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Alvin Plantinga, Anthony Flew, Atheism, belief, C.S. Lewis, Cambridge, Faith, General Philosophy, God, Jim Holt, John Updike, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Metropolitan, Oxford, Philosophical Investigations, religion, science, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, theism, There Is a God, Whit Stillman
“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible. Tenacious of this terror, this adamant essence as crucial to us as our sexuality, we resist those kindly stoic consolers who assure us that we will outwear the fright, that we will grow numb and accepting and, as it were, religiously impotent. As Unamuno says, with the rhythms of a stubborn child, ‘I do not want to die – no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live forever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now.’
The objections of material science and liberal ethics to this desperate wanting to belong to the outer, sunlit world, of sense and the senses; our wanting and its soothing belong to the elusive dark world within. Emerson, in Nature, points out ‘the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being.’ Evidence of God’s being lies with that of our own; it is on our side of the total disparity that God lives. In the light, we disown Him, embarrassedly; in the dark, He is our only guarantor, our only shield against death. The impalpable self cries out to Him and wonders if it detects an answer. Like the inner of the two bonded strips of metal in a thermostat, the self curls against Him and presses. The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’ something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the out rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side. The sensation of silence cannot be helped: a loud and evident God would be a bully, an insecure tyrant, an all-crushing datum instead of, as He is, a bottomless encouragement to our faltering and frightened being. His answers come in the long run, as the large facts of our lives, strung on that thread running through all things. Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.
The thermostat image needs adjusting: God is a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves, an adamant bubble enclosing us, protecting us, enabling us to let go, to ride the waves of what is.”
__________
From John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. No one writes with such self-assurance and style about the metaphysical headaches that plague anyone who honestly tries to find answers to The Big Questions. Updike brings to this task the same eye for detail and consummate precision that make his novels so distinct and so engrossing.
Still, there are some additional voices which may be worth bringing into this discussion about whether belief in the existence of God may be rightfully called ‘properly basic’ — that’s to say, whether it may be reflexively assumed by “the elusive dark world within”.
In Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan (1990), a scene at a posh Manhattan cocktail party kicks off with the following heady exchange between two of the film’s young protagonists:
Charlie Black: Of course there is a God. We all basically know there is.
Cynthia McLean: I know no such thing.
Charlie Black: Of course you do. When you think to yourself — and most of our waking life is taken up thinking to ourselves — you must have that feeling that your thoughts aren’t entirely wasted, that in some sense they are being heard. Rationally, they aren’t. You’re entirely alone. Even the people to whom we are closest can have no real idea of what is going on in our minds. We aren’t devastated by loneliness because, at a hardly conscious level, we don’t accept that we’re entirely alone. I think this sensation of being silently listened to with total comprehension — something you never find in real life — represents our innate belief in a supreme being, some all-comprehending intelligence.
When he was eighty-four, the renowned Oxford philosopher and lifelong atheist Anthony Flew wrote There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, a short treatise that justified his controversial late-life turn to theism. In it, he writes about a challenge made to one of his arguments for atheism:
By far, the headiest challenge to the argument [Flew’s ‘presumption of atheism’: the argument that the burden of proof is on the theist] came from America. The modal logician Alvin Plantinga introduced the idea that theism is a properly basic belief. He asserted that belief in God is similar to belief in other basic truths, such as belief in other minds or perception (seeing a tree) or memory (belief in the past). In al these instances, you trust your cognitive faculties, although you cannot prove the truth of the belief in question. Similarly, people take on certain propositions (e.g., the existence of the world) as basic and others as derivative from these basic propositions. Believers, it is argued, take the existence of God as a basic proposition.
Another great Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, provided a foundation for Plantinga’s theory in his 1945 lecture “Is Theology Poetry?”. This talk contains the following excerpt, which is widely acclaimed but often ignored or distorted by those who merely quote its final sentence:
This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience.
The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dream world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.
While Lewis was making this speech at Oxford, Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself as resolute a skeptic as Flew and Lewis and Updike had once been, was at Cambridge compiling the text of his famed Philosophical Investigations, which contain the following affirmation of god as a properly basic belief:
A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.
Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.
I have posted more from this work as well as some further reflections on in on it: Wittgenstein on God and Belief.
If you want to read more about Updike’s cosmology, check out his discussion of it in Jim Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist?:
The Universe Was Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period.
If you want some heavier and headier stuff, wade through a challenging section from Plantinga’s essay “Game Scientists Play”:
Jessica Renshaw said:
Updike wrote a gritty apologetic for self-consciousness on the other side:
SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike, 1960.
john said:
Not that I agree with hi, but good heavens this is a powerful poem! What an incredibly powerful and emotional statement. I had no idea Updike was such a strong poet. Thank you so, so much!
jrbenjamin said:
Good stuff. He was such an underrated poet, too. Thanks for posting this, Jessica.
Food,Photography & France said:
The question of whether there is a God or not palls before the damage done to each other by those who believe in different Gods.
john said:
It doesn’t pall, but it should, and in many cases does, shame those of faith today, and inform them, I hope, of insight.
Sam's Branch said:
I made up my mind long ago that there is no god that I have heard about that makes any sense. And I don’t care if there is or isn’t a god or gods. What I care about indicates that if there is a god it is meaner than hell(if there is a hell). No all powerful god could allow the massive destruction of the Appalachian Mountains by mountain top removal strip mining. That is small potatoes compared to the massive destruction of human beings by other human beings. If there is a god it must be a virus–it obviously favors viruses. I figure there is something or some things mighty damned strange causing all this amazing, amazing—it might be a cop out to call it god which seems to be a word for not knowing. If there is a god it doesn’t matter, if there isn’t it doesn’t matter. I can’t fathom a god as I can’t fathom why the politicians in Mingo, Lincoln and Logan Counties in West Virginia control everything and then get caught overreaching–they are demi-gods in their little places and seek the whole crown of gawd almighty thinking the word won’t go past the county border and go to prison for being stupid. I ramble.
This is a bit large–The Universe Was Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period.
It was once one trillionth the size of a proton. Christians often quake that the universe couldn’t be that small and then claim that the universe was created from nothing which is smaller than one trillionth the size of a proton, I think.
I do enjoy your search but have made up my mind and am probably not smart enough to dig in and find out if I am wrong.
jrbenjamin said:
You seem pretty smart to me, though I’m not sure I understand your fixation on the Appalachian Mountains. Also, I’m not saying I agree with Updike’s ideas, or that I think Plantinga is correct that theism is properly basic (given that we assume many things about our world that are not true; i.e. that it is flat).
Still, I think it’s worth noting these points, regardless if you’re an atheist, theist, or agnostic. I often have trouble with fully believing in a theistic universe, since, like you, I can’t get over the problem of evil, the suffering of humans and animals everywhere, and the inequality and apparent randomness of so much of our world.
But I like how you end your response: with an admission of ignorance. One of the best utterances ever spoken is the Socratic principle, that the mark of a truly intelligent person is that he/she can grasp and admit the scale of his/her own ignorance. The simple fact is that we do not know the answers to some of these questions, and we may be in principle incapable of understanding them with the 4 pound organs inside our heads.
We are so ignorant of our vast universe — made up largely of dark matter and energy — so I think, if anything, atheism is an intellectually cramped position. It pretends to more knowledge than we have.
Thank you for reading and responding.
leilovely17 said:
Hi Sam,
I don’t really like to comment on comment’s like yours, because I don’t want to feel like I am badgering someone into something they are obviously against, and I am not sure if you will even see it. However, your comment has been stuck in my head since last night, and so I pray that I convey what it is that is on my heart to you correctly.
This one line more than anything: “That is small potatoes compared to the massive destruction of human beings by other human beings”. God does not want people to destroy nature anymore than he wants us to destroy each other
This is not the first time I see or hear statements like this. Why, if God is so good are there human trafficking, people being raped, kids being killed. And the one answer I often hear Christians reply is “To teach us compassion”. Well, no doubt we learn compassion through all the Evil that is happening. What I think that everyone has forgotten is that the God that loves us, our omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creator has in fact given us free will.
People are always asking why does a good God allow bad things to happen. The bad things that saturate this world are due to human actions and the evil intents we have towards our fellow man. We have a problem with God’s lack of intervention in our evil ways, and that is what this all is, evil. Should he respond as his goodness(righteousness &holiness) required, and as he did in the old testament days? everyone would be asking why would a LOVING God do this. It’s because he is good and he is love that he is allowing all this evil while his mercy and grace find those who are seeking it before he returns to judge us so that in his ACTIONS he will be justified.
But humans, being our perverse self, look at the bible and Jesus as just another storybook filled with silly tales. When in doing so we are proving correct the very words in John 1: 10-11 which says “He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him.”
Read, if you wish, acts 5:3-10 which is the account of Ananias and his wife Sapphira. God has given us an instinctive knowledge of himself, and once we really look around and see beyond this destruction that we create we will, clearly, see how very real he is.
tedrey said:
Wow, it would take an essay to respond to these apologia, but I can cut a path through all of them with one point. These persons for whom nothingness is no problem (Updike), who have no urge to the serious mental instability shown in Unamono, who have never felt their thoughts were always overheard (Charlie Black), who cannot take God as a basic proposition (Platinga), for whom passing from Christianity to science is like going from dream to waking (pace C. S. Lewis), and for whom life neither educates one to a belief in God nor forces the concept upon one; well, we can easily ignore religion and get on with the jobs and joys and burdens of life. We simply see no sense in assuming the existence of a God, and pretty much pity those who do. It seems to be a rather basic human difference, between those who believe something because they’ve just “got to”, and those who don’t feel that “got to” and therefore can judge by the evidence.
jrbenjamin said:
I’m not sure I’m fully following you, but I think I’ve got the gist of your point.
First: Updike isn’t excluding the idea that a nonreligious person may get on with the jobs of life. After all, he had had a crisis of faith in his 30’s and had done much work during that time.
Second: to clarify, the ‘nothingness’ Updike is referring to is shorthand for ‘death’ or ‘eternal nonexistence’. So he says it’s crippling for some people, ignored by others. Sure these two archetypes exist on a continuum — with some people being only moderately fixated on mortality — but they nevertheless are real.
Could you answer the following questions for me?
1. Why is Unamono mentally unstable? To me it’s completely rational to feel solipsistic rage at the thought of one’s mortality.
2. Have you ever had the feeling that there was a divine intelligence or force that was privy to your thoughts and emotions? It’s seems, if not totally natural, at least not completely unnatural.
tedrey said:
1. Unamono writes: “‘I do not want to die – no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live forever and ever and ever. I want this ‘I’ to live – this poor ‘I’ that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now.’”
And someone with that much pain and despair and need may not be in the best condition to make rational decisions about what is and what can be. Still, if a psychotherapist or witch-doctor or Catholic priest can make him feel better, I say “Go for it.”
2.. Never. But I don’t insist that because I haven’t, nobody has. While I’m tired of religious people telling me I really must feel or believe things that I really don’t.
It’s not that I strongly disbelieve in God, but that I don’t see the slightest reason to do so. If “believers” had not been shouting it out all my life I doubt I ever would have come to the concept on my own.
That’s where I’m at. And I don’t think a debate on it is necessarily the best use of this blog. Sensitivities are too often wounded. In private, if you wish.
deborahbrasket said:
Heady stuff, thanks for sharing. Interesting discussion in the comments too. I believe in “vast emptiness, vastly full.” I don’t think one can fall out of life anymore than one can fall into it. This “thing” I’m in I call God when I’m alone at night by myself like now. But I am loath to call it that at any other time, for it’s not like most gods I’ve heard tales of. I like what the monk once said: If you meet God on the street, kill him.
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