God, Part I: A Response to Lewis, Girard, and Ricoeur

The alternative is clear and certain--as alternatives so rarely are--that either the universe is the effect of God (we like to say "created by God") or it is not. You have to choose a side or get one by default. Most people of course choose by not choosing and end up a theist or an atheist by default. 

Before going on, I want to be clear here about the term "God." It is very hard, if not impossible, to say true things about God, who about him/her/itself, if he/she/it has ever said anything it is only to point out his/her/its existence. "I am that I am" (or "what I am" or "am being" or "I am what is"--even getting the thing said from Hebrew into English is a challenge, as big a challenge I imagine as understanding it in Hebrew.) God is said by various religions to have said other things of course: God is said to have said every word of the Quran. Is said to have said, in Christianity, "this is my son in whom I am well pleased." Is said by some--who will not be outdone by Muslims--to have said the whole of the Old and New Testaments, and by Mormons to have said The Book of Mormon--and on and on. What it means to say God said any of those things requires a great deal of thought and qualification to arrive at. And that's not what I'm concerned with here. 

So I repeat: it is very hard of not impossible to say true things about God. And there are two reasons for this, which again I won't do justice to but do need to mention: the first is language itself. Saying true things in language is hard in general. The model of language as embodying a meaning, a complete, fully comprehended meaning, and passing that whole and complete meaning without lack or excess from one person to another intact and without barnacles or dust or nicks or gouges, has been richly interrogated and found wanting. It's hard to say true things in language, which turns out less to be like passing a kernel or stone or ball from one mind to mind than like trying to transfer a handful of water from one palm to another in a hurricane. And the second reason is the nature of God himself (I'm going to fall back on the convenient and familiar shorthand of the male pronoun for now, with some reluctance). Among the truest things we can say about God are that God is infinite and absolute, perfect. We are none of those things. For the finite to encapsulate the infinite in words is impossible. Even to say that "God is infinite" is true requires us to add that we don't know what we're saying when we say it. We don't know what "infinite" really means. It means something more specific than "God is unknowable" but at the same time "God is unknowable" is hidden or trapped within the apparently smaller statement "God is infinite."

This brings me in my essential but frustrating digression to a second point about God: God is two. Although among the few things that all Abrahamic religions agree on is that God is One--even Christianity that also says God is "three in one--if God exists, there are really two Gods as there are two of everything for human minds: there is the God we define and there is the God that exists. When I say "God is infinite" I am saying that that is true by definition. That doesn't mean it's true in fact. But, again, I'm going to skip over this fascinating and essential concern in order to be able to say what I wish to say. When I say "God" I am going referring to the Abrahamic deity, though whether to that deity as defined or that deity as being will almost always be more or less uncertain. To the extent that I can say true things about God, they are true of the God of definition. Whether they are also true of the God represented by that definition is harder to say.

This difficulty of saying true things about God doesn't get us out of the dilemma. The universe--everything we humans with our words call "reality"--was either created by God or it wasn't. God, the "Being" God, either exists or he doesn't. 

Most people, if asked, would probably tell you that there are three possible responses to the proposition that God exists. "I believe it," "I don't believe it," and "I don't know." But there really aren't three. Even Nietzsche--one of histories greatest atheists--admits at one point (I don't recall exactly where) that "I don't know" is not separate from but part of the other two. Whether you believe in God or your don't, you don't "know." "I don't know" covers not just faith in the being or non-being of God but everything else as well. Whatever you "know" you know only with a degree of certainty that is never exactly 100%. Even Descartes was less certain of his existence than he said he was. Believing without a doubt is not the same as knowing.

The next digression I'm tempted to is "What does that mean?" If there are only two buckets, "I believe in God," "I don't believe in God," what do I do if I don't know what bucket I'm in? Can I put a foot in both buckets? "I have faith in God but I doubt?" "I have faith in no-God but I doubt?" I'm going to have to pass by this rabbit hole today.

God either exists or God doesn't exist. If God exists, God created the universe. If God created the universe, God did so intentionally. The universe is not a fart or a belch of God, it's not--as perhaps Kurt Vonnegut or Neil Gaiman would delight to surmise--the blurp of iced-tea God spilled on the anthill when he tripped on a rock, to the delight of the ants. At least that's the claim of the Abrahamic religions. 

It is the claim of the Abrahamists that this God can be found, indeed that this God wants to be found. There are so many schools within each of the three Abrahamic religions that even that statement is contestable. But it's as true as the roundness of the earth, and that's as true as we can ever hope to be. It may be, in fact I think it has to be, that one can't find this God unless this God is looking for you. But I think "wanting to be found" covers this pretty well, within the grossness of our concepts and our words. If God wants to be found, God wants you to find him. And if God wants you to find him, God is looking for you. At the same time, God only wants to be found in certain ways. God could reveal himself "directly" to you, presumably, just put into your head whatever it would be that you would have if you completed the obstacle course or solved the mystery. God could sit at the table across from you and say, "I'm the God-interface" because of course the infinite itself can't sit in a chair. "I just want you to know I exist and if you need proof, just name it, happy to provide it" and do whatever magic tricks you'd need. God can do "only God can do" stuff and can also fix the wiring of your brain so you'd accept the evidence. As I suggested once in a novel, God could rearrange all the stars of heaven while you were sleeping to spell out, "Hi, I'm God. I exist. Stop doubting. It makes you look stupid." 

God doesn't have to pussyfoot around. It we know God's actually way of revealing himself of inducing faith is better, we know it only by definition: if it weren't better, God wouldn't do it that way. We can then write essays and philosophies exploring why this way is better. But we know a priori, as it were: we know it's better because that's how God does it. 

If God wants to be found, and if God is the impulse we feel to find God, or the source of that impulse, then how is God to be found? There are only three possibilities: by reason, by observation, by experience. These are not distinct, of course. Reason can be pure reason, Kantian stuff, language as math, and, if this path is enough then there is an argument that will get you there, though not all arguments that try to arrive there are necessarily flawless, and all arguments that fail to get you there or that get you elsewhere--all arguments that reason that God doesn't exist are flawed. But I don't think reason alone can every get you there. Reason has to have something to reason about, observation and experience. These latter two aren't absolutely distinct either: all observations are experienced. And all experiences have to be observed. But the categories should be maintained. There's a difference between watching people mate and mating.

And this brings me, finally to the beginning. C.S. Lewis asserts that belief in God is the most reasonable response to being. He makes the argument in slightly different ways in different works. But the pattern of his logic is pretty consistent. Here is what how he puts it in "Is Theology Poetry":

Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it…. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.

The line of reasoning would be this: if reason is merely mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming, it cannot be trusted. Science says reason is that, therefore, according to science, reason cannot be trusted. 

The question we have to ask is why among all the random possibilities that could occur in a universe as vast and old as ours, why couldn't reason be one of them? We may have to acknowledge, following Lewis, that what we call "reason" and think of as such may in fact by a collective delusion. We might have to admit the possibility that everything we see, hear, sense, say and believe is as false as unicorns. We had to do that anyway. We are also reading and writing within the implicit caveat that "given the information we think we have now and with the methods that we agree are the best that we have, it follow that...." If the information is inaccurate or the methods (derived from that information) are bad, then we don't know anything, not even the fact that we don't know anything. But we also have to put that aside, because we have no choice but that or madness, and sally forth into the unknown, knowing, at least, that if we're wrong, we'll never find out. We will find the absolute limits of reason, as far as we are able, but still use it, because it's not just the best tool we have, but because if we abandon it, we have no other tools. 

And thus we have to rewrite the scientific myth that Lewis properly observes and plainly puts down. We have to add that somewhere along the way creatures invented a intellectual tool, "thought laws," that allow it to satisfy its desire to make sense of the whole story, to know that the story it tells itself is the true story.

I'm not saying that I think this is true. I hope it is false. But I can't see how the fact of reason necessarily ruins the whole project. 



Lewis and rareness, Ricoeur and abundance, Girard and history. Lewis and Girard and myth. 




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