits us to see (not believe, but see) that this most-fundamental reality is actus purus, non-composite, and so forth. This gives ultimate reality a character (eternality, cause and sustainer of all things, omnipotence, omniscience, and spatio-temporal omnipresence) which Classical Theists call God. And while there’s no guarantee that God should bother to reveal Himself to particular humans in any other way than by sustaining the ongoing existence of everything they observe, if God ever did reveal Himself, the revelation ought to be consistent with that actus purus, that-whose-existence-just-is-subsistent-existence-itself model which we discovered by metaphysical demonstration.”
Malcolm, it seems to me that the Classical Theist view looks from the outside at the Mechanistic view, explains it, incorporates all its richness, and adds more richness that Mechanism can’t ever allow for because of the narrowness of its range of explanation.
Materialism can’t ever give us the things Chesterton describes (forgiveness, free-will, and the rest) without explaining them away: They are “merely” reducible to matter and energy, and their only “meaning” is via a chain of causation, but this chain terminates only in some brute fact with no meaning at all.
Feser somewhere uses the analogy of a man with a metal-detector who is so impressed by the practical usefulness of his metal-detector for finding shiny things that he becomes convinced that only things made of metal can possibly exist. “After all,” he reasons, “my detector is very reliable at detecting things made of metal; but can’t find these other rumored non-metal things at all! Surely if there were real things that weren’t metal, they’d show up somehow, if only faintly? Surely the fact that every last thing I’ve found thus far is made of metal, is highly suggestive that there’s no such thing as real non-metal things? Perhaps made-of-metal is merely a synonym for real.”
It seems to me that the Classical Theist approach of Feser, Oderberg and others compares to Materialism in much the same way that the “There’s More Than Metal In The World” approach compares with The Metal-Detector Man. MacIntyre’s solution bids us jump outside the world bounded by the limits of our detection-devices, not in order to deny what those devices reveal to us, but to expose us to the wider reality that they don’t.
Hello–
A very refreshing and honest article, thank you. “God”– if nothing else– is our one pledge that such questions will be ever-new and ever-recurring.
May I encourage you to explore the writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. His understanding of language puts science in its place. You could start with my article about him in The Imaginative Conservative:
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/10/cross-of-reality-eugen-rosenstock-huessy-caryl-johnston.html
Keep thinking!
R.C.,
Usually when I find a comment of such length as yours I chide the author for his want of brevity. But I’ll not do so this time!
What you describe in your comment is exactly the critique of sola ratio that has brought me to this point. Reason alone, and a world-model confined only to what reason can reach, simply cannot encompass the self-evident truths of human experience — the transcendent qualia that are the very foundation of purpose and meaning.
Thank you for your comment.
Caryl,
Thank you for your recommendation. I had never heard of the writer you mentioned, and I will have a look.
If you are not yet aware of Dr. Charlton, you ought to be:
charltonteaching.blogspot.com