Theist vs. Atheist: What Should You Believe? is a seven-part series of articles by two authors, John C. Wright and Stephen R. C. Hicks, in which they debate seven key issues in religion.
Can the Existence of God be Proven (or At Least Be Made a Reasonable Hypothesis)?
By John C. Wright
This column needs must be thrice the normal length, for I must answer two columns by Mr. Hicks, and address the subject matter of this week’s question.
First things first:
There is nothing in the opening salvo of Mr. Hicks that need be controverted because he has said nothing controversial.
He has offered that it is not impolite or untoward to discuss religion; and so it is not, when it is kept at the level of polite conversation. Mr. Hicks has offered some parenting advice that children should not be indoctrinated. I am not sure what he means by this word, but from the context it seems he means taught to recite rather than understand their parents’ beliefs. If so, I agree wholly.
By this definition, ‘indoctrinating’ children would mean that the children are not be properly catechized, hence not properly prepared to face skeptical questions against their beliefs (be those theist or atheist beliefs). If so, then we all agree children should be properly catechized rather than being indoctrinated.
Children must be taught to question authority because, if they do not, they will not know to whom to go for authoritative answers.
Now perhaps this advice applies more to theists than to atheists. Christian belief is a disciplined and organized study of thought, just as economics, physics, geometry, law or moral reasoning. It is like a tower built from the ground up from axioms and common notions, with conclusions resting atop earlier conclusions. The naysayer who merely says phooey when the topic arises knocks the tower down.
But Mr. Hicks and I are not discussing mere nasty-minded destructive naysayers. When he gives his advice about child rearing, he is not saying to say phooey to every question a child raises about religion. Theist and atheist alike agree it is best in children to awaken the curious spirit and love of wisdom.
Mr. Hicks and I are discussing, like engineers examining a building for weaknesses, the art of inspecting the soundness of the structural supports of thought in a rigorous, fair and unemotional way.
Because when the tower of an unsound doctrine collapses, as such proud towers are wont to do, the wreckage and rubble is just as terrifying as the fall of a skyscraper. Contemplate the wreckage left when faith in the Czar departed from Russia, faith in the Weimar Republic from Germany, faith in the Monarchy from France.
Every child must be raised to be the engineer of the tower of his own beliefs about the world, and the parent does him no favors by failing to teaching him where the weak spots are.
Mr. Hicks also does not raise the central question about the morality involved in discussions on this topic when it is not on the level of a polite discussion, namely, that very thing which makes discussing the Christian faith different from every other topic humans discuss.
To the degree and in the way that love of God is a question of fact, of course it must be discussed like any other question of fact. Either it is true or it is not, and neither the laughter of the scornful nor the tears of the gullible will make a truth false or a falsehood true.
But it is obviously more than a question of fact. A polite discussion about, say, a theory of astronomy has nothing at stake aside from a merely intellectual knowledge. There is nothing immoral involved in talking a friend out of believing in the Cosmological Constant of Einstein.
But if you are trying to talk a bridegroom out of marrying a bride you suspect will be unfaithful, or if you are trying to talk a desperate father out of continuing to search the wilderness where his missing child was last seen, then to press the topic or drop the topic becomes a moral question of some delicacy of judgment. It is a moral question because if you are in the wrong, and the bride was true or the child alive, you have done unrecoverable damage to the soul and life of your victim. The abstract discussion will leave real and permanent scars.
Unfortunately, part of the disagreement is the question of what is at stake. If Christ is true to his word, to talk a weakhearted believer out of his Christian faith imperils his immortal soul. If not true, the selfsame talk is an act of raising a lamp to banish the darkness of superstition, and striking away the chains of deceptive priestcraft. (Of course, if the atheist worldview is true, there is perhaps disutility and dishonor involved in believing falsehood, but it offends nothing but manmade moral law, for there is no law above that.)
Hence, for good or ill, even the question of how wise or negligent it is to talk the faithful out of his faith depends on the question of fact of whether Christ is true or not. Hence, as I said before, there is no neutral place to stand in this war. The decision is binary and absolute.
So between what Mr. Hicks said and what he did not say, I believe he and I are agreed on the basic point that the matter not only ought, but must, be discussed.
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In his second salvo, Mr. Hicks falls into the lazy habit of misquoting what I so carefully said. The reader is asked to be on his guard against such negligence in thought, and note where my comment differs from Mr. Hick’s summary of my comment.
First, I said nothing about ‘my’ version of Christianity. Let us not wander into the error of thinking I am discussing or defending a personal opinion. I am discussing and defending Catholic Christianity as it has been practiced and taught for two thousand years. While I have respect for Protestants and Mohammedans and other heretics, their thought is heterodox, and I suspect it cannot be defended rationally, due to the logical internal contradictions inherent in heterodoxy. Hence I am not qualified to defend their beliefs except where, by happy accident, they overlap with orthodoxy.
For that matter, I will defend paganism where it overlaps with orthodoxy, for the pagans are at least wise enough to know that the material world cannot explain the material world, and cannot account for life as we see it. They know there must be more to life than this life.
Second, Mr. Hicks claims I said:
“(1) religious belief can be demonstrated to a large extent to be rational”
I said nothing about any extent, large or small. Monotheism is rational and can be proved by reason; Christianity is rational and can be defended by reason, but its central mysteries of the Incarnation, Trinitarianism and Soteriology, cannot be proved.
Love, in one sense, is completely rational, and in another is beyond reason and is the only thing that makes reason possible — in the sense that philosophy is love of truth. If someone were to sum up my sentence here by saying “Mr. Wright says belief in love can be demonstrated to a large extent to be rational” that summary would be utterly misleading. So likewise here.
“(2) that the arguments demonstrate a monotheistic god”
Not quite. What I said was “Reason can lead one step by step to Monotheism, but it cannot lead one all the way to Christ.” I did not use the word demonstrate for a reason: I was speaking of probative arguments, that is, arguments that lend weight to a proposition, not of demonstrative arguments.
The argument given by Euclid to prove the Pythagorean Theorem is deductive and airtight: it can only be denied by someone, let us call him Playfair, who denies one of Euclid’s axioms. The arguments given in the Federalists Papers, on the other hand, showing the wisdom of the Constitutional form of government, are probative, and rest for their persuasive force on the experience, horse sense, and knowledge of law, human nature, and history found in the educated men of that day.
“(3) that faith is a legitimate way to close the gap between what can be proved and a full commitment to religious belief.”
I am not even sure what this sentence means, and I do not recognize it as anything I said. Since I do not think faith and reason are opposites (indeed I deem them to be mutually interdependent) I do not propose that one is a substitute to be used to jump the last little gap when you run out of the other.
I had hoped my comment was clear. Love of God, like all forms of love, has some aspects that can be discussed as matter of fact and reason, such as whether the girl you love is legally married to another or not. Other aspects cannot be discussed as matters of fact, such as why you love her.
If your sister says she is in love with Oberon the Fairy-King, it is one conversation to convince her that fairies do not exist, but a second conversation to convince her to be true to Tom, the Baker’s Son, and ignore the horns of elfland dimly blowing in the west. The first is a question of fact; the second of faithfulness.
The role of reason is to shoot down the objections which a timid gut or arrogant heart or a foolish mind concocts, which may bewilder and mesmerize the unwary, tempting him to disbelieve in the truth he at one time correctly saw, when his mind was clear. Faith is not a substitute for reason but a defense of reason against the powers of unreason.
This is the same in atheist as theists. When the atheist walks alone in the graveyard at night, he must summon his faith to remind himself of the argument against the possibility of ghosts which he knew without doubt at noon in the school common room, surrounded by scoffing friends. Likewise, the Christian when he sees the grave eat his children must be faithful to what it was easier to believe while kneeling at mass, being touched by the holy spirit. Faith is just a word that means fidelity.
To be sure, the word has an additional technical meaning in Christian theology, since we regard that steadfastness of fidelity to require a divine grace to sustain, but Mr. Hicks did not raise that issue, and it is irrelevant here.
In a column this short, I very much dislike repeating myself. The proposition I am defending is this:
Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith.
Ergo the proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
Man’s faculties include his reason, his wisdom, and all his wits. Intimacy is beyond the reason’s unaided faculties. Intimacy is not merely knowledge. The devil has knowledge that God exists, but has no intimacy, no fellowship, with Him.
The philosophical argument to prove God exists cannot grant faith, which is that intimacy, any more than a syllogism can make you fall in love.
But such proofs are worthwhile, as they can predispose one to be accepting of faith, that is, once false and fallacious reasons for disbelief are cleared away; and second they can show that faith is not opposed to reason.
Mr. Hicks then quotes some heretics who disagree with the Catholic teaching on the matter. I am not sure to what avail he expends that ink: I do not deny that other people regard faith and reason as antithetical. Obviously they do. I deny that orthodoxy so regards it.
The quote from Tertullian is wrong. The quote “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe, because it is absurd) is ascribed to Tertullian. But Tertullian never wrote this: what he wrote (De Carne Christi, V, 4) was “Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est” (It is wholly believable, because it is incongruous).
Here is the exact quote: The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is incongruous.
For the record, he is arguing against the Docetism of Marcion, the heresy that Christ could not have suffered because it is incongruous for divine beings to suffer (a Greek idea, one we find also in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius).
Tertullian is talking about the fact that if the evangelists were lying or telling fables when they depicted Christ as able to suffer, they would have make the lie believable, and said Christ suffered no pain. That is, they would have made the lie seem like life, to accord to the expectations of the audience of the time. Tertullian believes it because the account of the Passion of Christ is in congruous, therefore unlikely to be a lie, therefore true. Tertullian is using the word ineptum ironically, to mean those things that a liar would never say for fear of not being believed.
This is why no one should quote matters out of context.
Since I said nothing about faith providing a proof or faith bridging a gap between reason and reality, the core of Mr. Hick’s argument is irrelevant, and need not be addressed.
Mr. Hicks then makes the false claim that I am filling these gaps with emotionalism. Alas for his windy statement, I made no such appeal, nor do I feel the need to answer such a cheap strawman argument.
He then defines “faith” to mean “a belief-commitment made beyond the evidence.”
That is a false definition, childishly so. It would be just as silly if I were to define “skepticism” as “a cowardly inability to see God”. If Mr. Hick was foolish enough to accept the definition of skepticism to mean cowardly, the argument would be over in a trice. Likewise, if I am foolish enough to accept his definition of faith as either emotionalism or as a lack of evidence, the argument would be over.
The word faith, fidelity, means truth. It means trustworthiness, it means keeping your emotions under control by your reason when they are in rebellion.
When a mountain climber is terrified by a drop and his teacher – just out of reach above him – asks him to make what seems an impossible or dangerous shift of his grip, it is not emotion that is the climber’s ally. He must have trust, faith, in the teacher. More to the point, when he stood safely on solid ground and measured the climb and counted the steps, his reason told him whether it was possible or not. In midair the panic strikes. At such time as this, the climber must have trust, faith, in his own judgment and skill when he inspected the rock before he decided to climb. Faith is the ability of the Christian to push aside the temptation and lure of irrational doubt.
“Faith almost always is an emotion-driven process in which one wills oneself to believe that which one wants to be true.”
Stuff and nonsense. I most solemnly assure you that I do not will nor want it to be true that I must love my enemies, turn the other cheek, or die a martyr’s death singing joyful hymns. My will is that I do so out of obedience to a God whom I love and fear, and I obey Him in these things because I am trustworthy and loyal, like a Boy Scout. My will is not that these things be true.
No one asked me, but, given a choice, I would far rather that Odin had been the High God, so that I could rape and pillage to my heart’s content.
But I did not make the reality in which I live. It made me. I did not choose which God was real. He chose me. The only thing I chose to do was, once I saw, very much against my will and inclination, that God must be real, to be faithful to my philosopher’s oath to face the truth and believe the truth no matter how absurd-seeming or unpleasant, merely because it was true.
No rational person draws his conclusion about which model of the universe is the most useful and reasonable and fit on the basis of his personal will or preferences. Needless to say, that is a Nietzschean belief, a core atheist doctrine, and thus the mere opposite of what Christ teaches. He did not say “YOU are the way, the truth, and the life, baby.”
As for calling it an emotion-driven process, Mr. Hicks has no doubt found it too difficult to argue with me, and is inventing some emotion-driven person with whom to argue. I would say that his emotions are driving him to find someone who made a different argument than I did, and one easier to overcome than mine.
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Theist vs. Atheist: What Should You Believe? is a seven-part series of articles by two authors, John C. Wright and Stephen R. C. Hicks, in which they debate seven key issues in religion.