Beyond Even Being

Plato says of the good that it is beyond even being.

This is strange. How could a thing lie beyond being? Would it thus not be? But if it is not, it can lie nowhere and thus cannot lie beyond being.

Should we insist against Plato that all that is exists? That all that is lies within the bounds of being, for what is without simply is not?

Perhaps, but I suggest that Plato is not guilty of the simple-minded error I've attributed to him. When Plato speaks of the relation of the Good to being, he means to say this: the Good is prior to and thus explains all else. Plato tells us again and again that what is is because it is good. The Good thus explains all things, and totality of all things that we call the world. The world exists because it was good for it to exist; it has the character that it does because it was good for it to do so.

(What do we say of the Good itself? Does it exist because it is good? If so, does this absurdly place the Good prior to itself? If not, what then is the explanation of the existence of the Good? Good questions all, but questions for another day.)

This is wisdom, I think; it is wisdom that Christianity has embraced. But Christianity has not stopped there, for it tells us what the Good is. God is the Good, and the Good is Love. This is the central theological posit of Christianity; it is the central practical truth is the faith-life of the believer.

So, to be Christian, you must believe this: there is such a thing as the Good (a Good that in no way depends upon us or our opinions for its existence), all things exist because they are Good, God is the Good, and God is Love.

Here's a curious little bit of autobiography. Long before I became Christian, I did believe that there was such a thing as the Good (and that it was not relative to anything human) and that this Good dictated the right relation between persons. Indeed, in the whole of my life I've never felt the least temptation to doubt this. It seems to me now, in retrospect, that all along I was ripe for conversion.

Ordinary Goodness . . . and Extraordinary

Perhaps ordinary goodness can be taught.

But the extraordinary . . . I cannot even think of how to begin to teach it. We can explain to a child why he must not lie, cheat or steal. But can we explain why he must love both friend and enemy? Can we explain why he must be prepared to give up his life for his enemy? Is it not natural to hate those hate us?

To the materialist, extraordinary goodness - the sort of goodness that seems unnatural - must be stupidity. Why would the materialist give up a life of comfort, travel to a place of poverty, disease and war and there work for the good of others whom he does not know? What reason could he give?

What reason can the materialist give for self-sacrifice? What reason can the materialist give for sacrifice of my life for another, no matter whether that other loves or hates me? If I am this body and this body alone, and my fate is this body's fate, should I not protect it at all cost? Perhaps I am made to love those near me. But love those far away - to love those who hate me - that nature has not made me to do. And if I am to do just that - love those not near, love those who hate me - then I am not made by nature alone.

If there are extraordinary goods (and of course there are), there is a moral order outside nature. And if there is a moral order outside nature, must we not entertain the possibility that there is a God?

Within You or Without You?

I have begun to search for the way to best formulate a certain assumption that seems to run through much of the theist/atheist debate. (For convenience, let us construe "atheism" widely here. Atheists are those who believe theists irrational.) I've landed on a name. I call it "The Teapot Model". Bertrand Russell argued that the God-hypothesis was much like the hypothesis that a teapot orbits the sun. It is possibly true, he said. But he insisted that, though possibly true, it could not be known true, for no evidence could be given in its favor. Thus, he concluded, the God-hypothesis was deeply irrational.

One might respond to Russell in many ways. One might say that we do have good evidence of God's existence. One might say that God, if real, is so radically unlike a teapot that to assume we must come to know them in the same way is deeply mistaken. I have some sympathy for both responses. (Of the two, the second seems closer to the heart of the matter.) But to me they've always seemed to fall short of the mark.

The issue is this: the God-hypothesis would have us assume that God is an object that stands outside us and whose existence can be known only by inference from what is clear either to sense or to intellect. I reject this assumption.

I am not alone in this. Much Christian theology rejects it. God, we are told, is He in whom we have our being. We are with Him, but not as two who stand side by side. We are through Him, and Him through us. Thus we are not ours alone. God is in us, and at every moment He sustains us. Every iota of what is good in us - and all that truly is is good - is Him. When conscience speaks, it is the voice of God. When we love, the love we share is God.

God is not over and above. (Perhaps we should say that God is not over and above only, for though in us He is no exhausted by his presence in us. We are finite, He infinite.) Rather He is within, and thus is to be found within.

Thus God is not to be discovered as the teapot would be discovered if in fact it were there. The believers relation to God is not that of knower to an external object known. This is why I find atheism a bit ridiculous. I've had a number of moments in my life where the presence of God within me has become quite clear. Even now as I sit with the noise of traffic around me, cold and alone, and still feel that presence. It is a hint, a whisper. It is as motion caught in the corner of the eye. Attention is mostly elsewhere, but a fraction is upon it, and I know that He is there.

When someone tells me there is no God, it seems to as if I have been told that there is no sun or moon. Perhaps I do not see them now, or see them only faintly. But I know they are there.

Perhaps it would be better to say that it seems to me as if I have been told that I have never felt love, or regret. Of course I have, I would reply. I feel them now. They are here before me, with me. I cannot doubt them. S0 too I cannot doubt that God exists. He is here with me now.

So I say to the atheist: God is within you (and without you too in all creation). Do you feel the tug of conscience? That is God. Do you love someone? That is God.

Do not ask me then to marshal evidence in favor of God as He were some variety of exotic particle that could be made to show itself were conditions just so. Do no demand miracles. Do not demand proofs. Search yourself. There is within you a power upon which you depend, a power upon which all depend. Do not close your eyes to it.

Faith in Reason, Pt. 2

In Part 1 of Faith in Reason, I said that, if I were asked to explain my Christian belief, I would begin with the impotence of reason to answer the questions that it sets for itself.

But I expect that critics will respond thus:

Let's say we agree that reason is impotent in the way you think. But from this nothing about the truth of Christianity follows. If reason is impotent, we must be skeptics about the big questions - the purpose of life, God's existence and the rest.

I certainly do agree that, from the impotence of reason alone, Christianity does not follow. But where reason cannot see, another faculty begins to discern the outlines of a greater truth. At times, I call this "the heart". Others call it "the conscience". There is within us a capacity to discern moral truth, a capacity that cannot be reduced to reason or to emotion alone. It is, I believe, sui generis - unique in kind. Where reason is silent, it speaks.

It speaks in me. It always spoke in me. When I was still a materialist and an atheist, my most deeply held convictions were moral. I believed that all persons were of equal worth, that the interests of all were of equal importance, and the root of evil was the denial of this.

This I still believe. I don't think that this conviction admits of rational proof. But I do no think that it needs proof. Nor do I think that my conviction is simply a way that I feel. It is genuine belief - genuine knowledge I would say. The equality of worth is, in itself, quite clear and quite obvious; and that by which I discern its truth is the conscience, is the heart.

So here then is my view. Reason is impotent. Mere emotion is not adequate to the task of discernment of moral truth; emotion does not yield knowledge. In the space that is left when reason and emotion retreat, conscience speaks; and it directs us to the truth.

How does this link up with Christianity? Over time, I have come to the opinion that Christianity best articulates what conscience first revealed to me. So it isn't that Christianity follows from the impotence of reason. Rather it's that, when reason knows its place and is silent where it cannot lead, another (and I should think better) faculty can speak; and if thought through, Christianity is the inevitable end.

Faith in Reason, Pt. 1

Once I had faith in reason. I though that it could unravel the riddles of life, that it could give certainty about life's purpose and God's existence (to name only two).

But that faith has slipped away over time. Reason, I now believe, is largely impotent if it works on its own. (At least it is impotent when it consider the great questions. About the lesser questions - What do I have for dinner? What's the chemical composition of table salt? - it seems adequate to its task.) Why believe this? My experience of the conclusions of the philosophers.

Here's what I mean. On any issue of any importance (life's purpose, God's existence, etc.), philosophers always, always come down on different sides. (I used to joke to my students that, about any philosophical issue at all, some philosophers say p, some say not-p, some say that we cannot know whether p or not-p, and some say that it was a pseudo-issue to begin.) But this isn't because some are better informed or more intelligent than the rest. Rather, philosophers who disagree are, as a rule, equally well-informed and equally intelligent.

Now, consider your own philosophical conclusions in this light. (I do mine.) Let us say that you have come to the conclusion (Descartes' and Plato's conclusion) that the mind is a non-physical substance. Some philosophers agree. Some disagree. But those that disagree are no less capable philosophers than are you. (This is an irrefutable empirical fact. I can be easily seen if you will but open your eyes.) Their view is just as well-informed, their arguments just as powerful.

Now, which of you is most likely to be right? Of course, since your views contradict, at most one of you is right. But which? It seems obvious to me that you are just as likely to be wrong as your opponent. Your and your opponent are equally likely to have made some subtle mistake that vitiates your argument. (We can say this at least about the philosophers - where they make mistakes, they make subtle ones.) But if this is so, it seems that one can have little faith in the cogency of one's own arguments. They might be good, they might not; and at present (and it would seem into the indefinite future as well) there is no way to know which it is.

Consider this too. Likely you have come to believe that some argument you once thought cogent really is not. I've done this a number of times. I once thought that mind was material, and thought that my arguments for this compelled assent. I now think precisely the opposite. Mind is immaterial, the arguments for its materiality are flawed, and the arguments for its immateriality are quite strong. Now, what is the probability that I'll do such an about-face in the future about this or some other issue? Surely it isn't negligible. Indeed I think it great enough that one must take the possibility of an about-face seriously. But if this is so, any claim to knowledge is vitiated. If once can be forced by reason to abandon a view that reason once led one to accept, one does not know.

My conclusion is this: the pervasiveness of philosophical dispute (and of change in philosophical opinion) makes philosophical knowledge impossible.

But what is the method of the philosophers? Reason unaided. No appeals to authority, just reason and reason alone. But then we must say that reason unaided is impotent to settle the issues that it sets itself.

If asked, this would be one of the many explanations I'd give of my conversion to Christianity. Reason can't answer the vital questions of my life. Christianity can, and does.

Why I Am a Christian: Chapter One

I thought that it might be a useful exercise to explain why I've become a Christian. What I will say does not add up to an argument for the truth of Christianity. Though I will explain why I am Christian, I do not justify my Christianity. But nonetheless I think that my story is not without interest.

The story will be told in chapters. The first is told here. It concerns my life as philosopher. Another will tell my story as teacher, and a third my story as churchgoer. (I became a churchgoer before I became Christian. For one of my habits of thought and behaviour, I suspect that this is not uncommon.) In the last, I will discuss those bedrock moral commitments - commitments that I've had for as long as I can remember - that led me to Christianity.

Chapter One: Philosopher

When I began graduate work at Purdue's philosophy department in the fall of '90, I was a naive scientific naturalist. I thought - with little in the way of genuine reflection on the matter - that the scientific inventory of the inhabitants of space-time exhausted all of being; I thought, that is, that there was nothing but what scientists, qua scientists, said there was. There were quarks, electrons, photons . . . and all the other creatures in the particle physicists' zoo, there were the thing composed of these, and there was space-time - but there was nothing else. There was no soul, no God, no heaven, no hell.

I recall vividly a drive in the Indiana countryside one Saturday. (Some of my most vivid memories are almost exclusively intellectual in nature. I recall above all what I thought, not what I did. I suppose that that reveals much about the kind of man I am.) I was alone in the car with my thoughts. In an instantaneous flash of insight, I conceived the outlines of a complete philosophical naturalism. For a reason that I cannot now explain, I was excited by it. Perhaps it was simply that such a thing was new to me.

But though I was a scientific naturalist, I was still drawn to philosophy, in particular to metaphysics. (I still self-identity as a metaphysician. It's where my philosophical heart lies.) So then I was very much drawn to the study of - to speak for a moment like Aristotle, or like Thomas - being qua being. I wanted to know how, at bottom, things hang together. I wanted to know what the most basic categories of being are, and I wanted to know how the entities in those categories were related.

In retrospect, I suspect that it was this appetite for metaphysics that was the crack in the door that finally opened up into faith. My work in metaphysics led me to take Christianity seriously, and to this day if I encounter a metaphysician who rejects Christianity out of hand, I dismiss him out of hand.

In my study of metaphysics, I became acquainted with the work of a number of great metaphysicians of the past. As my first graduate teacher of philosophy once said to me, philosophy carries its baggage along. Great philosophers of the past are never dropped from the tradition (though popularity does wax and wane). Rather, their works demand scrutiny today just as they did when written. Their works still matter, and very likely always will. The list of metaphysicians whose work I studied is long, and among the most important to me were: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, McTaggart, Plantinga and van Inwagen. (You might not know the last three. If not, you should.) It was not their theism (and all but one - McTaggart - are theists of one sort or another, and even he was a supernaturalist) that drew me to them. Rather it was their philosophical acumen and the beauty and power of the metaphysical systems they constructed. I identified strongly with these men, and with the project of metaphysical inquiry that bound them together. I made their project my own, and thus hoped to carry on the tradition - even if only in a small way - that they had begun. This proved crucial in my conversion. Because of my great respect for their work, I came to realize (slowly, ever so slowly) that theism must be take quite seriously because men such as this took it seriously. Indeed I think this as good an argument as you're likely to find in philosophy: Aristotle and Leibniz (by my lights the two greatest philosophers ever to have lived) adopted the view that P, thus P must be taken with great seriousness even if one ultimately judges it false. But Aristotle and Leibniz were theists, etc. etc.

If like me you have a love of philosophy and wonder how to bridge the gap between mere interest in religion and genuine faith, I suggest that you read the great theists of Western philosophy with this idea clearly and firmly in mind: the theism of this author informs all of his work. It is not something merely tacked on at the end. Rather the whole of their work reflects and indeed culminates in their theism.

Of course my study of metaphysics (and the other branches of philosophy, too) was not carried out in isolation. Rather it was done in the company of others. The most important to me were (in temporal order, not order of importance): Jan Cover, Jacqueline Marina (now my wife of 14 years), and the men and women I came to know when I was at Notre Dame.

The most important of my teachers was Jan Cover. He exercised a quite extraordinary influence over my intellectual development, though later we were to break. Of a more committed Christian I do not know. My conversion came after the break, but he was still instrumental in it and for this I thank him. He also exercised a quite decisive influence on my philosophical development. I suspect that much of his philosophical method and demeanor persists in me still. I suspect too that, if not for the path he set me on, I'd not now be Christian, for under his hand, I became a metaphysician.

My wife is Christian (albeit of a non-traditional sort), indeed has been for the whole of her life. She never made any effort to convert me; for she thought that our moral concurrence was of much greater importance than any theological concurrence, and in moral concurrence we were. Rather she wore her Christianity on her sleeve. This could not have failed to influence me. (Sometimes I think it a fault, but I am, if nothing else, highly influencable. I'm a little bit like Woody Allen's Zelig.) I suspect that there was a kind of Christian osmosis in our home. It seeped from her to me.

Let me end with the year I spent at the University of Notre Dame. I was a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion from '99 to '00. While there, I was surrounded by Christians of many stripes, men and women of great acumen who were deeply committed to the faith. I did not become Christian at that time, though I suspect that if I'd stayed their influence would have won me over. But though I did not convert, still that year had a great influence upon me. I began to feel the power of the Christian world-view. There too I began to truly learn about Christianity. As a child, I was under the influence of my mother's Christianity. She was a member of the church of Christ. (I love her dearly. She's a wonderful woman. But I would that she were not a member of the church of Christ. I don't think it good for either mind or soul.) The church of Christ thinks itself the only true heir of the first century church; the rest of us Christians are apostates, it holds, and are hell-bound. But this is mere bluster. The church of Christ is but one of many small Protestant sects, one distinguished by its extreme Biblical positivism. It treats Scripture like a great storehouse of spiritual and moral truth, and thinks that all the Christian may say is already explicitly said there. Thus in the church of Christ, all that one may do is gather together texts. One does not attempt to discern how they hang together; one does not attempt to state the Bible's most important doctrines in the form of creeds, and (heaven forbid) one does not attempt to engage in scriptural interpretation if that requires that one do more than simply restate (perhaps in a folksy way) what's already said there in exactly the way it's said. In the church of Christ, one just assembles verses, without, I should add, much regard for context. The result in my case was that, when I left the church of Christ, I knew little or nothing of the essentials of Christianity. Oh, I could quote verses. I could tell you what the church of Christ thought was wrong with every other variety of Christianity. But I did not know what Christianity was, and this ignorance was not remedied until my year at Notre Dame. While there I began to read widely in Christian theology, and I came to realize just how powerful an intellectual system Christianity was. The metaphysician in me was deeply impressed. Later the metaphysician in me was to find rest in God.