Whether theist or atheist, Christian or non-believer, it is quite possible that your concept of God is pictorial and quite possibly childlike. This is not to say that this is a bad thing. Much of religious thought is expressed in picture language and it is probably beyond us to entirely escape it, and it may furthermore be quite unhealthy to do so. The reason for this is that much of our thought is pictorial, or representational. There is a problem however, and a very serious one, when as members of a culture dominated by the achievements of science our intellectual development outstrips our childlike picture of God. Some choose to live with a split consciousness with grown-up scientific and common sense thought in one part, and the childlike picture thought of religious faith in the other. What I am thinking of here at its crudest is the idea of God as either a “big friend in the sky” or its counterpart, which is one of the modern reasons for rejecting faith, the idea of God as an overbearing and oppressive judge that threatens our freedom. For many however, this split consciousness simply does not work, and the result is a loss of faith or the lack of any inclination to ever have a faith.
I watched a fascinating interview with an astrophysicist, and inevitably questions of God, faith, origins and purposes, knowledge and infinitude arose. The physicist was quite straightforward in confessing the inability of science to answer certain questions. What struck me however was the manner in which he dismissed a (childlike) picture of God as irrelevant, and assumed that a religious faith in God as creator was intended as an explanation for the origin of the universe. The inevitable retort to such a belief is to ask “and where did God come from?”. This is without doubt the ultimate form of the “God of the gaps” argument: God is seen as necessary to explain those things for which we have no other (scientific) explanation. As science has progressed, God’s services have been required less and less, and presumably we can dispense with God altogether now that science has explained so much. No self respecting modern would seek to explain patterns of weather as the direct intervention of God. Although it should be said that not all astrophysicists are atheists, the error this particular astrophysicist is making is to assume a picture language concept of God and apply it to the realm of scientific thought in order to dismiss it. God is being thought of as an object separate from the world, albeit a very big object, infinite in fact. The scientist is essentially saying that explaining what science has so far been able to fully explain – the beginning and existence of the universe – by means of another object (God) still leaves us with the problem of explaining the beginning and existence of God. Given his assumptions about the concept of God and God’s relationship to reality, I would have to agree. The problem is that he is using picture language and finds that it doesn’t explain what he assumes theists are seeking to explain. Perhaps too there is a bias to the “how” questions of science as opposed to the “why” questions that, inconveniently for some, do lead to questions of faith. No doubt, many theistic believers do think quite straightforwardly of God as such a separate being, outside of and prior to what we call reality, and at a certain point created everything that exists. However, it is not a fully adequate understanding, and the problem of arriving at a more adequate understanding is what mystics have wrestled with in inner experience and theologians and philosophers have wrestled with in thought. But more on that later.
The example of the astrophysicist is one of how intellectual development, in this case a scientific world view, has outstripped what I have described as picture language of God. Our culture is dominated by the scientific world view; the ability of science to penetrate mysteries of the material world is awe-inspiring; through technology it has given us immense power over our environment; being “scientific”, “objective” or “certain” has taken on the gold standard of what all knowledge should aspire to. In such a cultural environment there are many that find religious knowledge, and in particular the idea of God, to be both naive and contradicted by the materialist and scientific world view. There is a story that when the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his volumes on the solar system, Napoleon asked Laplace why there was no mention of God. The reply given by Laplace is said to be “I had no need of that hypothesis”. Indeed, given the assumptions made by physics, and the limited scope of science, this is the correct answer. Science has no need of God.
However, there is a problem, and a very deep one. Science is based on a set of assumptions which philosophers describe as metaphysical. The word comes to us from Aristotle, who after his Physics wrote another volume called After Physics; “meta” just means after. However, the better way of putting it is that metaphysics is not what comes after, but what comes before physics. Metaphysics asks and seeks to answer questions about the way that reality is; a typical question being “what does it mean to be?”. Science begins with certain assumptions about reality, and without these assumptions it would have made no progress. These assumptions include such ideas as that there are finite and separate objects in the world; that there is cause and effect; that reality behaves according to laws that are consistent over time. Some of these assumptions are quite similar to those made by common sense thinking. It is quite natural to think of our world as being made up of separate and finite objects, things that have boundaries, characteristics and an identity. It is also quite natural for us to distinguish ourselves as sentient beings from the objects around us that we know something about. To put this in more philosophical language, there are subjects capable of knowledge and objects that are capable of being known. Of course, some of those objects are also other individuals, or subjects, which complicates things in a way that will not detain us here other than noting that some of the things we claim to know about those other individuals include such intangibles as intentions, purposes and emotions, and these are things that science either excludes altogether or else seeks to “explain” in mechanistic terms, and such explanations really in the end explain nothing.
The scientific world view assumes this same stance of subject and object, but seeks a knowledge that penetrates beyond the surface into natural laws and mathematical relationships, a world of cause and effect that quite clearly denies any place to those intangibles of which common sense claims some knowledge. This is where we encounter a limitation of the scientific world view: it is unable to give us any useful account of the things that matter most to us as human beings. Such things as morality, the purpose of life, love, and even what we mean by “parliamentary democracy” are not objects that natural science can investigate. Of course, there are attempts to construct scientific accounts of morality, of which Utilitarianism and Marxism are examples. However, Utilitarianism assumes a measure of “happiness” or “utility” as a way to calculate moral decisions, reducing human nature to the point where there is no concept of the moral person (or agent) that would distinguish humans from other creatures. Marxism on the other hand assumes a historical dynamic of purpose (“teleology” or a purpose behind history). Both sets of assumptions, despite protestations, are beyond the remit of science. Some look to neuroscience to explain human thought and behaviour, but the assumption here is that explaining a mechanism in the brain is also an explanation at the level of human meaning.
You may be noticing a recurring theme here: there are lots of assumptions. All of the assumptions I have mentioned are, at base, assumptions of how thought, or knowledge, relates to the world of objects or “physical stuff”. As I have already noted, philosophers recognise these assumptions as metaphysical ones; they are assumptions about the nature of being and our existence in the world. They are also assumptions about the relationship between thought and being, and in this Descartes can be seen as the father of a philosophical divide between the two. Descartes divided reality into two kinds of substance: extended substance, in other words material objects, and thinking substance, or we might simply say – thought. This division, or dualism, lies at the root of many of our modern problems. It is worth underlining the point: at the heart of our modern culture is an assumption that there are two kinds of reality, there is physical stuff, and there is thought. And then of course we have the question of how the two relate to each other. It is a question that scientists set aside or ignore, and philosophers struggle to answer. There is no doubt that in setting aside the relationship between thought and being, science has been able to achieve huge progress in understanding the material world, but it has been at the very high price of undermining or devaluing our understanding of ourselves. It also leads to some very common misconceptions about the nature of science and its practice, in particular the excessive reverence given to the opinion of scientists and those we now describe as “experts”.
If we take the scientific world view as given, with its limitation on what we can really know to relationships of cause and effect, physical laws of nature, and mathematical explanations, or the stuff of material reality that Descartes described as extended substance, then we are left without any secure way of knowing anything about all those things that matter to us most. The resulting vision of our real place in the universe is then quite a depressing one; our rational abilities as humans have led us to a place in which we can explain all kinds of physical and mechanical processes in the material world, but we remain unable to explain our own nature other than as objects that are as much determined by cause and effect as the proverbial billiard balls bouncing off one another. However, most of us would be hard pushed to find anyone for whom this represents a viable philosophy of life. Are we not back to the split consciousness I referred to at the start? Although now it is not in the sense of a childlike religious faith alongside a more grown up common sense view on life, but of a practical sense of the value and purpose of our life alongside a scientific world view that has no place for it. Either way, we have lost our ability to be at home with ourselves and in the world of which we are clearly a part. It is an experience of estrangement, or we might say, alienation. Some have described it as a disenchantment, a breaking of the thread of light binding us to heaven.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche poignantly expressed this disenchantment and alienation in the words of the madman:
“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
The pre-Enlightenment enchanted world in which spiritual value infused everything is gone. The horizon by which we were able to place ourselves in the world has disappeared and we are left without a sense of where we are, and more disturbingly, of who we are. Whilst an argument can be made that it is a materialist or scientific world view that has intensified our experience of disenchantment, the problem goes much further back, perhaps even as far back as the Genesis story of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden which is the archetype of our loss of God and of our original connection with Being. What brought about this expulsion and loss was, according to the myth, the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; in other words, our emergence into reason and cognition. For many of us moderns it is precisely reason and cognition that means for us that God is dead. The way back is barred, the only way is out into the world, and for us too there is no return to a naive re-enchantment.
It is time to question those assumptions that I referred to earlier, and ask if there is an alternative way of understanding our place in the world that is both more satisfying and more rational. I say more satisfying and more rational quite intentionally. However satisfying it may be, there is no return to a pre-Enlightenment enchanted world; for better or worse this is unavailable to us unless we opt for a religion based on feeling that denies or compartmentalises what we have learnt from the Age of Reason and the scientific revolution. No doubt there are many that opt for such a religion of sentiment, whether in the guise of traditional religions or in the contemporary irrationalities that alike search for a sense of meaning and value by denying a place to reason. Given the dehumanising aspects of science and technology and the difficulty we now have in accounting for who we are as human beings it is no surprise that contemporary movements surrounding the notion of social justice entail a rejection of science and rationality; something we could describe as a retreat from reality. In order to make ourselves at home in the world, are we then faced with the necessary choice of denying and repudiating a material reality that is either indifferent to us or even hostile?
To address this we need to return to this question of the relationship between thought and being. The point at which we first encounter knowledge or cognition seems to be at that early stage of life when we begin to distinguish ourselves from the objects around us. Birth is the beginning of a process of separation in which we gradually identify ourselves as a separate and finite being, a being with boundaries. At the same time as being the gain of an identity, it is also a loss of our connection with being, a loss that our whole lives turn out to be an attempt to overcome, both in finding our connection with others and in finding a connection to reality as a whole, spirituality, or God.
The cardinal assumption that I noted above is the distinction between the subject that knows, and the object that is known. Another way of expressing this is to say that human thought and reason is placed outside the world of objects. Thinking is what we do as observers of a material reality that is distinct from us; we see ourselves as the detached observer that is not part of what it observes. This detachment is the ideal of science, and it has no doubt proved effective in gaining insight into its limited and restricted object – the world of material objects. But what is neglected is that the thinking scientist is also part of the world, and more generally, the thinking subject, you and I, are also in the world. We might say reason is in the world. And this is something that the scientific world view simply does not account for. This is no problem for science with its limited remit of understanding material objects. It is a problem however if we look to science as the benchmark, or the gold standard, of what truth looks like. It is also a problem if we look to a scientific world view to inform our understanding of ourselves including our moral and social nature.
The very thing that science sets aside, or brackets, is that we as “observers” are also part of the world. We are objects in a world of objects, but we are also objects that think. Reason, thinking, or rationality is very much something that is in the world. The idea that the world is rational is in fact assumed by science as regards the physical world; the very notion that there are laws of nature is an assertion of a rational order. But science gives no place inside its concept of the world for the rationality of us as observers. The importance of this point is that it should alert us to the fact that the scientific world view is incomplete; by its very nature it is not able to explain everything.
The point is that reason, or rationality, go further than natural laws. In our moral and social existence we hold ourselves and others to account; in other words we give reasons for what we do, and this is an expression of rationality although of a different order to natural laws. The question comes down to the relationship between these two kinds of rationality, these two expressions of reason. Is there any relationship? Or must we accept that there are simply two separate and incompatible views on the world? The question is a deep one and continues to divide philosophers and here is not the place to offer an adequate justification for one side or the other. What I do want to offer however is a way of conceiving of reason or rationality in the world that incorporates both ways of viewing the world and our place in it. This is a way that acknowledges, and leaves room, for both our human and reason seeking understanding of the world and the scientific understanding of cause and effect. It is a way that gives an account for the interrelatedness not only of persons but also of objects, in other words, of our participation or membership in the world and one another. It is also a way that recognises a relationship between thought and being, between reason and physical matter.
I have already mentioned metaphysics, something that can sound rather daunting. Some of the mystery can be dispelled by thinking of metaphysics as an exploration into what things are and how they relate. We can also think of this as logic, which at its simplest is simply a set of rules for the relationships between things. I have commented above that science does have its own metaphysics, or logic, but that it is an incomplete one that is unable to explain everything. The common sense and the scientific views I am going to describe as a “logic of opposition”; it is a way of looking at the world as made up of separate objects that oppose each other as individuals. But there is also another logic, and that is the “logic of participation”; a way of looking at the world that sees the interconnectedness of all things, both persons and objects.
This logic of participation does not negate the scientific view, after all, science is aware of the way that every particle making up the universe reaches and even interpenetrates every other particle. However, an illustration from music perhaps makes easier sense than thinking of the hard to imagine mutual indwelling of objects. The musical chord is a way we describe the presence as well as harmony of distinct notes. The individual notes, rather than disappearing into some kind of musical mush, remain present at the same time as being part of a whole. The whole is greater than the parts, but we remain able to identify the individual notes. In personal relationships we have become accustomed to thinking of ourselves as individuals, and perhaps we could see this as related to the kind of social atomisation characteristic of modern society. But we are also still aware of the way that we are constituted by our relationships with others, although arguably this awareness has faded to our cost. I am not thinking here of the kinds of collectivism in which the identity of the individual is lost – this is not participation, rather it is in the end both submersion and effacement. One way that we experience a profound union with another person without losing our individual identity is in the sexual relationship. At its best this is an experience of losing ourselves in the love of our partner, a mutual indwelling, a participation in each other in which we remain truly ourselves at the same time as being outside of ourselves and in the other.
This logic of participation is one that is present in the understanding the Christian church has of our relationship to God, and the way God relates to the world. One of the early church councils, known as Chalcedon, spoke of the human and the divine natures of Christ as being united in one person “without confusion” and “the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union”. The language here is decidedly philosophical and conceptual. It is a part of that theological and philosophical struggle to put into words the Christian understanding of the incarnation. The apostle Paul also spoke of God as “him in whom we live and move and have our being”. In the worship of the church, the celebration of communion, the sharing of bread and wine, is described as an act in which we are one body, the body of Christ. The language is metaphorical for clearly we remain separate individuals, but it is also describing a reality that can be understood only in the logic of participation, which is precisely the logic of Chalcedon.
Speaking of logic brings us back to reason. It is the Greek word “Logos” that gives us the English word “logic”, as well as all the “-ologies” that aim at being rational thought about whatever field of investigation – theology, sociology, anthropology, and many others. Logos is a word with a richness of meaning for Christian faith. The very centre of Christian thought is the incarnation – John’s gospel begins with the Word of God, the Logos, that was with God, and that was God. John goes on to describe this Word as becoming flesh and living amongst us. This is reason being in the world in the highest possible expression of the idea. This is philosophical language, but it is a language that is complemented by the language of love understood by faith. Faith does entail picture language, but as we have seen it is not hostile to the conceptual language of participation. For many Christians, the picture of God as a being with whom we can speak and have a relationship is deeply meaningful, but it is worth commenting on the spiritual life of mystical thinkers. One such is St Theresa of Avila, who spoke of a relationship with God that reached the level of a sense of unspoken union with the divine, a relationship that has gone beyond the picture language of a God who is somehow separate from us. Without going too far into the realms of theological thought, we can take the incarnation, the unity of the human and the divine in the person of Christ, as the basis for our thinking about how each of us and all of us relate to God. It is a mutual indwelling, a participation of the divine in the human, and the human in the divine. It is an identity between us and the God who nevertheless remains distinct from us.
In attempting to draw things to a conclusion without getting lost in theological and philosophical reflections, I should draw attention to some of the consequences for our original problem of escaping from a split consciousness, whether of a Christian faith limited to picture language against real world experience, of a scientific world view against a need to still live a meaningful life in the real world. Any kind of split consciousness is an alienation, either from a world that is foreign to us, or from a God that appears to threaten our freedom. The idea of God as “above”, as some kind of infinite being that not only created us but also rules over us, does not sit well with a perfectly proper understanding of human freedom rooted in our rational nature. Whether we take it as a metaphor, or as an event in history, the incarnation of God in the person of Christ is the very opposite of a threat to our freedom or a denial of our humanity. Rather, it is the “idea of ideas” that establishes both our rationality and our freedom. Our reason, our rational nature, is instead our participation in God, our share in the divine nature.
It is worth exploring whether this participatory understanding of God overcomes some of the obstacles found by many in accepting the reality of God. Atheism is understood to be the rejection of belief in God, but it is pertinent to ask what concept of God is being denied. Many people now describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, which can presumably be taken as expressing the thought that there is something greater than ourselves, but that traditional religion with its supposed picture of a God who is separate and beyond seems no longer relevant. It may be the fault of the Church in failing to communicate a concept of God adequate to modern questions and concerns, or it may be the fault of those that have never penetrated beyond either complete ignorance or else a Sunday school level of understanding. Either way, my argument is that contemporary atheism or agnosticism may be rejecting or doubting the wrong concept of God. If so, it may also follow that the conflict between theism and atheism is an unnecessary one. If atheism amounts to a rejection of inadequate concepts of God, then it is hand in hand with the kind of faith I am arguing for.
Even if the logic of participation and the concept of God that I have outlined above manages to overcome some of the obstacles to faith, we are still a long way from a living and practical faith in Christ. However, what I hope I have convinced of is as follows. Firstly, that because of the metaphysics it has assumed, and because of its self limitation to the world of material objects, science is in no position to rule on the question of God, and that science need not be an obstacle to faith. Secondly, the domination of our culture by this incomplete scientific world view has created many of the problems we face in making sense of our moral and social existence. These include the environmental issues that stem from our alienation from the natural world and the tribalism and divisiveness that stems from our alienation from one another and our difficulty in accepting the otherness of our social opposites. And thirdly, and more optimistically, that Christianity does in fact have some significant intellectual resources to answer some of the profound problems faced by us moderns. In particular, the incarnation understood as the reconciliation and unity of the human and the divine, and the very death of God which for Nietzsche was the profoundest loss of hope but is for the Christian the participation of God in our human condition.
In essence, what I am arguing for is a way of conceiving of ourselves as being at home in the world, at home with ourselves, at home with our other, and at home with God, and that all these are related.
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