Motus Mentis

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill.

Bill asks: why are some people amenable (in some cases, driven) to belief in God, while others simply can’t get there, or even reject the idea with disgust? It seems to require a particular disposition; a nagging intuition that there has to be something beyond and above the physical world we find ourselves dropped into — that there must be something more than just “atoms and the void”. Gurdjieff referred to this disposition as “magnetic centre” — a dissatisfaction with the idea that the physical exhausts the real, and an intuition that higher influences are trying to reach us.

Merely to be dissatisfied with our current reductionist model isn’t enough, though; as an example of this, Bill mentions the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who, despite rejecting materialist “explanations” for the existence of consciousness, said that “I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” (Nagel remains an atheist.)

Many smug and brainy atheists flatter themselves that it’s simply a matter of intelligence: if you’re smart enough, you’ll see right through the whole theism thing as a defense-mechanism against our natural fear of death and extinction. Not so, says Bill, nor is it any of the other obvious possibilities:

This has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge or upbringing. Not intelligence: there are both intelligent and unintelligent theists and atheists. Not knowledge: there is no empirical knowledge that rules out theism or rules in atheism. Not upbringing: some are raised atheists and becomes theists, and vice versa. What you need is a certain sort of spiritual depth that is present in, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but absent in, say, Daniel Dennett. If you are ‘surface all the way down’ religion won’t get a grip on you. You will not be able to take it seriously. It will strike you as superstitious nonsense, make-believe, wishful thinking, unconscious anthropomorphic projection . . . .

What’s curious to me here is that I’ve been on both sides of this for as long as I can remember. My mother was the daughter of a Scottish minister, but as far as I can recall she never expressed any religious belief at all, and had a feisty antipathy to the idea of any sort of hierarchical or authoritative Church (which might in part be due to her father having been a Congregationalist, though I never discussed it with her). My own father, who grew up in London, was raised as an Anglican; his father, though, was a non-practicing Jew. Both of my parents were scientists, and used to joke that they had had me baptized (I’m not even sure as what), and had kept my younger brother David unbaptized “as a control”. We never went to church, and religion was no part of our lives, but two of their closest friends (I called them Uncle Horton and Uncle Bob) were serious Christians: Horton Davies was a distinguished scholar of the history of the Church, and Robert Montgomery was the minister of the big Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street, and the chaplain of Princeton University. My father certainly had the “magnetic centre”, though, and despite his distinguished career in medical science he never turned his back on the idea of the transcendent. His belief in God seemed to deepen as he aged.

My father also had been introduced, in postwar London, to the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff (and to the man himself: Gurdjieff, who lived in Paris, used to visit groups in London from the end of the war until his death in 1949). Growing up, I can remember seeing some curious books on the shelf: In Search of the Miraculous; Meetings With Remarkable Men; Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, and others. I knew that my father believed there were difficult and important truths in these books. I never read them myself until quite a bit later.

My own position, through much of my adulthood, was hard-core scientism: the Universe was a cosmic accident; life the product of some lucky chemical event, followed by billions of years of mutation and Darwinian selection; consciousness just some sort of quirk of nature, its mechanism not yet understood but sure to be in the future; and our sense of a hidden magic behind it all no more than a comforting illusion. I’d read Asimov as a boy, and Wells, and later Gould and Dennett and Dawkins. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (which by the way sparked a bitter feud with Gould), Daniel Dennett quotes an old song, Tell Me Why:

Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the ocean’s blue,
And I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the ocean blue,
Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

Being Dennett, he then devotes an entire book to smashing this worldview into atoms. I recall also that Isaac Asimov, a secular materialist to the core, had in one of his zillions of books offered his own take on that second verse:

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Rayleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you.

I generally agreed.

Nevertheless, behind it all, and despite all my naturalistic bravado, that magnetic centre, that “disposition” Bill refers to, kept nagging at me, and little by little I found my faith — my antireligious faith — beginning to waver. (Encounters with highly intelligent theists, such as Bill himself, were an important influence as well.) I began to realize I wasn’t compelled by reason alone to choose either position.

In Bill’s post he names some of the factors that impel him toward theism. One is that naturalism simply fails to provide answers to several critically important questions, among others why anything exists at all, how life arose, and what gave rise to consciousness. These and others have vexed me as well for a very long time; I used to accept the “promissory notes” given by scientism assuring that they would soon be answered, but became more and more dissatisfied as the years went by. (I have written in some detail about these and other problems in an essay of my own called Pilgrim’s Progress, the first of the linked series of posts that now includes this one.)

Another thing that might tilt a person toward belief — and perhaps the most compelling — is personal religious or mystical experience. Bill mentions two of his own. I had such an experience myself, decades ago. I’ll try to describe it:

At the time I had been impressed enough by the description of Man’s predicament in the Gurdjieff material (I’d finally got around to reading those books my father had on the shelf — combatively at first, but with a growing sense of astonishment at the depth and coherence of the ideas they contained) that I had gone so far as to begin attending weekly meetings at the Gurdjieff Society in New York. We were given exercises in self-observation, in meditation, and in curious, difficult “sacred dances” that were meant to cultivate a peculiar state of attentive self-awareness. It was all very hard work, and nothing much seemed to come of it other than a growing realization of how habitually mechanical and unconscious most of life usually is. We were told, though, that at some point our efforts would be rewarded with a glimpse of what was possible. One night it actually happened.

I’d woken up in the wee hours and gone to the bathroom. While I was in there about my business, I suddenly became fully, astonishingly, Awake — wholly conscious of what I was, and of my relation to, well, everything. I saw with pure clarity the mechanicalness and disarray of my ordinary life, and I saw also, but completely without fear, the fact of my death, and the urgency of using my brief span of life to put myself in the proper orientation to everything around me. I felt a great wave of joy and love and understanding, and knew at once that this was what all the prophets had spoken of, that Buddha and the bodhisattvas were trying to lead us to. I had long heard the phrase “state of Grace”, but suddenly I knew what it meant.

And as soon as this happened, I felt the old thoughts arising – my “monkey mind” trying to claim this miraculous moment as its own, to freeze it, to analyze it, to write a story about it — and it all slipped away and was gone. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of minutes — but it was absolutely unforgettable.

These things, being a matter of purely subjective experience, are useless as objective, third-party “proofs” of anything at all — but for all our bluster about the shared material world, subjective experience is the closest and realest thing of all, and is the actual bedrock of our existence. Nobody who has an experience like that can be quite the same afterward.

Finally, Bill talks about the rational arguments for belief in God. They cannot compel — if they could, this would all have been settled thousands of years ago — but they can, at least, put the possibility of God on as solid a foundation of reason as any that atheism can claim. We are free, equally reasonably, to choose to believe as to deny — and in another in this series of posts, The Parallel Postulate, I consider what that freedom can mean.

Read Bill’s thought-provoking essay here.