By Peter Mullen, Anglican Mainstream. (Image: Unsplash)
I wanted to know about transcendence not in the gnostic or deistic sense of knowing that. Rather it was existential with me: I wanted to know how to respond to the reality of transcendence. Of course, the philosophical problems about the scope and limits of knowledge and possible justification for what we believe are important. Being a Christian – or at least trying to be a Christian – doesn’t excuse me from taking the trouble to listen to arguments and to try to think straight. I am interested, therefore when Richard Dawkins, even as I speak, is celebrating notable anniversaries of his books: The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He is so certain in his view that the universe is a mechanical thing lacking purpose and, in a word, totally deterministic. If ever I have the good fortune to come across Professor Dawkins, I should like to ask him just one question:
‘If the universe and all that is in it is determined, was it determined that you yourself should be a determinist? I mean, did you have no choice in it? I must confess, Sir that I don’t generally warm to men who tell me that they have come to believe what they believe only because they were forced to believe it!’
And I’m not relying on theological ratiocination in wanting to put questions to Professor Dawkins and his co-irreligionists. For science has its own paradoxes and contradictions. For example, Dawkins and the Neo-Darwinists do not believe in freedom of the will: it’s all determined by our genes, they say. In fact, you can’t even call the genes our genes because in no sense do they belong to us. But biologists such as Dawkins also believe what their brother scientists the particle physicists tell them: that at the sub-atomic level, reality is unpredictable and indeterminate. But it’s nonsense to believe there is a deterministic system which in its most basic particulars is indeterminate. In short, if there were no purpose and design in creation, we would not base our whole lives – as we do – on the notions of purpose, meaning and design. Most of what we do is purposeful: we all do things so that. The cosmos everywhere discloses signs of intelligent activity, of things being for something. It would be strange indeed to think that purpose and design themselves arose by accident.
As Francis Bacon puts it in his essay On Atheism:
‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend and the Talmud and the Koran than that this universal frame is without a mind.’
For my next exhibit, there is Dr Gerald Schroeder, a professor of physics at the Weizmann Institute, who tells us what modern science says about the nature of the physical universe:
‘The world we see as solid is made solid not by matter but by ethereal forces carried in photons – themselves a theoretical construct – travelling immense distances between the nuclei and surrounding electron clouds. The world of atoms and molecules consists of wavelike particles separated from each other by voids, held in place by never seen massless photons, travelling at the speed of light among particles that are not only particles but also waves. If the strong and weak nuclear forces had been ever so slightly different, if electromagnetism were not just exactly what it is, and if gravity were not as we experience it – then there would be no life at all If you can conceptualise this melee in an intelligible way, I have an urgent suggestion: Publish!’
Modern physics thus reveals to us a world which does not look at all as if it’s made of bits and pieces of matter, but it is really rather ethereal. Less as if it’s material stuff. More as if it’s mind stuff. Moreover, it looks overwhelmingly as if the universe was made with us in mind, for, as Shroeder says, if it had been ever so minutely different, we wouldn’t be here. The odds against the universe happening by accident to be so accommodating to us are so astronomical as to be virtually impossible. And it is not theologians who are making this point, but scientists. They have even coined a phrase to refer to the hospitableness of the universe: they call it The Anthropic Principle – because the world seems to have been constructed with man in mind
In a vivid sentence, Professor Fred Hoyle said,
‘Life evolving by chance has the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a scrap yard and leaving behind it a fully formed jumbo jet.’
I wouldn’t say these matters are uninteresting, but they interest me only as the crossword interests me. Or as a chess problem is interesting. I know I have said this before but I will say it again in slightly different words because it is essential to my purpose and procedure in this essay: any God discovered by deistic methods, any God who is the conclusion from empirical propositions – from how the world happens to be or appears to be – would only be an idol, the creation of human minds. I know there is a reality beyond empirical conjecture, transcendence, or God. But what it is and how I respond to it is my task and my preoccupation.
I cannot find any other way of making my response apart from the thought and general culture which has shaped western society for the last two millennia and which is referred to as Christendom. It is an even longer heritage if we take into account the Jewish civilisation of which Christianity was a historical development. This tradition provides me with the vocabulary, scope and means of approaching transcendence. It does not take – as deism and rationalism take – human consciousness as the centre and starting point for the understanding that God, or less pejoratively transcendence, is the origin and centre of all knowledge. Transcendence cannot be spoken about and for that reason it is rejected as nonsense by the rationalists and logical positivists from their misreading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Thus Waissmann, Carnap, Schlick and their colleagues founded the Vienna Circle and invented the Verification Principle, which declares,
‘The meaning if a statement is its method of verification.’
Which sounds all very well until you apply it to the statement of the Verification Principle itself and find that it is not verifiable by its own criteria! The Verification Principle is not verifiable. Nice jar of jam you’ve got there, Professor Ayer: pity it’s inedible!
On the contrary, Wittgenstein regarded all the things which are not empirically verifiable as the most important things. As he said, these things cannot be described or defined but only shown. Specifically, among these things he had in mind – ethics, aesthetics and theology – are all outlawed as literally meaningless by the logical positivists. It did not seem to have occurred to them that they were by their own system consigning to the rubbish heap all the things which are of the most interest to most people, which are actually the things which logical positivists regard as the most important too – once you get them out of the seminar room.
It may be useful to see how the rationalists and positivists differ practically in their treatment of what most matters to us from the philosophers who actually understood what Wittgenstein was getting at when he said that the most important things cannot be described but only shown. In ethics, for example, the biblical teaching cannot be validated by any external means of authority but must be its own justification. It’s either take it for what it is or leave it damn well alone. So let us see what we have to choose between…
On the one hand we have the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament which take a couple of hundred words to tell us what we must not do; and we have the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament which takes about a thousand words to tell us what we ought to do. These Scriptures are of course rejected by the positivists. Instead of the do’s and don’ts in a few words, they offer us Methodology in Metaethics by Professor O. L. Earbender – German edition Methodologie in der Metaethik by Gottlob Guttersneippe and I. C. Weig, published, last time I looked, by Verlag-Berlin as $45 – which offers us no moral guidance at all but only a forensic examination of ethical terminology.
Collingwood puts it succinctly:
‘The positivist says to his pupils, “If it interests you to study this, do so; but don’t think it will be of any use to you. Remember the great principle of realism, that nothing is affected by being known. That is as true of human action as of anything else. Moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action: it can’t therefore make any difference to the practice of moral action. People can act just as morally without it as with it. I stand here as a moral philosopher. I will try to tell you what acting morally is, but don’t expect me to tell you how to do it”.’
What applies to ethics applies also to aesthetics. If we want to know Rembrandt and Giotto, we look at their paintings and, if we have any sense, we steer well clear of the art gallery’s catalogues and the ever-so-nice visiting lecturers. Or just look at the fatuities composed by the music critics on the works of Mozart and Beethoven. If you want to become acquainted with those masters, listen to Mozart’s K465 or Beethoven’s Opus 27 no. 2. If you want to know what is ethical, read the Bible – or look to Baruch Spinoza or some other source of moral teaching. If you want art and music, go to the paintings and listen to the compositions and not what’s merely said about them: all the pretentious twaddle that goes into explanations.
This is the way it is with theology – or better, the response to transcendence. We cannot start from our own consciousness as the thing which is fundamental and upon which everything else is to be constructed. We must first take transcendence – what can only be shown – for granted, as something which just is, and see what follows. This has all been said before many times and by my betters. Tertullian spoke of faith seeking understanding. Augustine said we do not understand in that we may believe but we believe that we may understand. And elegantly by Collingwood in his justification for the necessity of absolute presuppositions and by Kant in his Categories. Or, best of all, just open St Matthew’s Gospel:
‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.’
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Revd Dr Peter Mullen is a retired Anglican priest. He has published around 40 books on philosophy, theology, literary and musical criticism, novels and short stories.