What are ultimate questions and why are they hard to answer?
Dr Felicity McCutcheon
Dialogue Australasia Conference
Newington College, Sydney 2011
‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp – or what’s a heaven for?’
from 'Andrea del Sarto' by Robert Browning
Introductory remarks
What are ultimate questions?
When I had finished writing my PhD on Wittgenstein, I had the privilege of
having it read by the late emeritus professor of Christchurch, Oxford, David
Pears. He called me into his study and after saying some complimentary things
about it he remarked “you know Felicity, as I read it I got the distinct
impression that there was just him and you in the room when you wrote it’. By
‘him’, he meant, of course, Wittgenstein. And he was right. I wrote it with
Wittgenstein looking over my shoulder the whole time (disapprovingly, I might
add)
Ultimate questions are a bit like that, I think. Always in the room, unsettling,
demanding and challenging us – calling us to make sense of who we are and
perhaps even calling us to become more than we are.
This paper has been more difficult to write than I had anticipated. My problem
was essentially one of scope. Too much to say, so many ways and too little
time to say it. It was also a problem of semantics. I initially got caught up in the
issue of definitions (what is an ultimate question and what is not) and the ever
present analytic philosopher in me then decided I should work through all
ways ultimate questions can’t be answered before getting to the ways they can
- a kind of via negativa approach. I had begun thinking seriously about the
paper over Christmas when I was on holiday in Italy – and more especially,
sitting at a little writing desk in a nunnery in Assisi. I was filled with a kind of
wonder at St Francis and the example of his life as an answer to the most
pressing of ultimate questions but I realised I couldn’t simply stand before you
today and point to lives of truth and love, although everything I will go on to
say is really a set of footnotes to doing just that.
I eventually realised I could have more modest aims and that as opening
keynote all I really needed to do was to provide a scaffold for our thinking this
week, both in terms of the nature of these questions and how we, as teachers,
might go about handling them in the classroom. The sessions to follow will no
doubt do a much better job at focussing on specific questions so my work is
preparatory. I really want to do just 3 things:
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1. Explore the essential features of ultimate questions
2. Examine various ways in which we might attempt to find answers
3. Discuss the particular difficulties that arise when teachers address these
questions in the classroom
First, let’s have the experience before us of being asked these questions.
What does it mean to be human?
Why is there evil and suffering?
How do I find truth?
What is a good life?
Note carefully what happens inside you when you are asked questions like
this.
Be assured that your students will have the same response, although in their
case the sense of mental panic, confusion and helplessness will probably be
more marked. It is very tempting, I think, to want to put an end to the
discomfort and uncertainty, either by defaulting to a strongly felt opinion (with
a kind of triumphant certainty) or to disconnect from the question altogether
with a kind of triumphant relativism – I have had students take this position
and declare loudly that ‘These questions don’t have answers so it doesn’t
matter what you think.’
Which is really a way of saying the question doesn’t matter and so there is no
need to think about it.
If, as I shall suggest, ultimate questions require not merely thinking about but a
deeper response from our core, the challenge of helping our students take
them seriously will require more than simply engaging their sceptical minds.
There is the added difficulty in getting our students to travel inwards and
discover ‘the outer regions of inner space’ as Joseph Campbell once put it.
In an age of information and interactive technologies, a world of search
engines, tracking, updates, blogs, tweets, and immediacy of response, I think
the difficulty is increased as we are led further and further away from
developing the patience for and seeing the value in ultimate or eternal
questions.
Robert Storr, Dean of Yale, School of Art expresses it well:
‘We are in a period in which scanning has replaced seeing and keeping track
has replaced paying attention’ (quoted in The Age, 1 Aug, 2010)
Paradoxically, living in a constant present strips us of the opportunity to be
truly present and this makes the asking and answering of ultimate questions
even more difficult. I know that this is one of the biggest challenges I face in
teaching my RE classes. It is trying to get the boys to slow down, to move them
inward rather than settling for the outer, to get them to think from the back of
their minds rather than always being in the front.
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But being hard to answer does not make them unimportant. Indeed, I shall
argue it is what gives them their importance.
Such questions arise from our deep self and so can only be inhabited and
engaged with at a deep level. One way I try to get my boys to think about it is
to draw a distinction between the near and the far.
[A classroom exercise was explained here]
If you only have the ‘near’ you can’t see where you’re going, nor can you see
what’s coming. Having a horizon ‘makes sense’ of my experience and provides
it with some kind of coherence. Without it my experiences are simply had –
without a background or a backup, there is no ground to stand on and nothing
to hold onto.
My ‘present’ is my near but it needs a horizon before it has a meaning beyond
the fact that I am having an experience. ‘What is this an experience of?’ ‘What
is the meaning of this experience?’ That question takes me out of ‘now’ in
order that I may be ‘in’ it. If we never do this we will end up like Alex Higgins
the Irish snooker player, who in an interview some time ago, when asked about
his life, replied; ‘I can’t tell you – I haven’t been there for most of it’.
Ultimate questions – a peculiar specimen
What are ultimate questions?
When I am teaching free will and determinism to my year 11s I open with the
question on the whiteboard: ‘what is the difference between the moon and a
person?’ In this context, I am simply looking for something like ‘a person can
choose to dodge a meteor and the moon can’t’ (it’s a way of motivating their
interest in the way the free will question hinges on what you think a human is
made of…on a materialist model, we are made of ‘essentially’ the same stuff as
the moon which makes it problematic to defend the kind of free will they
naturally think they have…hence, the follow up lesson on Creatures in the
Libertarian Zoo (examines attempts to defend free will by developing views of
what the ‘will’ is really made of – Kantian wills, Cartesian minds and religious
souls…)
Humans ask ultimate questions. The moon cannot.
Ultimate questions tend to be concerned with two domains, although as we
shall see, they are interrelated. The first is to do with what we might call the
‘ultimate ground’ of things. This is the fundamental nature of reality (explored
primarily by philosophy and theology). The second is what Paul Tillich calls
‘Ultimate concern’. This is the nature of experience and meaning – the
existential/values component.
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If we take a look at some sample questions we shall identify these two
categories and also see the overlap.
Origins
1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
2. What caused the universe to exist?
3. Where did we come from?
4. What place do we have in the universe?
Meaning
1. Does life has meaning?
2. What is the meaning of human life?
3. Is there ultimate meaning behind the universe?
4. Does death cancel out meaning?
Guilt
1. Why do we feel guilty? Should we?
2. Is there a supernatural basis for moral behaviour?
3. Does following certain rules of conduct relieve our guilt?
4. Which comes first: guilt or morality?
Death
1. What happens after death?
2. How does having-to-die affect our living?
3. What does it mean to ‘fear death’?
4. Does my life cease to have meaning once I die?
Generally, we can see the interdependence by tracking down possible
responses. If, for example, I come to the conclusion that there is a divine cause
of the universe which also has the qualities of love, justice and goodness,
answers to questions about guilt and meaning will follow a particular path
(although not necessary a ‘certain’ one or the ‘same’ one for everyone).
Ultimate ground - metaphysical (philosophical/theological) - Reality
Ultimate concern – existential/value – ‘meaning’ - Experience
Given that it is humans that ask such questions, what are the ways in which
they might be answered and what difficulties do we face not only when trying
to answer them but also when trying to teach them?
In what follows, I want to look first at where science can take us. I want to
address the place of science as I believe that scientists have become the new
priests of culture and it is worth thinking carefully about what they can and
what they cannot tell us, how they can and cannot help us. Helping students
understand the limits of the empirical method is crucial to enabling them to
recognise and look beyond the pretensions of scientific reductionists like
Richard Dawkins. The point is not to enflame an already muddled religion vs
science debate but to enable young people to think clearly about the issues
presented in the debate.
Ultimate questions - How far can science take us?
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I think it is really important for teachers to see with a steady eye and help their
students see clearly why science cannot answer ultimate questions. I want to
make two points about science and scientific knowledge.
First, science, no matter how far it advances, can never be more than a
description of phenomena. That’s right. Science describes. It does not explain.
My second point is that science qua science cannot provide answers to
ultimate questions that by their nature seek the ground of the phenomena
presented to and described by science.
Science as description
Judging by the number of people who think that science is explanatory, this
first point must be terribly difficult to grasp. But if you think about it, the point
is easy to see. Either science is describing patterns or predicting patterns and
these patterns are simply made up of descriptions. In its simplest terms:
‘Every scientific statement in the long run, however, complicated it looks, really
means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the
sky at 2.20am on January 15th and saw so-and-so, or, ‘I put some of this stuff in
a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so. Do
not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.
And the more scientific a man is, the more I believe he will agree with me that
this is the job of science – and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But
why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind
the things science observes – something of a different kind – this is not a
scientific question. If there is ‘something behind’, then either it will have to
remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different
way. The statement that there is any such thing, and there statement that there
is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can
make…Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single
thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a
universe?’ and ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ and ‘Has it any meaning?’ would
remain just as they were? (C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 1, Ch 4)
Nietzsche makes the same point: “We call it explanation, but it is description
which distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We
describe better – we explain just as little as anyone who came before us”. What
we have achieved are descriptions of greater and greater complexity and
sophistication (and inferred patterns, which we call laws – from our
descriptions) but we have explained nothing. Knowing how fire changes
molecular structure does not explain fire itself….“If we chop up the endless
continuum of the world into manageable pieces for our digestion, let us not
imagine that the menu we prepare for ourselves is the only, or even the
tastiest, one. Yet the hubris of science insists that it is” (Introducing Nietzsche
p60)
When I am trying to explain to my students the difference between a scientific
question and a question about meaning, I use the example of a mother who has
lost a child in a car accident. ‘Why did my child die?’ The ‘scientists’ (doctors,
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forensic police, etc) will answer this with a presentation of the empirical facts.
Something perhaps like: when a car is hit at such and such a speed from such
and such an angle, the human who feels the impact suffers from a crush of the
chest resulting in a complete failure of vital organs, thereby resulting in death’.
Knowing the physical details won’t answer the mother’s actual question which
is to ask for the event to make sense. To that question, science has nothing to
say.
Of course when Richard Dawkins and many others insist that Science is the
only menu and ‘There is no ultimate why’ they are not presenting a scientific
view but rather declaring their own theological or faith position, they are
presenting their answer to an ultimate question.
What Nietzsche calls the ‘hubris of science’ is more formally known as
scientific reductionism or scientism which is not a scientific but a
metaphysical position that holds only the physical universe exists and that
only science can provide truth. It is itself an answer to an ultimate question but
it is important to note that it is not in itself a scientific answer.
With the collapse of a religious world view and the increasing irrelevance of
religious language, it is tempting for people to simply fall for the hubris of
science. Our students literally imbibe its assumptions from everywhere in the
media. Here’s just one example which I think is indicative of many. It’s a fairly
typical example of how scientific discoveries are reported by the media.
Neuroscientists have apparently discovered the part/s of the brain that are
connected to religious experience and religious belief.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009: ‘Belief and the brain’s God spot’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/belief-and-the-brains-godspot-1641022.html
The by-line reads: ‘Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that
control religious faith. And the research proves, they contend, that belief in a
higher power is an evolutionary asset that helps human survival.
We are then told that:
A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed
for religious experiences, according to a study that analyses why religion is a
universal human feature that has encompassed all cultures throughout history.
Scientists searching for the neural God spot, which is supposed to control
religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain
that form the biological foundations of religious belief”.
Leaving aside the conflation of ‘belief’ with ‘experience’ and various other
logical errors, this article is actually making one very simple claim. That
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scientists have found the part of the brain that is active when human beings
have spiritual experiences, and they have discovered that all human brains
seem to have this part, and that spiritual experiences can be caused by
stimulating that part of the brain, whether the human has an actual belief in
God or not.
Now I don’t know about you but I’d be more surprised if scientists discovered
that no part of the brain was active when people have religious experiences. I’d
also be a tad concerned! So, what have I learnt when I am told about this
discovery (which, incidentally, I am not implying doesn’t have information that
is interesting – science is interesting - it’s just not equipped to deal with the
ultimate and is being dishonest whenever it suggests otherwise).
The article is too long to go through it point by point with you now but I will
include the link in the published version of my paper and more detailed
analysis of the philosophical assumptions embedded in the article. I encourage
you to examine it with your senior students. They rightly feel caught in the
middle of a science/religion debate where the options are either to reject
science or to reject religion. It’s an impossible choice and unsurprisingly, they
more commonly default to scientism without being able to clearly orientate
themselves to the issues.
What most people take from articles like this is the conclusion that when
science discovers the parts of the brain active in, say, our experience of
beauty, or poetry, or in this case, God, this entails that beauty, meaning and
God are nothing but brain states. If we can stimulate such experiences without
having ‘real objects’, surely we have ‘proved’ there is no such thing as beauty,
meaning or God. What follows from this is that it is foolish to continue to ask
questions about God’s existence because clearly science has proved God
doesn’t exist.
Obviously the shift from a description of brains and experiences to the
metaphysical conclusion is philosophically illegal. Clearly the brain can
produce an experience of X either by experiencing X or by being stimulated to
experience X. The fact of the latter does not disprove the existence of Xs (I
could, for example, tickle the right part of your brain and cause you to see a
chair or taste apple pie but that tells me or you nothing about the actual
existence of chairs or apple pies).
So a clearer way to present the ideas in this article might be this:
A brain state can be matched to a belief in God, and researches have also found that
the human brain can be stimulated to have religious experiences, according to a
study that suggests that religion is a universal human feature that has encompassed
all cultures throughout history.
You can now more easily see the descriptive, rather than the explanatory
nature of the science and also realise that nothing in the findings themselves
can tell us what our experiences are of.
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The article rather tellingly concludes with this:
‘When we have incomplete knowledge of the world around us, it offers us
opportunities to believe in God. When we don’t have a scientific explanation for
something, we tend to rely on supernatural explanations’.
I presume we are supposed to conclude that although belief in God was a
necessary explanatory feature for biological survival, we won’t need such
beliefs in a world where science has explained everything. In essence this is
the logical equivalent of claiming that now that we have knowledge of the God
spot, we no longer have a need for God. I assume I don’t need to point out the
absurdity of such a conclusion.
What I have tried to show here is that this contains a profoundly mistaken idea
– that God currently fills the gaps that science will one day fill. Nothing about a
scientific discovery per se can by itself give us an answer to ultimate ‘why’ or
‘what’ questions. Empirical data cannot, all by itself, reveal its source or
ground. Re Lewis: why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is
anything behind the things science observes – something of a different kind –
this is not a scientific question. When Dawkins decides there is nothing behind
and there is no why, this is as much a faith decision as the person who thinks
there is something behind and there is a ‘why’. It is simply dishonest of
anyone to suggest that Dawkins’ position is the position that truly enlightened,
scientific minds must adopt.
Science will never answer ultimate questions – but, more worryingly, perhaps
the hubris of science may one day mean that people are encouraged to feel
foolish for asking them. Something distinctly and deeply human would be
threatened in such a world.
Humans ask ultimate questions. Science cannot.
Asking Ultimate questions – the distinctly and deeply human
What does it mean to be human?
Why is there evil and suffering?
How do I find truth?
What is a good life?
When a human asks a question like this they are asking about meaning and
purpose. They are asking about ultimate reality, value and personal
significance. They are asking an existential question, and this is another
reason why ultimate questions are difficult to answer. The ‘facts’ contribute to
the problem. They cannot, on their own, provide a solution. Answers to
ultimate questions are to be found within. On that point I am sure David Tacey
will have much more to tell us on Wednesday. I want to make just a couple of
points here by looking at how Kierkegaard presents the problem.
Ultimate questions - the existential component
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Of crucial importance to Kierkegaard’s analysis of the existential nature of
ultimate concern is his critique of Hegel.1. Any totalising theory will have the
same features as Hegel’s system. A ‘theory of everything’ would be just as
much a target of Kierkegaard’s analysis as Hegel’s attempt to explain world
history in terms of spirit consciousness.
You will recall that Hegel’s grand project was to provide a biography of Reason
– the story Reason would write for itself if it could. Dissatisfied with Kant’s
abstract and context free account of Pure Reason, Hegel engaged in the much
more ambitious project of showing Reason progressing to an Absolute state.
Recall Hegel’s Geist, moving through history via the process of the dialectic,
overcoming paradoxes through a series of synthesising steps until it
eventually achieves an ultimate synthesis – an absolute final state, realised,
not unsurprisingly perhaps, in Hegel’s 19th century Germany. For Hegel, it was
quite literally ‘the state’ that was absolute. All the contradictions and
paradoxes that Kant had stumbled across disappear in Hegel’s final state. It is
Rationality made perfect.2 In Hegel’s ideal society, the will of each individual
and society’s laws must coincide because ultimately human beings are defined
by their relation to others. The result of this Hegelian system was that the
individual must be subordinated to the family unit, the family to society and
society to the State.
Kierkegaard argues that Hegel’s Absolute obliterates the subject.
Only individuals can ask ultimate questions. The State cannot. A system
cannot.
Kierkegaard argues there can be no complete system because existence is a
‘surd’, always left over when all description and analysis is complete. Abstract
concepts are always abstractions whereas real life human beings can never be
reduced to mere concepts. Our individual existence is the unanalyzable
residue which is simply’ there’. Kierkegaard rejects Hegel’s system because it
does not include existing individuals. And he accuses Hegel of the absurdity of
not being able to include himself in his own system: ‘Is he purely eternal, the
pure ‘I am I’ even when he eats, sleeps and blows his nose?’
Reason and science may provide objective truths - abstracted from reality,
conceptualised and tested. In each of these cases there are objective, external
criteria to which we can appeal when we question the truth of a claim. These
truths, claims Kierkegaard, are existentially indifferent. That is to say, nothing
in your life would radically change if you discovered that one of these truths
was false.
Take for example, the discovery mentioned earlier, that neuroscientists have
discovered the parts of the brain that are connected to belief in God or
religious experience. If, in 20 years’ time, this discovery is overturned, would
1
I have a more detailed section on this is my appendix, where I track Kierkegaard through Kant and Hegel.
Many philosophers were enamoured with Hegel. His influence on Heidegger perhaps helps to explain the
latter’s interest and belief in the Nazi state, although I suspect that only goes to show the malignancy of
‘rationality’ left unchecked. The Cyber men in Dr Who are another good example!
2
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that change anything about a persons’ life – religious or atheistic? I suggest
not.
Subjective truths, on the other hand, are truths for which there is no objective
criteria to which one can appeal, and yet, for Kierkegaard, they are the most
important kind of truths. These are existential truths in that they are essentially
related to one’s existence. These truths are not about objective facts but about
values and the foundation or ultimate ground of values, and by implication, our
identity, meaning and place in the universe.
Subjective truths are not pieces of knowledge, or well- reasoned arguments,
rather they must be appropriated by the individual, internalised and reflected in
one’s decisions and actions.
Humans ask ultimate questions. Humanity cannot.
Humans have fears, desires, thoughts, dispositions, neuroses and
commitments. Humanity does not. This is Kierkegaard’s starting point. Whilst
fictional and abstract characters are provided with a character or essence that
determines their destiny, for real people, the opposite is true. It is their chosen
actions the cumulatively determine their character and what they understand
their actions and experiences to mean. Living is not an activity that can be
‘mediated’ by some ongoing dialectic (nor, I am tempted to say, by a scientific
hypothesis).
If for example you are told that you are hard wired to propagate, you still have
to decide who to marry, or indeed, whether to marry and whether to have
children. The science doesn’t take decisions away from you – nor does it take
away the consequences of those decisions, in terms of the meaning they have
for you.
Kierkegaard suggested that most people flee from their freedom, seeking relief
from the anxiety of having to choose for themselves or face ultimate questions
by following the crowd. Most people are content to be absorbed into the
everyday world of marriage, career and social respectability. If their society is a
Christian one, they go to church, get their children baptised, and so on. If their
society is communist, they dutifully attend party meetings and obey the
dictates of the state. If their society is a capitalist one, they will no doubt
unthinkingly believe their purpose is to accumulate assets and wealth and
contribute to the ‘growth’ of the economy. Kierkegaard does not suggest they
are hypocrites, however. They are simply avoiding all self-conscious reflection
about the kind of life they lead. They lack any real freedom because they have
allowed others to decide how they should live.
Kierkegaard’s existentialism is a radical and damning challenge to this. Our
capacity to ask questions about meaning and value (which Kierkegaard would
describe as our spiritual nature), to place ourselves in time and space and to
hear the call of the eternal, is what defines us. But this is also a source of
spiritual anxiety. The more awareness, the more freedom; the more freedom,
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the more risk, the more responsibility but also the possibility of lives with
profound meaning – lives lived sub specie aeternitatis.
Kierkegaard’s analysis of the different types of choices we can make (the
aesthetic, the ethical and the religious) ends up with the conclusion that only
living in relationship with the absolute or ultimate will grant a person a life of
ultimate meaning. Kierkegaard famously saw accepting the God-Man paradox
of Jesus as the ultimate Faith stance because it required maximum subjective
risk (it doesn’t make sense) and yet secured maximum meaning. A finite
individual could live in relationship with the infinite. The eternal could be met in
the present.
If you are ever looking for curriculum content in your philosophy and RE
courses I highly recommend you include at least an introduction to
Kierkegaard somewhere. I find that although the material is difficult, senior
students get an enormous amount from it.
The existential nature of ultimate questions is what makes them possible to
answer but also is part of the reason they are hard to answer. Why?
 First, a person has to take them seriously (and there are reasons why we
would rather avoid them)
 Second, even if you do take them seriously, you live in a society that
encourages you to avoid them
This means that as teachers, if we are to protect and preserve what is deeply
and distinctly human, we must do all we can to affirm both the questions and
the persons who ask them.
If ultimate questions are deeply and distinctly human why would we rather
avoid them?
Because they unsettle us. Questions about our mortality and our value are only
possible in creatures that have sufficient consciousness. As Kierkegaard
emphasises, we are aware that we will one day cease to exist, that we have to
choose and take responsibility for our actions and that ultimately, our lives
may come to nothing. Tillich rather usefully presents the three main types of
anxiety which are distinctly human and related to ultimate concern:
1. Ontic self-affirmation – threatened in terms of fate and absolutely in
terms of death
2. Spiritual self-affirmation – threatened in terms of emptiness and
absolutely in terms of meaninglessness
3. Moral self-affirmation – threatened in terms of guilt and absolutely in
terms of condemnation
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If our capacity to experience existential anxiety is connected to our ability to
ask and answer ultimate questions it is crucial that we accept and learn
from this anxiety and unsettledness. But this is painful and difficult.3
A striking component of Tillich’s analysis is his account of spiritual
fanaticism and its connection to the threat of meaninglessness. Tillich
suggests that anxiety about meaninglessness is based on man’s sense of
separation from the whole of reality – so it can be overcome by
surrendering his separation and fleeing from his freedom to fanaticism – a
situation in which no further questions can be asked and the answers to
previous questions are imposed authoritatively. The fanatic surrenders
himself in order to save his spiritual life. Meaning (of sorts) is saved but self
is sacrificed.
I sometimes wonder when I look at the technological totality that constitutes
my students’ experiences, whether the need for constant connection is not
another form of overcoming the anxiety of meaninglessness by surrendering
separation. Of course the fanatic does this to a fanatical degree. In both cases,
however, there is a collapse of a distinction between self and reality; for the
fanatic, the horizon (the ‘far’) has become everything, for those addicted to
Facebook and Twitter updates, the constant feed of the ‘near’ (the now)
obliterates the horizon. Meaninglessness is staved off by the endless
possibilities offered by social networking sites that can perhaps temporarily
silence the anxiety. ‘I must check for new feeds’.4 It is hard to see how in that
conglomerate of constant news flashes and emotional flux the deeper,
searching self can make itself heard or known.
Perhaps challenges to the importance of existential anxiety are also coming
from other sources. Part of the consequence of the shift from the religious to
the scientific world view is the objectification of humans to purely biological
subjects, rendering us objects of scientific enquiry and technical management.
Don’t we now have a proliferation of narcotics to soothe a proliferation of
anxiety disorders?
But the problem here is highlighted by Tillich:
‘The safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the
technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person,
…this safety is bought as a high price; man, for whom all this was invented as
means, becomes a means himself’ (Tillich p.138). In other words, self becomes
an object, a thing.
Humans ask ultimate questions. Things cannot.
For those who seek the holy grail of a utopia of happiness (now more
commonly termed ‘wellbeing’) expressions of individuality and expressions of
despair disturb them. In such a utopia one is unable to distinguish the genuine
For a cutting commentary on the medicalization of anxiety, see Kierkegaard’s parable: ‘A visit to the doctor’,
subtitled: Can medicine abolish the anxious conscience?’ in The parables of Kierkegaard, p.57
4
Does this perhaps not really mean – get some more emotional food?
3
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from the neurotic. Think of Huxley’s brilliant vision in Brave new world. The
controller wants the smooth functioning of society – the technological
reduction of self to the collective. John the Savage embraces and
courageously claims the ‘negative’ – he wants to incorporate suffering, not to
deny life but to affirm it because this is the truth about reality, the truth about
being human.
“We prefer to do things comfortably’, said the Controller.
‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want
goodness. I want freedom’.
‘In fact’, said the Controller, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy’.
‘Alright then’, said the Savage defiantly. ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy’.
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent…the right to be
tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all”, said the Savage at last.
“The Controller shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome”, he said.
(Brave New World)
Normalisation by narcotics – Augustine’s restless heart provided with peace,
secured not by spiritual truth but by soma. There may be plenty that is new but
there’s surely nothing brave about such a world.
There is something brave about an individual who understands that spirit
makes him human and that the promise of physical or material salvation is
simply another version of hell.
Of course along with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, that other 19th century existential
giant, recognised the impending loss of a divine horizon and realised that
humans would need to find a new horizon to replace the God they had killed if
they wanted to avoid the mindless pursuit of pleasure and the siren songs of
science. Nietzsche saw with a clarity wrought from a kind of brilliant madness
the impending fate of man:
“Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life,
well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending
sand!” (Daybreak 174)
His rejection of hedonism and utilitarianism, perhaps of all the comfort and
leisure technologies to which we have become increasingly addicted, is no
less compromising:
“Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us a state that soon
makes man ridiculous and contemptible” (BGE 225).
The higher one leaves pleasure “to the great majority: happiness as peace of
soul, virtue, comfort, Anglo-angelic shopkeeperdom” (WP 944). (I can't help but
think there's a side glance here to Benthan and his utility calculus)
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Nietzsche’s much misunderstood Ubermensch is not a cruel and ravaging
beast but a ‘higher man’ a ‘free spirit’ who understands that neither morality
nor reason can generate meaning and neither can science. Ultimately one
needs mythology – a horizon before which and a ground on which to stand.
“The passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar…it involves the use of a
rare and singular standard cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for
which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are
dedicated to an unknown god; a courage without any desire for honours; selfsufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things” (GS 55)
Nietzsche understood that to make sense of my life or my experience I must be
shown it as a whole. I need a ‘far’ to make sense of the ‘near’. He adopted the
mythology of fate, eternal recurrence. All that I have done and that happens to
me can be creatively woven into the continuing saga of my life. I can choose to
repossess it. Of anything I may say: ‘Thus I willed it so”.
I personally think there is something incredibly inspiring in Nietzsche’s call to
authentic and passionate self-determination. I also happen to think he was
deeply mistaken in his belief that an individual could self-create. But he does
not advocate a nihilistic negativity, despite the fact that many postmodern
cynics claim him as their master. But modern day cynics are not like their
predecessors in Greek society who were critics of contemporary culture on the
basis of reason and natural law. Modern cynics have no belief in reason, no
criterion of truth, no answer to the question of meaning. They ‘courageously’
reject any situation which would deprive them of their freedom to reject
whatever they want to reject. They are empty of both preliminary meanings and
an ultimate meaning and are easy victims of neurotic anxiety.
[ anecdote about students who arrive with certificates justifying their
resignation to weakness and entitlement to indulgence]
Nietzsche, when properly handled, can be a wonderful antidote to a culture of
hedonism, helplessness and entitlement. Nietzsche, unlike many of his
postmodern followers, at least knew that redeeming truths are not
psychological but metaphysical. His mistake was to think that by force of will
we could create new ones. Kierkegaard knew that whether we call on him or
not, God is always present. He is always and already waiting to be found.
Teaching Ultimate questions
So, what does all this mean for our classroom practice? Good teaching is
always about what matters. Good RE teaching is about what ultimately matters.
It turns out that it is not merely the minds of our students (sceptical or
otherwise) that we need to engage. We must also
 Engage their hearts and spirits (their deep selves)
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 Present them with examples of how these questions have been thought
about and answered (the core of our curriculum) which is really a way of
presenting them with possibilities
 Confirm in everything you do and say that these questions matter
 Live the questions ourselves
 Know that your answer need not be their answer. They are not you
Ultimate questions are essentially existential. What does that mean? The
answer can’t be found on the internet or in a text book or even in a facilitated
discussion. There is no answer ‘out there’ although the way other humans
have thought about and lived their own answers is an important part of me
working out my answer. At the end of the day, however, every individual faces
the question and must come to an answer for themselves.
How many will even try?
Kierkegaard again:
“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like
schoolboys; they cheat their masters by copying the answers out of a book,
without having worked out the sum for themselves” (Journals, Jan 17th, 1837)
We have new ways of copying the answers, don’t we? It’s so much easier to
google than to really search (I think of it as ‘goggle’ – have a look at the eyes of
your students when they are doing internet tasks. We literally goggle when we
google.)
Perhaps the copy and paste facility has simply replaced the traditional method
of rote learning?
Whilst there is nothing at all wrong with using technology for particular
purposes I think it is important to be mindful of its limitations, too. When I am
doing my ‘near’ and ‘far’ exercise with my new year 9s, I get them to read
through and discuss the following remark.
“In post-modern culture we tend increasingly to inhabit virtual reality rather
than actual reality. More and more time is spent in the shadowlands of the
computer world. The computer world is all foreground but has no background.
Much of modern life is lived in the territory of externality; if we succumb
completely to the external we will lose all sense of inner and personal
presence. We will become the ultimate harvesters of absence, namely, ghosts
in our own lives”. (John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes)
People ask ultimate questions. Machine cannot. Ghosts do not. (Okay, so I
don’t know that last one for sure.)
The most important thing we can do as teachers is to affirm what O’Donohue
here calls the ‘inner and personal presence’ of our students which is the only
‘search engine’ that ultimately matters.
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In closing, I have two teaching ideas I call to inner and personal presence that I
have found to have lasting significance for my students in philosophy. Both
are done at year 12 but I am sure they could be adapted to younger years.
 The grave stone exercise – what do you want your hyphen to stand for
and why?
 Letter to unborn child on how to live a good life
Perhaps another way of affirming their personal presence and potential is to
have reminders up in the classroom. What about Aslan’s command to the
creatures of the newly created Narnia: ‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, Awake. Love.
Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.” (ch 9)
It’s always struck me that Aslan does not say ‘believe this creed’ but rather
‘become a certain kind of creature’. In another of his other books, C S Lewis
has one of his character’s ask: ‘How can the gods meet us face to face until
we have faces?’ (Till we have Faces, p.223)
Why not have a discussion about the difference between having a Facebook
page and having a face, an identity ready to meet the gods? Ready to come
face to face with the ultimate?
Ultimate questions are hard to answer because they ultimately call us to
account, they demand something from us. Rather like Wittgenstein’s gaze, or
Aslan as described by Mrs Beaver, they are ‘good but not safe’.
In conclusion then
Understanding the nature of ultimate questions involves recognising the limits
of science, reason and technology. It involves recognising that they demand a
profoundly subjective response to the call of the eternal within us, that no
answer is ever the once and for all answer or known once and for all. It is to
recognise that ‘the real mystery of life is not a problem to solved, but a reality
to be experienced’. (J.J.Van der Leeuw)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Appendix – sections that could not be covered due to time constraints
Ultimate Questions – How far can Reason take us? – Kant and Hegel
In examining the place of Reason I had to decide, due to the constraints of
time, whether to look at Plato or Kant. Plato was, of course, Western
philosophy’s most famous exponent of Rationalism as a source of knowledge
of the ultimate or absolute and in many respects it would make sense to focus
on him. However, Plato’s account, brilliant in its scope, depth and detail, has,
nevertheless been found out by subsequent developments in philosophy
where distinctions Plato never made have been introduced to sort out some of
the conceptual and explanatory confusion Plato fell into to. I am thinking for
example of the subsequent separation of epistemology from semantics, and
metaphysics and logic (specifically, the distinction between necessary truth
and necessary existence). More significantly for our purposes though, I
personally think that Plato did not offer a vision attainable by Reason alone
but, a mystical view which requires a more expanded and perhaps more
spiritual view of the nature of consciousness. For these reasons I have decided
to focus on Kant as a way of revealing the limitations of Reason when it comes
to answering ultimate questions.
Time constraints will mean that I cannot do justice to the nature and scope of
Kant’s project but you will remember Kant’s was trying to address the sceptical
challenges presented by Hume whilst avoiding what he saw as the unjustified
dogmatism of the Rationalists’ project. Armed with his belief that we can only
give content to our conceptual categories via experience, Kant drew that
famous distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal realms, arguing
that empirical reason could not play the role of establishing rational truths
because it goes beyond any possible experience and is applied to the sphere
of that which transcends it.
I cannot here defend Kant against Rationalists who may present counterarguments, but I think his concept of the antinomies is instructive when
thinking about the relationship between reason and ultimate questions.
Antinomies are contradictions reason encounters when it attempts to think
about ultimate grounds or secure purely rational truths. Kant identifies four
antinomies that are generated by reason’s attempt to achieve complete
knowledge of the realm beyond the empirical. Each antinomy has a thesis and
an antithesis, both of which can be validly proven, and since each makes a
claim that is beyond the grasp of spatiotemporal sensation, neither can be
confirmed or denied by experience. The First Antinomy argues both that the
world has a beginning in time and space, and no beginning in time and space.
The Second Antinomy’s arguments are that every composite substance is
made of simple parts and that nothing is composed of simple parts. The Third
Antinomy’s thesis is that agents like ourselves have freedom and its antithesis
17
is that they do not. The Fourth Antinomy contains arguments both for and
against the existence of a necessary being in the world5.
‘Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is
burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself,
it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not
able to answer”. (Preface to First Edition, Critique of Pure Reason)
Our capacity to Reason is what gives us the ability to ask ultimate questions
but alas, it is unable to provide answers to them.
Of course Kant’s account of Reason is far more sophisticated than the tool
most of us use on a daily basis but the truth of Kant’s position can be seen
more directly. For example:
We teach a unit in year 10 on the philosophical arguments for and against the
existence of God. It is instructive and challenging for the boys as they work
through the ontological, cosmological, teleological arguments, Pascal’s wager
and Feuerbach’s projectionist theory. What always comes out of this unit is
their acute awareness that these arguments, by themselves, won’t prove
anything. They don’t settle the issue. If Reason alone is inadequate to the task
of answering an ultimate question one might be tempted to reject as
unimportant the study of philosophical approaches to these questions. After
all, philosophy is the discipline that employs the tool of Reason par excellence.
Aren’t all attempts doomed to fail?
Wittgenstein’s ladder – Tractatus 6.54
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Philosophical approaches are the rungs on a ladder which you ultimately
discard…but which are essential steps. The VCE Philosophy course has a unit
called ‘The Good Life’ which examines the answers given to the question ‘what
is the good life?’ by Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Simone Weil.
[ talk about the benefits of this…but how ultimately reason won’t decide for
you – it’s the biggest challenge for my boys taking the course that ultimately
they have to come to a conclusion on the question of God’s existence, on the
nature of the good life and on whether life has meaning from somewhere other
than reason.
Kant’s arguments to show that neither reason nor the empirical world,
considered by itself, settle the question of the ultimate ground or nature of the
For Kant’s account of the Antinomies of Pure Reason see ‘The transcendental dialectic’, Book II, Chapter II –
The Antinomy of Pure Reason in Kant’s masterpiece Critique of Pure Reason
5
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world or persons. Kant concludes by saying to believe that experience makes
sense as a totality we must have Faith.
Belief and the brain's 'God spot'
Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that control religious faith. And the
research proves, they contend, that belief in a higher power is an evolutionary asset that helps
human survival. Steve Connor reports
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
GETTY
The search for the God spot has in the past led scientists to many different regions of the
brain.
A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious
experiences, according to a study that analyses why religion is a universal human feature that
has encompassed all cultures throughout history.
Scientists searching for the neural "God spot", which is supposed to control religious belief,
believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological
foundations of religious belief.
The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive
to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief
in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.
"Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal
equivalent, and found in all cultures," said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington. "Our results are
unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by wellknown brain networks, and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground
religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions."
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Scientists are divided on whether religious belief has a biological basis. Some evolutionary
theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on
individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have
overwhelmed those with no religious convictions. Others have suggested that religious belief
is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the
outside world. Religion and the belief in God, they argue, are just a manifestation of this
intrinsic, biological phenomenon that makes the human brain so intelligent and adaptable.
The latest study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
involved analysing the brains of volunteers, who had been asked to think about religious and
moral problems and questions. For the analysis, the researchers used a functional magneticresonance imaging machine, which can identify the most energetically-active regions of the
brain.
They found that people of different religious persuasions and beliefs, as well as atheists, all
tended to use the same electrical circuits in the brain to solve a perceived moral conundrum –
and the same circuits were used when religiously-inclined people dealt with issues related to
God.
The study found that several areas of the brain are involved in religious belief, one within the
frontal lobes of the cortex – which are unique to humans – and another in the more
evolutionary-ancient regions deeper inside the brain, which humans share with apes and other
primates, Professor Grafman said.
"There is nothing unique about religious belief in these brain structures. Religion doesn't have
a 'God spot' as such, instead it's embedded in a whole range of other belief systems in the
brain that we use everyday," Professor Grafman said.
The search for the God spot has in the past led scientists to many different regions of the
brain. An early contender was the brain's temporal lobe, a large section of the brain that sits
over each ear, because temporal-lobe epileptics suffering seizures in these regions frequently
report having intense religious experiences. One of the principal exponents of this idea was
Vilayanur Ramachandran, from the University of California, San Diego, who asked several of
his patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy to listen to a mixture of religious, sexual and neutral
words while measuring their levels of arousal and emotional reactions. Religious words
elicited an unusually high response in these patients.
This work was followed by a study where scientists tried to stimulate the temporal lobes with
a rotating magnetic field produced by a "God helmet". Michael Persinger, from Laurentian
University in Ontario, found that he could artificially create the experience of religious
feelings – the helmet's wearer reports being in the presence of a spirit or having a profound
feeling of cosmic bliss.
Dr Persinger said that about eight in every 10 volunteers report quasi-religious feelings when
wearing his helmet. However, when Professor Richard Dawkins, an evolutionist and
renowned atheist, wore it during the making of a BBC documentary, he famously failed to
find God, saying that the helmet only affected his breathing and his limbs.
20
Other studies of people taking part in Buddhist meditation suggested the parietal lobes at the
upper back region of the brain were involved in controlling religious belief, in particular the
mystical elements that gave people a feeling of being on a higher plane during prayer.
Andrew Newberg, from the University of Pennsylvania, injected radioactive isotope into
Buddhists at the point at which they achieved meditative nirvana. Using a special camera, he
captured the distribution of the tracer in the brain, which led the researchers to identify the
parietal lobes as playing a key role during this transcendental state.
Professor Grafman was more interested in how people coped with everyday moral and
religious questions. He said that the latest study, published today, suggests the brain is
inherently sensitive to believing in almost anything if there are grounds for doing so, but
when there is a mystery about something, the same neural machinery is co-opted in the
formulation of religious belief.
"When we have incomplete knowledge of the world around us, it offers us the opportunities to
believe in God. When we don't have a scientific explanation for something, we tend to rely on
supernatural explanations," said Professor Grafman, who believes in God. "Maybe obeying
supernatural forces that we had no knowledge of made it easier for religious forms of belief to
emerge."
Philosophical analysis of ‘The Independent’ article on the God-spot
People engaged in the sort of research discussed here want to show that belief in
God and the experience of the numinous can simply be explained by, or more
accurately, can be reduced to nothing more than brain states. The scientific
assumption is that there is no God, but that the ubiquitous belief in God and the
ubiquitous experience of God can be explained in terms of evolution and brain
states. There are several muddles here. First, is the conflation of states of belief
with states during which the brain has religious experiences. The conflation can be
shown thus: X can believe in the existence of God, that is, X can entertain
propositions about God, without necessarily having any religious experiences at all.
On the other hand, X can have an experience of the numinous without entertaining
any propositions about God. (There are people who have religious experiences but
who are avowed atheists). Second, both brain states involving belief and brain states
involving religious experiences necessarily ARE brain states. The fact that the brain
is involved says nothing about the veracity and verisimilitude of the beliefs and/or
experiences. When I view a picture of an apple pie and when I view an apple pie,
the same visual pathways of my brain are fired up. This is a paradigmatic case of the
chicken and the egg. I can stimulate that part of the brain involved in the experience
of having sex without actually having sex - this does not mean that that part of the
brain will not be stimulated when I actually have sex. In other words, what brain
research tells us about the actual existence of God is zip. The article points to the ongoing conflation of epistemic matters with ontological matters. No doubt, when I
entertain propositions about dragons, giants and princess faeries, some part of my
brain lights up. Should I ever actually encounter a dragon, giant or princess faery,
some part of my brain will light up.
Problems:
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1. Believing that X exists is not the same thing as experiencing X's ontic presence.
2. Brains can deal with both actualities and with analogies.
3. The brain can produce an experience of X by experiencing X or by being
stimulated to experience X. The latter does not disprove the existence of Xs.6
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Shaping the Spirit: policy and practice for promoting spiritual development in schools February 2009 ©
Appendix 2
Some examples of ‘Ultimate Questions’
The following offers some examples of the sort of questions that have been called
ultimate or
fundamental questions. It is important to realise that sometimes young children may be
asking an ultimate question about for example the fact of pain or evil, if they ask a
question like, ‘Why are there stinging nettles?’
1 Authority
Who can I trust?
Who should I listen to?
Who should I obey?
What can I believe?
Who can I believe?
Whose rules should I follow?
Why shouldn’t I steal?
Where can I find the truth?
Am I answerable to anyone?
2 Morality
How do I decide what is right?
Where do my ideas about right and wrong come from?
Where do our ideas about right and wrong come from?
Why is honesty better than dishonesty?
Why shouldn’t I do bad things? E.g. Why shouldn’t I steal? Why shouldn’t I cheat? Why
shouldn’t
I lie?
3 Values
What really matters to me?
Do people matter more than things?
Why is courage better than cowardice?
Why is justice so important?
Are people more important than animals?
4 Origins
How did the universe begin?
How can something come from nothing?
Why is there anything rather than nothing?
Is there a Creator or is everything really just a cosmic accident?
6
This analysis was kindly provided by my good friend and philosopher Dr Peter Bennett, Head of Philosophy
and Religious Studies at Haileybury College, Melbourne. I confess to outsourcing this section!
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If there is a God, who made God?
Are we alone in the universe?
5 Identity
Do I know the ‘real’ me?
Do others see me the way I see myself?
Do I see myself in the way that others see me?
How can I get to know the real me?
Am I being true to the real me / myself?
What does it mean to be me?
What does it mean to belong?
What does it mean to be human?
6 Destiny
Where am I going?
Can I determine my own future?
Can I change?
Can I ‘buck the trend?
What can I hope for?
Is death really the end?
Why must we die?
Is there life after death?
Is there a heaven or hell?
Is there an ultimate reward or punishment?
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Shaping the Spirit: policy and practice for promoting spiritual development in schools February 2009 ©
Will evil prevail?
Is reincarnation true?
What future is there for the human race?
How will the world end?
7 Meaning
Why do we keep asking ‘Why’?
Does anything make sense?
Is there a God?
Why is life unfair?
Why is there so much suffering?
Why do we not stop the suffering?
What brings lasting happiness?
Is there a reason why things happen to us?
Is there such a thing as an ‘act of God’?
8 Purpose
What is it all for?
Why go on?
Why do some people appear to win and others appear to lose?
Does life have any purpose?
What does it mean to be successful?
What should I aim for?
Can I be different?
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This list of questions has been slightly adapted from one produced as part
of RE Today’s Looking Inwards Looking Outwards project. We are grateful
to RE Today for their permission to use the original list.
One of the 32 page booklets in the Engaging with Secondary RE series is
entitled ‘Spiritual RE’ (Edited by Lat Blaylock, RE Today, ISBN 978-1905893-10-2 – www.retoday.org .uk ). It explores issues to do with
spiritual development from an RE perspective.
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