The Conundrum of Belief and Disbelief
Endless Quest and Very Personal Dilemma of Aleksander Samarin
“The theist must be prepared to believe, not merely what
cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs
that he also holds”.
John Leslie Mackie (1917 – 1981)
Preface
“God mustn’t merely cover the territory of the actual, but also,
with equal comprehensiveness, the territory of the possible”.
John Niemeyer Findlay (1903 – 1987)
As far back as I can recall from the clutter of my memories, I was always
fascinated, and undoubtedly shall remain so till my death, by the mystery
of the motivation, of the cause, of the reason by which people acquire,
retain or lose their faith. And in spite of this seemingly incessant mission
that stands before me I shall, to the best of my ability, try to make some
sense of this puzzle, by analysing this conundrum and by compiling as
many as possible both real or ostensible contradictions, which encompass
this enigma.
People with Unyielding Convictions
“Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold,
More anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”.
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
It seems to me that many contradictions in the interpretation of the
formulated ideas arise from the dissimilar, unlike understanding of the
basic concepts, of the fundamental language terms which we use. Thus,
throughout this article I shall resort to the Oxford Dictionaries (arguably
the most articulated source of English semantics) in defining the basic
expressions of English language.
The word “conviction” is defined as “a firm expression or belief”.
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“Belief’ in turn is defined as “the feeling that something is real and true,
trust, confidence”. “Trust” is defined as “firm belief in reliability or truth”.
Although these definitions appear to be somewhat tautological, it seems
that they are as precise a comprehension as one can attain.
The antonym of “conviction” is apparently “scepticism”, which is defined
as “a sceptical attitude of mind”, and “sceptical” stands for “inclined to
disbelief things, doubting or questioning the truth of claims or
statements”.
Of the most eminent scientists and philosophers with very strong
convictions of belief and disbelief I shall at first refer to just the two.
Paradoxically, their contradictory convictions came to pass from their
scepticism, from their doubts about human ability to comprehend reality.
It should be pointed out that by the end of the sixteenth century the
fundamental concepts of philosophy and science were already reasonably
well established in Europe.
It was a remarkable French philosopher and scientist – René Descartes
(1591 – 1650) who not only challenged all the earlier philosophical
concepts and created several currently acceptable mathematical methods,
but, oddly enough, his strong conviction in the existence of God and
human soul was based on the most extreme form of scepticism. As most
of the philosophical and scientific work at that time was written in Latin,
his Latinised name was known as Renatus Cartesius, and thus his
philosophical and scientific concepts are usually referred to as Cartesian.
Mathematical theories are generally derived from the basic principles,
from axioms (“an axiom” is defined as “an established principle, self
evident truth”). But self evident to some may not be self evident to others.
The emergence of the Non-Euclidean geometries, which were created
using the rigorous mathematical logic, is an indisputable evidence of this
apparent contradiction. However, it was an entirely new, an original
method of treating philosophy, using exactly the same methodology
which Descartes applied to his mathematical theories, that questioned
most of the previously accepted notions of reality and lead to his ideas of
the extreme scepticism.
I shall illustrate his novel approach to philosophy by quoting from one of
his most significant works: Discours de la Méthode , or “Discourse on
Method”, part IV : –
“Since I desired to devote myself wholly to the search of truth, I
thought it necessary to reject as if entirely false anything in which I could
discover the least grounds for doubt, so that I could find out if I was left
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with anything at all which was absolutely indubitable. Thus, because our
senses sometimes deceive us, I decided to suppose that nothing was really
as they lead us to believe it was. And, because some of us make mistakes
in reasoning, committing logical errors in even the simplest matters of
geometry, I rejected as erroneous all reasoning that I had previously
taken as proofs. And finally, when I considered that the very same things
we perceive when we are awake, may also occur to us when we are
asleep and not perceiving anything at all, I resolved to pretend that
anything which had ever entered my mind was no more than a dream. But
immediately I noticed that while I was thinking in this way, and regarding
everything as false, it was nonetheless absolutely necessary that I, who
was doing this thinking, was still something. And observing this truth:
I think therefore I am was so sure and certain that no ground for doubt,
be it ever so extravagantly sceptical, was capable of shaking it, I
therefore decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first
principle of the philosophy I was seeking to create”.
Thus, Descartes arrives at what may be considered the only undeniable
truth – “I think therefore I am”, or in French – je pense, donc je suis, or in
its Latin version – Cogito ergo sum, – which is perhaps the best known
quotation in western philosophy. However, although Descartes finally
recognised that he can establish his necessary existence only as long as he
thinks, he also readily admitted that when he was not thinking it was quite
possible then that he did not exist. Nonetheless, this Cartesian canon
became the starting point resting on which Descartes builds, as he calls it
“with clarity and distinction” his philosophy. And, even though he applies
to it seemingly comparable methodology to that of his mathematical logic,
his subsequent derivations of the “indisputable” truth became highly
debatable. Unlike the above “essential” concept, his subsequent reasoning
is not actually original, but is similar to the previously proposed
verifications for God’s existence – those of the Anselm’s ontological
proof, and of the one derived from Augustine’s theology. Both Anselm of
Canterbury (1033 – 1109) and St. Augustine (354 -430) are accused of
using what is known as”circular arguments”, that is the arguments which
use as a proof the very concept which they attempt to verify.
Ontology is defined as “the department of metaphysics concerned with
the existence of things or being in the abstract”. Ontological argument is
an attempt to prove that our concept of a being is sufficient to prove its
existence. Descartes proceeds with this argument as follows: he starts
with the premise that although humans realise that they are imperfect,
they nonetheless find it their minds the idea of supreme perfection.
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He then asserts that “a cause must contain at least as much reality as its
effect”, and hence the cause of the idea of perfection must necessarily be
a perfect being, or God. In his Fifth Meditationes de Prima Philosophia ,
(generally known as “Meditations”) Descartes thus affirms:
“It is certain that I no less find the idea of a God in my
consciousness, that is, the idea of a being supremely perfect, that that of
any figure or number whatever: and I knew with not less clearness and
distinctness that an external existence pertains to His nature than that all
which is demonstrable of any figure or number really belongs to the
nature of that figure or number… I cannot conceive God unless as
existing, it follows that the existence is inseparable from Him, and
therefore He really exists… The necessity of the existence of God
determines me to think in this way: for it is not in my power to conceive a
God without existence, that is, being supremely perfect, and yet devoid of
an absolute perfection, as I am free to imagine a horse with or without
wings…”
As I mentioned before, this argument apparently was originally proposed
by St. Anselm. After its revival by Descartes it was subsequently
accepted by Benedictus (originally Baruch) Spinoza (1632 – 1677) and
by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716). It should be noted however,
that St. Anselm’s ontological argument was rejected by St. Thomas
Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274). The successive arguments against this proof
being “circular” emphasize that it proceeds not from a concept of God
Himself, but from the psychological fact that we are now equipped with
this idea. But the arguments of both Spinoza and Leibniz were criticized
and declared false by Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), and also by David
Hume (1711 – 1776), whose scepticism, leading to the denial of God’s
existence, I shall address in the second half of this chapter.
Having established in his own mind the existence of God, who, as a
perfect being, must be by His nature benevolent and non-deceiving,
Descartes using, as he puts it, ideas which are “clarae et distinctae (that
is clear and distinctive), proceeds to create a consistent perception of the
reality of his external world. For Descartes the world is made up of two
diverse kinds of substance – that of mind or consciousness (res cogitans):
the substance which is unextended and indivisible, and of matter (res
extensa), which is both – extended and divisible. Many prominent
philosophers who were contemporaries or predecessors of Descartes were
accused by the Roman Inquisition of heresy. Descartes apparently
considered himself to be a devout Catholic, but some of his views were
obviously in disagreement with the traditional dogmas of Catholicism.
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This was particularly so in relation to his acceptance of Galileo Galilei’s
(1564 – 1642) conviction of the heliocentric solar system, which he
himself expressed in the treatise Le Monde, but which, after learning of
the Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition, he hastily withdrew from publication.
However, some of his other notions and possibly also his scepticism,
upon which he builds his faith, were sufficient for the Pope to place all
his works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, that is the Index of
Prohibited Books. It seems to me that in contradiction to Papal decree,
when Descartes was invited as a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden and
where, being unaccustomed to cold, he subsequently died of pneumonia
on the 11th of February in Stockholm, Christina abdicated her throne in
order to convert to Roman Catholicism, as the Swedish law required for a
monarch to be a Protestant. Thus, it is obvious that the fundamental code
of belief taught to Cristina by Descartes was indeed that of the essential
Catholicism.
Annals of history reveal to us that many philosophers who were
contemporaries of Descartes were accused of being atheists, but it was
prominent Scottish philosopher, historian and man of letters – David
Hume who daringly and self-righteously affirmed that he is an atheist.
One of his lasting legacies is the so-called “Hume’s Law”, which states
that the “naturalistic fallacy is indeed a fallacy; and hence that
conclusions about what ought to be cannot be deduced from premises
stating only what was, what is, or what will be – and the other way about”.
Hume’s argument for epistemological scepticism (“epistemology” is the
“theory of the method or grounds of knowledge”) consists of two parts. It
starts with the recognition of human fallibility and predisposition to errors.
He maintains that not one of our judgements contains even a single item
of knowledge, but has only a statement of probability. And even the
strength of this probability diminishes until it finally disappears, so that in
the end we are left with no reason whatsoever to substantiate anything we
believe. In his “A Treatise on Human Nature” Hume makes the following
statement:
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can
never pretend to any other office that to serve and obey them”.
Hume obviously recognises that there are contradictions of his reasoning.
This is apparent from his writing:
“Shall we, then, establish it for a general maxim, that no refin’d or
elaborate reasoning is ever to be receiv’d? Consider well the
consequences of such a principle. By this means you cut off entirely all
science and philosophy.
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…And you expressly contradict yourself; since this maxim must be
built on the preceding reasoning, which will be allow’d to be sufficiently
refin’d and metaphysical”.
To this apparent contradiction Hume then adds:
“We have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and
none at all. For my part, I know not what ought to be done in the present
case”.
This, in my opinion, places Hume into what one may call an “ontological
void”, the contradiction into which he logically trapped himself, and such
reasoning should have at best lead him into agnosticism (“agnostic” is a
“person who believes that nothing can be known about the existence of
God or of anything except material things”) or even into solipsism (a
“view that the self is the only known, or only existent”), and yet Hume
proceeds to argue his case for the non-existence of God. The following
are just a few examples of these verifications. The first one is from the
Dialogs concerning Natural Religion:
“Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings,
animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious
variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living
existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive
to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How
contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole represents nothing but
the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and
pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her
maimed and abortive children”.
The second one is from his On the Immortality of the Soul:
“Nothing in this world is perpetual; every thing, however, seemingly
theory firm, is in the continual flux and change: the world itself gives
symptoms of frailty and dissolution. How contrary to analogy, therefore,
to imagine that one single form, seeming the frailest of any, and subject
to the greatest disorder, is immortal and indissoluble? What theory is
that! How lightly, not to say rashly, entertained! How to dispose of the
infinite number of posthumous existences ought also to embarrass the
religious”.
And finally one more from A Treatise on Human Nature:
“Errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only
ridiculous”.
It seems as a conundrum to me, that starting in each case from the
extreme scepticism, Descartes acquired a strong belief and Hume not
only the disbelief, but the denial of reason.
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What then are the Causes of Belief and Disbelief?
“If I err in my belief that the souls of people are
immortal, I err gladly, and I do not wish to lose so
delightful and error”.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
Plato (428 BC – 348 BC), that is his pseudo name – he was given the name
Aristocles at birth – defined knowledge as the “justified true belief”. In
psychology beliefs are sometimes divided into core beliefs (those which
are actually analysed in our mind) and dispositional beliefs (that is those
which we failed to contemplate previously). There is considerable
misconception of how our beliefs are formed. Albert Einstein (1879 –
1955) considered that the “common sense is the collection of prejudices
acquired by age eighteen”, that is if we consider common sense as a kind
of belief. It seems to me that some children are influenced in their beliefs
by family and community in which they live, in some cases by a teacher,
by a charismatic leader, or possibly they are indoctrinated by religious
code of faith which was taught to them by family members or at school.
But is it possible that the seeds of beliefs or disbeliefs are hereditary, that
they are already part of our genetic characteristics at our birth?
In my attempt to find some evidence of such a possibility, I came across
what surely is not statistically valid evidence, but perhaps an isolated,
exceptional case. Even so, it proves to me, that neither the hereditary
development of ideas, nor the family upbringing would necessarily guide
the offspring to an acquisition of identical beliefs. The classical case of
this seeming inconsistency are the remarkable biographies of the two
eminent British men: those of Michael Ramsey (1904 – 1988), who
became one hundreds Archbishop of Canterbury, which by his
prominence in the Anglican Church would indisputably characterize him
as the most committed Christian. His older brother – Frank Plumpton
Ramsey (1903 – 1930), whose main interests were philosophy of
mathematics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology, was, according to his
wife, a “militant atheist”. Both, Michael and Frank were educated at
Cambridge and apparently had very similar family background.
The second case convinced me that two people with the seemingly
alike and exceptional mental ability, with the rational, logical intellects,
can hold diametrically opposite convictions in their religious points of
view. These two renowned scientists both received Nobel Prize in physics
for independently developing absolutely identical concepts in quantum
mechanics – considered to be the most abstract field of human knowledge,
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the conceptions of which can only be meaningfully expressed in
mathematical terms. In 1979 Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow and
Steven Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for, as it was
stated by the Nobel Prize Foundation: “their contributions to the theory of
the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary
particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral
current”.
Of these three I shall deliberate on the scientific and religious views of
just the two – Salam and Weinberg. Mohammad Abdus Salam (1926 –
1996) became the first Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize. At the age of
fourteen, Salam scored the highest marks which were ever recorded at
Punjab University. In 1946 he received his Master’s Degree in
Mathematics from the Government College University in Lahore, and in
the same year was awarded a scholarship at St. John’s College in
Cambridge where, in 1949, he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with
Double First Class Honours in Mathematics and Physics. He then
received his PhD degree in Theoretical Physics from the Cavendish
Laboratory in Cambridge. It seems, though, Salam was more disposed to
the theoretical, rather than experimental studies, and even at that stage of
his research he was able to find a solution for the renormalisation of a
meson problem which, at that time, remained unresolved for the most
outstanding creators of quantum theory, such as Paul Adrien Maurice
Dirac (1902 – 1984) and Richard Phillips Feynman (1918 – 1988).
It must be emphasised that, although Salam conducted his research with
Glashow and Weinberg at the Imperial College, he was able to
mathematically prove the theory of the unification of the two fundamental
forces in nature – the strong and the weak nuclear and the
electromagnetic force, independently of his colleagues at the Imperial
College. Salam was and remained a devout Moslem throughout his entire
life and during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize he quoted the
following verses from the Quran:
“Thou seest not, in the creation of the All-Merciful any
imperfection. Return thy gaze, seest thou any fissure? Then return thy
gaze, again and again. Thy gaze comes back to thee dazzled, weary”.
He then added:
“This, in effect, is the faith of all physicists; the more is our wonder
exited, the more is the dazzlement for our gaze”.
He also once wrote:
“The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah’s
created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged
to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and grace for which I render
thanks with a humble heart”.
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Now, the co-recipient of Salam’s Nobel Prize for the development of the
identical, extremely complex, intricate and abstract concepts of quantum
mechanics, Steven Weinberg was born in New York in 1933 to Jewish
immigrants Frederick and Eva Weinberg. Weinberg received his
bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1954 and the PhD degree in
Physics at Princeton University in 1957. After completing his PhD
Weinberg conducted a post-doctoral research at Columbia University and
then at the University of California, Berkeley. His research embraced a
variety of topics in subatomic particles, including the high energy
behaviour of quantum field theory, symmetry breaking, pion scattering,
infrared photons and quantum gravity. In 1966 Weinberg left Berkley to
accept a lecturer’s position at Harvard, and in 1967 he became a visiting
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at the MIT
he, for the first time, envisaged a model of unified electromagnetic and
weak nuclear forces. One of his most exceptional contributions to science
was the prediction of the actual existence of Higgs boson, the concept
which was only recently evaluated experimentally in the Large Hadron
Collider in Geneva. Weinberg became Higgins Professor of Physics at
Harvard University in 1973. In 1982 he joined the University of Texas at
Austin and founded the “Theory Group” at the Physics Department. And,
obviously, Weinberg’s Nobel Prize Award became the ultimate
recognition of his remarkable achievement in science. Weinberg admitted
of being a convinced atheist all his life. He is also known for his strong
support for the state of Israel. He wrote an essay titled “Zionism and its
Cultural Adversaries”. Weinberg was also very critical of the initial
British attitude towards Israel. He wrote:
“Given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness
and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere,
boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find
any explanation other than anti-Semitism”.
I think that his fear of Muslim fundamentalists can explain his
following remark about the religious beliefs:
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad
people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion”.
In the conclusion to his book: “The First Three Minutes, a Modern
Vision of the Origin of the Universe” published in 1977, he writes, after
observing the serene earth from the aeroplane:
“It is very hard to realize that all this is just a tiny part of an
overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that his
present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early
condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems
pointless”.
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But finally, some thoughts of solace:
“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things
that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of
the grace of tragedy”.
Is there a Common Cause why People Acquire, Retain or
Lose their Faith?
“For I thought that the first step towards satisfying the several
enquiries, the mind of man was apt to run into, to take a survey
of our understandings, examine our own powers, and see to
what things they were adapted. Till that is done, I suspect that
we began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for
satisfaction…”
John Locke (1632 – 1704)
“An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
My next challenge is to discover at least a hint which may give me a
specific, be it an insignificant clue, on how and why some exceptionally
intelligent, talented and obviously logically thinking people, do radically
change their beliefs. I shall start with a remarkable novelist, children’s
fantasy writer, poet, lecturer, radio commentator, Oxford scholar and
Christian apologetic writer – Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963). Lewis
was born in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and he is best known by his nom
de plume: C.S. Lewis. In his autobiographical book: “Surprised by Joy”,
he wrote:
“I am the product of long corridors, empty rooms, upstairs indoor
silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns
and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also endless books. My
father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.
There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the
cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books
in bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books
of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parent’s interest, books
readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most
emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In seeming endless rainy
afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the
same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks
into a field has of finding a new blade of grass”.
As a child and a son of two devoted Christians, Lewis apparently
believed in God, and attended church regularly. But then his mother died
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of abdominal cancer when he was just nine years old. As his mother was
dying of cancer, he prayed to God and asked God to heal her, but clearly
all his prayers were in vain, and she passed away. This is how he
describes the tragedy of his mother’s loss:
“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was
tranquil, reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun,
much pleasures, great stabs if Joy, but no more of the old security. It was
sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis”.
After this heartbreaking event Lewis, together with his brother Warnie,
was sent to a boarding school in Watford, England, where they were
subjected to a brutal treatment by the headmaster, and subsequently they
were moved to another boarding school. During this time Lewis became
interested in mythology, particularly after reading Richard Wagner’s
“Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.
In 1913 Lewis was enrolled in England’s Malvern College, where he
excelled in classical studies and at the same time became a nonbeliever,
as he himself recalls:
“I was at this time living, like so many Atheists, in a whirl of
contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry
with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a
world”.
And also:
“I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof of any of
them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the
best. All religions, that is, all mythologies, to give them their proper name,
are merely man’s own invention, Christ as much as Loki”.
(For those who are unfamiliar with Nordic mythology, Loki is a
companion of great gods Odin and Thor, but also a trickster, who is able
to change not only appearance, but also a gender).
After his bad experience in the two boarding schools, Lewis persuaded
his father to allow him to continue his studies under private tutelage, and
from 1914 till 1916 he immersed himself, under the guidance of a
proficient scholar – William Kirkpatrick, into his favourite subject of
mythology, and in the study of languages, including Greek, Latin, French,
Italian and German. Myth to Lewis was obviously something false, and
he placed Christianity into the same category as all the other myths.
In December 1916 he made his first visit to Oxford, applying for a
classical scholarship. In the letter to his father he wrote: “This place has
surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful”.
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During World War I (it was then known as a Great War, as historians
started counting great wars only after the World War II) Lewis, was
commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Third Battalion of the
Somerset Light infantry, fought in France. Shortly after arriving at the
battlefield he became hospitalized for nearly a month, suffering from a
trench fever. The record of this event reflected his mocking outlook on
atheism, as he wrote: “The gods hate me – and naturally enough
considering my usual attitude towards them”. After re-joining the Third
Battalion Lewis distinguished himself by capturing nearly sixty German
soldiers, but shortly after his service ended when he was wounded by a
“friendly fire”. A shell explosion lodged shrapnel in his arms and chest.
Following his recovery, Lewis returned to his studies in Oxford in 1919.
It was then, using a penname Clive Hamilton, he published his first book
Spirits in Bondage. With his interest in mythology it was inevitable that
after Lewis met John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 – 1973), the renowned
author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they became good
friends. From 1925 to 1954 Lewis was a Fellow and a Tutor of Magdalen
College, Oxford, and in 1954 he was appointed Professor of Medieval
and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, the position
which he held till his death in 1963. Tolkien was also a Professor at the
University of Oxford from 1945 till 1959 and he and Lewis became
active in the informal Oxford literary group known as “Inklings”.
The fairy-tale books “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and
particularly “The Chronicles of Narnia” written by Lewis, obviously
have great similarity to Tolkien’ sorcerous fiction. Apparently this
kinship of spirit with Tolkien and his other “Inklings” friends, with whom
he held spiritual discussions about human beliefs, as well as his reading
of works by well-known theists, challenged the vies which Lewis held
before so convincingly. Quoting again from his book Surprised by Joy:
“You must picture me alone in the room at Magdalen, night after
night, feeling, whatever my mind lifted even for a second from my work,
the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not
to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come to me. In the Trinity
Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and
prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all
England”.
After his conversion to theism, Lewis next step was conversion to
Christianity when he admitted to himself that the heart of Christianity is
not only a myth, but also a historical fact. However, I find it very difficult
to understand the actual process of his acceptance that the Scriptures
indeed confirm that Jesus is the Son of God. In the autumn of 1931 Lewis
and his friend Warnie went to the zoo. Apparently, when Lewis started
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out for the zoo, he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, and yet
inexplicably, by the time they arrived at the zoo, he became a firm
believer in Christian doctrine. Lewis became a member of the Church of
England, in spite of the fact that his friend Tolkien was a Catholic. And
this is when Leis began to write all these wonderful books as a Christian
apologist.
His first challenge was to reconcile the existence of the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Compassionate and Benevolent God with the existence of
evil. Already in the early stages of the Second World War Lewis faced
suffering, misery and pain that besieged England and all of Europe, and
unlike his experiences as a nonbeliever during the First World War when
it needed no explanation, he had to resolve this apparent contradiction.
The result was his book The Problem of Pain, published in October 1940.
The following is a short extract from this discourse:
“Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that
something is wrong when he is being hurt… pain is not only immediately
recognisable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly
in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons
shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what
they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain
insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to
rouse a deaf world”. For Lewis the horrid death of Jesus Christ on a cross
confirmed that we have a God that knows most terrible pain, and suffered
with us in our pain.
His second challenge was the obvious dogmatic conflicts within the
Christian creed, not just between him and Tolkien, as I have mentioned
before, but particularly the “troubles” in Northern Ireland between the
Catholics and the Protestants. His Mere Christianity Published in 1952 is
an attempt to emphasize that there is a fundamental, true Christian faith,
and the sectarian differences are, in all probability, simply the results of
human misinterpretations of the Scriptures. And yet, there was one more
very personal challenge that Lewis had to face. It should be noted that his
radio broadcasts endorsing Christianity and his many books, which were
translated into more than 30 languages, brought him worldwide acclaim.
He also corresponded with many of his readers, one of whom, Joy
Davidman Gresham was American writer of Jewish descent, a member of
the Communist party and an atheist who, after corresponding with Lewis,
became a Christian convert. Having established a pen-relationship with
Lewis, Gresham was determined to meet him in person. She visited
Lewis as part of her long trip to London in 1952, and after becoming
13
personal friends and intellectual companions, they agreed to enter into
civil marriage contract, so that she could permanently stay in the UK.
However, soon after the civil marriage, Gresham was diagnosed with
terminal bone cancer. Their relationship became more personal, and they
were married in hospital in a Christian ritual in 1957. Unexpectedly, her
cancer went into remission, and it seems for the first time in his life
Lewis became blessed with a true love of a woman. The remission lasted
for three happy years but in 1960 there was a relapse in the disease and
Joy died. Lewis had to face a deep challenging sense of loss. He kept a
diary, which his friends persuaded him to publish, and this became one of
his most highly regarded books: A Grief Observed.
I selected several extracts from this attempt of his to justify the existence
of seemingly senseless and inexplicable grief:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but
the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the
same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
(Please note, that in his transcripts Lewis refers to Joy as “H”)
“On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. I almost prefer the
moments of agony. They are at least clear and honest. But the bath of
self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging in
it – that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to
misrepresent H. herself…”
And then, the challenge to his faith:
“Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms.
When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so
happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as interruption, if
you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and prise, you will
be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your
need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A
door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on
the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you
wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There is no light in the
windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so
once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why
is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very
absent a help in the time of trouble?”
And again, thinking about the immortality of human soul:
“Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? The vast majority
of the people I meet, say at work, would certainly think she is not. Though
naturally they wouldn’t press the point on me. Not just now anyway.
What do I really think? I have always been able to pray for the other
dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H.,
14
I halt. Bewilderment and amazement come to me. I have a ghastly sense
of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity… But there are
other difficulties.’ Where is she now?’ That is in what place is she at the
present time. But if H.is not a body – and the body I loved is certainly no
longer she – she is in no place at all. And ‘the present time” is a date or
point in our time series… Kind people have said to me ‘She is with God’.
In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and
unimaginable”.
And also, apparently not finding a consolation in his faith:
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me
about the duty in religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come
talking to me about the consolation of religion or I shall suspect that you
don’t understand…
They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes
them so sure of this?
Because she is in God’s hands. But if so, she was in God’s hands all the
time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become
gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s
goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or
there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our
worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting
us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it…
I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it
over again. Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, is a God so
bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if
nothing else, too anthropomorphic.”
“Anthropomorphic” is defined as “attributing human form or personality
to a god or animal or object”.
So, is there a consolation after all?
“I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. I want H. not
something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the
end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle…
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily,
I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable…
And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me
at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with
them. H.’s death has ended the practical problem. While she was alive I
could, in practice, have put her before God; that is, could have done what
she wanted instead of what He wanted; it there’d been a conflict. What’s
left is not a problem about anything I could do. It’s all about weights of
feelings and motives and that sort of thing. It’s a problem I’m setting
myself. I don’t believe God set it me at all.”
15
It seems to me, that the final paragraph of this soul disturbing book
is, after all, some kind of a solace:
“How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not
to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am so at peace with God’. She smiled, but
not at me. Poi si torno all’ eterna fontana”.
Some of the thoughts, trials and challenges, not just to my faith but to my
sanity, were similar to those experienced by Lewis when our son, after he
graduated with Honours from Sydney University, was killed while on a
job assignment in Rhodesia. There was nothing, absolutely no assistance
of any kind, not even an expression of sympathy from our Government.
My wife then was diagnosed with the incurable cancer, and A Grief
Observed became my constant reading companion, as well as another
soul searching and remarkable book: Confession, which Count Lev
Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) wrote in 1879, and which was
finally published in Geneva in 1884.
I presume that to the majority of educated people worldwide at least the
major works of Count Lev Tolstoy, such as Anna Karenina and War and
Peace, even after more than a hundred years after his death, are just as
well-known as the literary masterpieces of William Shakespeare, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes. And yet
Tolstoy himself did not consider his numerous literary masterpieces,
which he wrote before his theological essays and books, of equal
significance to his writings in the pursuit of religious truth. This, I assume,
is not the case with many of his readers, for whom Tolstoy’s religious
works are less known, or even not known at all. As I already mentioned,
for me, in my days of despair, his remarkably honest and mind shattering
thoughts became real revelation. However, in this article I shall restrict
my references only to the Confession, and even then (at least for me) to
only the most mind devastating sections of Tolstoy’s confession. I shall
use these quotations in the sequence in which they appear in the book, but
not necessarily restricting them to single subsections. I shall start from the
first page of Tolstoy’s Confession:
“I was baptised and educated in the Orthodox Christian faith.
Even as a child and throughout my adolescence and youth I was schooled
in the Orthodox beliefs. But when at the age of eighteen I left my second
year of studies at the university I had lost all belief in what I had been
taught”.
(On the 25th of May 1847 Tolstoy had to withdraw from the
University of Kazan for health reasons).
“I remember that when I was eleven years old a high-school boy
named Volodin’ka M., now long since dead, visited us one Sunday with
16
the announcement of the latest discovery made at school. The discovery
was that there is no God and that things they were teaching us were
nothing but fairy tales…”
“A certain intelligent and honest man named S. once told me the
story of how he ceased to be a believer. At the age of twenty-six, while
taking shelter for the night during the hunting trip, he knelt to pray in the
evening, as had been his custom since childhood. His older brother, who
accompanied him on the trip, was lying down on some straw and
watching him. When S. had finished and was getting ready to lie down,
his brother said to him, ‘So you still do that’. And they said nothing more
to each other. From that day S. gave up praying and going to church.
And for thirty years he had not prayed, he has not taken communion and
he has not gone to church…”
“Thus it has happened and continues to happen, I believe, with the
great majority of people. I am referring to people of our social and
cultural type, people who are honest with themselves, and not those who
use faith as means of obtaining some temporal goal or other…”
Tolstoy then describes his thoughts and desires subsequent to his
departure from the university:
“As now I look back at that time I clearly see that apart from
animal instincts, the faith that affected my life, the only faith I had, was
faith in perfection…”
“With all my soul I longed to be good, but I was young, I had
passions, and I was alone, utterly alone, whenever I sought what was
good. Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally
good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to
vile passions I was prised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, selfinterest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance – all of it was highly esteemed.
And I gave myself over to these passions…”
“I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing and heartrending pain…”
“Thus I lived for ten years. During this time I began to write out of
vanity, self-interest and pride. I did the same thing in writing that I did in
my life…”
Tolstoy’s earliest autobiographical and exceptionally talented work
(as it was already recognised then by the literary critics) was Childhood,
Boyhood, and Youth (1852 – 1856).
In 1857 Tolstoy visited Paris and became a witness, on the 25th of
March, of beheading on a guillotine of a convicted murderer François
Riche. This is how he describes this horrid event:
“Only now and then would my feelings, and not my reason, revolt
against this commonly held superstition of the age, by means of which
people hide from themselves their own ignorance of life. Thus during my
17
stay in Paris the sight of an execution revealed to me the feebleness of my
superstitious belief in progress. When I saw how the head was severed
from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into the box, I
understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no
theories of the rationality of existence or of progress can justify such an
act…”
And in the entry to his diary on April the 6th Tolstoy wrote:
“He kissed the Gospel and then – death. What insanity!”
Gradually, the senselessness of human existence overwhelmed Tolstoy:
“It was as thought I had lived a little, wandered a little, until I
came to the precipice, and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead
except ruin. And there was no stoping, no turning back, no closing my
eyes so I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the deception
of life and of happiness and the reality of suffering and death, of complete
annihilation.
I grew sick of life; some irresistible force was leading me to
somehow get rid of it. It was not that I wanted to kill myself. The force
that was leading me away from life was more powerful, more absolute,
more all-encompassing than any desire. With all my strength I struggled
to get away from life…”
“And this was happening to me at a time when, from all indications,
I should have been considered a completely happy man; this was when I
was not yet fifty years old. I had a good, loving, and beloved wife, fine
children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding without any
effort on my part…”
Please note, that this was written when Tolstoy already wrote such
masterpieces as Anna Karenina and War and Peace, which ensured him
worldwide recognition and fame.
“I could not help imagining that somewhere there was someone
who was now amusing himself, laughing at me and at the way I had lived
for thirty or forty years, studying, developing, growing in body and soul;
laughing at how I had now completely matured intellectually and had
reached that summit from which life reveals itself only to stand there like
a fool, clearly seeing that there is nothing in life, that there never was and
never will be. ‘And it makes him laugh…’
But whether or not there actually was someone laughing at me did not
make it any easier for me. I could not attach a rational meaning to a
single act of my entire life. The only thing that amazed me was how I had
failed to realize this in the very beginning…”
“This was the horror. And in order to be delivered from this horror,
I wanted to kill myself…”
“Several times I asked myself, ’Can it be that I have overlooked
something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is
18
it not possible that this state of despair is common to someone?’ And I
searched for all the answers to my questions in every area of knowledge
acquired by man…”
“For a long time I could not bring myself to believe that knowledge
had no reply to the question of life other than the one it had come up with.
For a long time I thought I might have misunderstood something, as I
closely observed the gravity and seriousness in the tone of science,
convinced in its position, while having nothing to do with the question of
human life…”
“My question, the question that brought me to the edge of suicide
when I was fifty years old, was the simplest question lying in the soul of
every human being, from a silly child to the wisest of elders, the question
without which life is impossible; such was the way I felt about the matter.
The question was this: What will come of what I do today and tomorrow?
What will come of my entire life? Expressed differently, the question may
be: Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do anything?
Or to put it still differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not
be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?
Throughout human knowledge I sought an answer to this question,
which is one and the same question in the various expressions of it…”
“One field of knowledge does not even acknowledge the question,
even though it clearly and precisely answers the questions that it has
posed independently. This is the field of experimental science, and at its
extreme end is mathematics. The other field of knowledge acknowledges
the question but does not answer it. This is the field of speculative
philosophy, and at its extreme end is metaphysics”.
As I read these sections of Tolstoy’s Confession, then naturally the
questions which were of life and death importance to him, were no less
vital for me, but there was one important difference, which resulted from
the new developments in science and philosophy during the past hundred
years. These new fields of science, and particularly those of Quantum
Mechanics and Cosmology, can no longer, as Tolstoy puts it: “clearly and
precisely answer the questions which they posed independently”.
There are numerous scientific works in these fields of knowledge which
recognize considerable similarity between modern science and theology.
John Polkinghorne’s “Quantum Physics and Theology – An Unexpected
Kinship”, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, and
Frank J. Tipler’s “The Physics of Immortality, Modern Cosmology, God
and the Resurrection of the Dead”, Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
Inc., London, 1995, are the two books on the subject, that first come to
my mind. On the other hand, even mathematics can no longer be
considered as the “extreme of precision” in natural sciences.
19
In 1931 Kurt Gödel (1906 -1972) published a theorem which
demonstrated the existence of formally undecidable elements within any
formal system of mathematics. Thus, for me there no longer exists an
unreachable divide between science and theology.
It was on December 14th 1900, at the meeting of the German
Physical Society, when Max Planck (1858 – 1947) stated that radiant
energy can exist only in the form of discrete packages, or “quanta”. This
concept contradicted the fundamental notions of Classical Physics and for
several years was only acknowledged by the “inner” group of physicists,
and certainly not by the general public. Even some of the scientists in this
selected group were at that time sceptical of the idea proposed by Planck.
The development of Quantum Physics to that advanced stage which was
finally perceived by scientists-theologians, such as John Polkinghorn, has
taken several decades and therefore the seeming incompatibility of
science, or what Tolstoy calls a rational knowledge, and religion, which is
to him an irrational knowledge, was an obvious conundrum, as he
explains:
“Life is an absurd evil, there is no doubting this, I said to myself.
But I have lived, and I am still living, and all of humanity has lived and
continues to live. How can this be? Why do men live when they are able
to die?”
“My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the
way of rational knowledge except a denial of life, and in faith I could find
nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible
than a denial of life…”
“Having understood this, I realized that I could not search for an
answer to my question in rational knowledge. The answer given by
rational knowledge is merely an indication that an answer can be
obtained only by formulating the question differently, that is, only when
the relationship between the finite and the infinite is introduced into the
question. I also realized that no matter how irrational and unattractive
the answers given by faith, they have the advantage of bringing to every
reply a relationship between the finite and the infinite, without which
there can be no reply. However I may put the question of how I am to live,
the answer is according to the law of God. Is there anything real that will
come of my life? Eternal torment or eternal happiness. What meaning is
there which is not destroyed by death? Union with the infinite God,
paradise.”
Although Tolstoy became a convinced theist, he was unable to accept
some of the dogmas of the Orthodox Church, apparently due to the fact
that he still considered them a denial of his “rational knowledge”.
20
I shall provide just one example of his perceived conflict between logic
and religion. The concept of Holy Trinity became a source of many
heresies in Christianity over the period of its troubled history. It also
created a logical contradiction for Tolstoy, and became one of the creeds
of Christianity which he was unable to accept. I do not concede that this
notion can be proven or refuted theologically. However, I was able to find
just for myself a kind of logical evidence, not in religion but in the
material world, that three can indeed be an undivided one. First I must
refer to the creator of the concept of “four-dimensional space”, to the
Russian-born German mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864 – 1909),
who in 1896 taught Einstein at the University of Zürich. In his work,
translated into English as Space and Time (1907), Minkowski concludes
that space and time cannot exist without one another and thus must be
considered as a single entity. It seems to me that matter, in its turn, cannot
exist without space-time, and hence all three, in spite of being separate
entities, can only exist as one.
For his dissent from the true Orthodox faith Tolstoy was excommunicated
by the decree No. 557 of the Russian Holy Synod in February 1901. It
seems that his faith remained unshaken by this verdict. He was convinced
that “true” Christianity reveals itself not in words, but in deeds, in the
non-resistance to evil and in love and charity towards our fellow human
beings. For the rest of his life Tolstoy continued to search for the truth in
religion, as can be seen from the entry into his diary of the 12th April
1904:
“Searching for God is like dragging a net out of water. While you
are dragging it, water remains in the net. As soon as you pull it to the
shore – the net is empty of water. While you are searching for God, both
in your thoughts and your deeds – God is with you. As soon as you relax
and decide that you have found God – you have actually lost Him”
Apparently Tolstoy’s book The Kingdom of God is Within You strongly
influenced “Mahatma” Gandhi (1869 – 1948) to resort to a non-violent
resistance in a form of protest and political action in British-ruled India.
In his autobiography Gandhi called Tolstoy “the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced”. Tolstoy also influenced
many modern dissenters, including the Nobel Prize Laureate, Aleksandr
Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008), who in his writings disclosed all
the horrors of the Soviet concentration camps.
21
Attempts to Provide Logical Evidence of Belief and Disbelief
“Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian
any more than standing in your garage makes you a
car”.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936)
An attempt to provide a logical proof for the existence of God, which for
many was considered somewhat heartless, was made by the famous
French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662). His
status as a theologian is based primarily on the posthumous publication of
the book Pensėes de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres
sujets (1670), generally known simply as Pensėes, meaning “thoughts”.
In his incomplete treatise on Christian apologetics, Pascal presented a
ground-breaking argument highlighting the benefits to those, who were
Christian disciples, an argument which was based on the mathematical
theory of probability, and is generally known as Pascal’s Wager or
Pascal’s Gambit.
The wager is built on several other themes presented in his theological
work, and although Pascal dismisses the notion that all the trust can be
based purely on reason, he nonetheless does not consider reason to be
always irrelevant. In one of the chapters of his discourse he actually states:
“If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no
mysterious and surprising element. If we offend the principles of reason,
our religion will be absurd and ridiculous”.
The essence of the Wager is stated in part III of the §233 of Pensėes:
 “God is, or He is not”
 A Game is being played, where heads or tails will turn up.
 According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions.
 You must wager (It is not optional).
 Let us weigh the gain and the loss in waging that God is. Let us
estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose,
you lose nothing.
 Wager then, without hesitation that He is. Here is an infinitely
happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of
chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our
proposition is of infinite force, when there is the limit to strike
in a game in which there are equal risks of gain and loss, and
the infinite to gain”.
22
To put it in the simple terms – the wise decision is to wager that God
exists. Then if you gain, you gain all, and if you lose, you lose nothing.
On the other hand, if you bet against God, win or lose, you either gain
nothing or lose everything. The main criticism of Pascal’s Wager arises
from the fact that there have been many religious beliefs and it seems that
the “proof” of the benefit of faith must logically extend to the “numerous
gods”, some of whom may be of a “wrong kind”.
The process of logical deductions, which is considered to be fundamental
in the development of new ideas and principles in philosophy and also in
science, does not always lead to the identical or even to the comparable
conclusions. Michael Polanyi, FRS (1891 – 1976), a world renowned
scientist and philosopher, who pioneered the theory of diffraction analysis
in 1921 and the dislocation theory of plastic deformation of ductile metals
in 1934, expressed the following view of the reliability of human
knowledge in the preface to his book Personal Knowledge:
“Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive
experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such
knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a
hidden reality… Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and
as such inherently hazardous. Only affirmations that could be false can
be said to convey objective knowledge of this kind.”
It was Bavarian philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804 – 1872),
who attempted to provide a plausible explanation of the historical
development of religious beliefs in human society. As a child Feuerbach
was very religious, but following his studies at Heidelberg University he
became troubled by the inability to reconcile his belief in a personal deity
with some of the concepts of Hegelian philosophy, which was then taught
at Heidelberg. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) was a
German Idealistic philosopher, whose works had major influence on the
subsequent development of western philosophy. Hegelianism is a
collective term for the schools of thought influenced by the philosophy of
Hegel. It was apparently Hegel's religious conceptions that Feuerbach had
difficulty to accept. Hegel expressed a dual perception of Jesus Christ,
both as Divine and Human. The following is a brief citation from his
posthumous book The Christian Religion: Lectures on Philosophy of
Religion, Part 3:
“God is not an abstraction but a concrete God… God, considered
in terms of His eternal Idea, had to generate the Son, had to distinguish
Himself from Himself; He is the process of differentiating, namely Love
and Spirit”.
23
However, the greatest legacy of Hegel’s philosophy, which crossed the
boundaries between idealism and materialism, was dialectic. The term
dialectic is derived from a Greek word that means “to converse” or “to
discourse”. It was used in somewhat different elucidations by the Greek
and Middle Age Western philosophers. Hegelian dialectic can be defined
as a particular logical pattern that thought must follow. Hegel argued that
thought proceeds by the way of contradiction and by the subsequent
reconciliation of this contradiction. The overall configuration of this
process can thus be described as the one of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
For me personally this method of dialectic, rightly or wrongly, always
resembled that of the concept of the advocatus diaboli , that is of Devil’s
advocate, who was a canon lawyer appointed by the Roman Catholic
Church in order to take a sceptical view, to discover the inconsistences in
the evidence put forward by the advocatus Dei, by the Promoter of the
Cause for the canonization of a candidate.
But let us return to Feuerbach. His subsequent writings became extremely
critical not only of Hegel’s idealism, but also of the Christian theology.
The most famous of his books should probably be regarded Das Wesen
des Christentums (1841), translated into English as The Essence of
Christianity. In this book Feuerbach defined religion as “the dream of the
human mind”. He believed that all of spiritual development of human
beings is a natural process, and not an expression of God’s will or design.
Feuerbach thus provides a foundation for the critical view of all religious
beliefs, by arguing that it is now possible to recognize religion for what it
really is: not a God-given set of ideas, but simply a human creation.
Religion, in his view, tells us nothing about God and everything about
ourselves, reflecting our hopes, our deepest longings and particularly our
fear of death. And I again quote his The Essence of Christianity:
“God is the revealed and explicit inner self of a human being.
Religion is the ceremonial unveiling of the hidden treasures of humanity,
the confession of its innermost thoughts, and the open recognition of its
secrets of love.
God, far from being our master, should be our servant. But did we
really need such a servant on the first place? Can we not dispense with
such an outmoded belief altogether, and realize that we ourselves are the
only gods?”
24
Epilogue
“Jesus saith unto him: Thomas, because thou hast seen me,
thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet
have believed”.
The NewTtestament
St. John, XX, 29.
In this synopsis to my brief essay, as I anticipated from the very
beginning, it is impossible for me to arrive at the general conclusion as to
why people acquire, retain and lose their faith. However, in some cases it
seems it is our inability to perceive the reality – reality of the abstract, of
the intangible realm, by comparison with the reality of the material world
that leads people to this conundrum. This difference in the perception of
these two realities, although at times not very distinct even in in the past,
as it manifested itself in the scepticism of Descartes and Hume, has
practically disappeared with the advent of new scientific concepts, such
as quantum mechanics. The contradictions which Tolstoy perceived
between the “rational” science and the “irrational” religion not only no
longer valid, but arguably, the reality of the material world, the
underlying substance of which is the quantum domain of subatomic
particles, is much more abstract than the ideas which can only be
expressed in terms of language. And naturally, all religious books are
written in the vernacular languages, which local population uses for
communicating with one another, although the notions presented in
theology are often extremely incorporeal and abstract, and some are
articulated in the form of parables.
However, many concepts of modern science can, at best, be expressed
only in the language of mathematics. Some, such as duality of particles
and waves, or materialization of an object only after it is observed, seem
to define our common sense. This is how Richard Phillips Feynman
(1918 – 1988), recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of
quantum electrodynamics, one of the most abstract notions of this theory,
describes in one of his lectures the process, which can lead to some
conception of at least the essence of quantum mechanics:
“Because atomic behaviour is so unlike ordinary experience, it is
very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to
everyone… we shall tackle immediately the basic element of the
mysterious behaviour in its most strange form. We choose to examine a
phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any
classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In
25
reality it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away
by ‘explaining’ how it works. We will just tell you how it works”.
It is obviously impossible for one human being to ascertain the mental
process of another human being. However, it seems to me that the
announcement in 2004 by Antony Garrard Newton Flew (1923 – 2010),
who was one of the most “militant” atheists, that he has converted to
theism, may have been result of the recognition of the “mystery” not only
of religion, but also of science. Flew was always very strong advocate of
atheism. He insisted that the existence of God can only be proven from
empirical evidence. When an undergraduate in Oxford, Flew attended the
weekly meetings of C.S. Lewis’s Socratic Club fairly regularly, but even
then he was convinced that “it just seemed flatly inconsistent to say that
the universe was created by an omnipotent and perfectly good being”.
He was a devotee of David Hume, about whom he wrote Hume’s
Philosophy of Belief (1961). His many other books about atheism and
denial of religious beliefs included: God and Philosophy (1966),
The Presumption of Atheism (1976), and Atheistic Humanism (1993).
And then his apparently sudden and certainly controversial conversion to
theism in 2004 was explained by Flew in a letter to The Sunday
Telegraph as follows:
The God in whose existence I have come to believe most
emphatically is not the eternally rewarding and eternally torturing God
of either Christianity or Islam, but the God of Aristotle that he would
have defined – had Aristotle actually produced a definition of his (and my)
God – as the first initiating and sustaining cause of the universe”.
Flew also did not believe in the immortality of human soul, as can
be seen from his statement to The Sunday Telegraph:
“I want to be dead when I’m dead and that’s the end to it. I don’t
want anything without end”.
The reason I believe his conversion was influenced by the
“mystery” of science in comparison with the equal “mystery” of religion
can possibly be explained by his following declaration:
“The most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that
are supported by recent scientific discoveries”.
Very brief biographical sketch:
Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and
Engineering since 1988, Dr. Aleksander Samarin is Visiting Professor at
the University of Technology Sydney. His current interests include
Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Religion.
20th of January 2013.
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