Our certainty about God is not derived from scientific experiments, but from certain conclusions based on our experience

While I am pressing the issue of faith and reason, I cannot help but share what I read before turning off the light and going to sleep last night: Msgr. Albacete's Inside America column, which he writes for Traces, the monthly publication of Communion and Liberation. Again, this is in the June issue. The column is entitled Dispelling the Fog and is about his participation in a two hour panel discussion at the World Science Festival that took place at NYU. The discussion was called Science and Faith. The other panelists were "a winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, a self-described Jewish atheist who is the American director of research in a study of the 'biological origins of religious convictions' paid for by the European Union, and a cognitive psychologist from Hawaii who is examining how the brain functions during religious experiences".

The physcist described himself as a Christian and the cognitive psychologist is a convert to the Catholic faith. At the end of the discussion, after Albacete's intervention, the self-described atheist proclaimed- "“Either I am not an atheist, or you are not a believer, because I agree with you more than with anyone else on the panel.” Albacete ends his piece by writing about how he thought Giussani, whom he knew well, would react to the atheist's comment: "All I thought about in the limousine (!) ride back home was Fr. Giussani’s face, smiling!".

To see how things ended that way, you have to read Albacete's column. To do that, you must go to Traces and follow the archive link to June 2008, on which page you find the link to Albacete's column.

I find much resonance between certainty about God arising from conclusions based on our experience and St. Anselm of Canterbury's observation that "we do not seek to understand in order to believe, but we believe in order to understand". Anselm's insight no doubt arises from the experience we all have of needing to make sense of the world into which, employing Heidegger's term, we are thrown. It is a fresh posing of the question of Being, of Sein, which Heidegger sought to recover by destroying classical metaphysics- Why is there something rather than nothing? Before this question science is rendered mute.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. It is a loss for the world. A true man of conscience because he was a man of faith. He lives beyond faith now. He wrote The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, a book that blew the lid off the Soviet regime under Stalin, exposing the lies that communists and their sympathizers in the West had been believing and promulgating about the workers' paradise and all that nonsense. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is perhaps best remembered in this country for his 1978 Harvard commencenment address, in which he turns his prophetic charism, just as his fellow Slav, JPII, who was also from a communist country, would do for over twenty-five years upon being selected to walk in the shoes of the fisherman later that year, on the decadent West. Here is a section of that speech- Humanism and Its Consequences:

"How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

"This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

"The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

"However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century."

These are truly prophetic words. I encourage you to read A World Split Apart. A diaconal bow to Dr. Francis J. Beckwith for directing me, from the blog WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD, to the Columbia University page of Solzhenitsyn's speech and to Sharon for linking me to Dr. Beckwith's post.

As the Orthodox say, May his memory be eternal.

UPDATE 18:24: In the NY Times a young Russian man, named Anton Zimin, age 26, demonstrates that, while there are challenges, Solzhenitsyn's charism lives on in the Russian people. He observes: "'The problem is that now, it’s all about consumption — this spirit that has engulfed everybody,' Mr. Zimin said. 'People prefer to consume everything, the simplest things, and the faster, the better. Books are something that force you to think, reading books requires some effort. But they prefer entertainment.'"

The mystery of ourselves, or, who is the storyteller?

Virginia Woolf, 1902

This morning I had get up and spend some time at work. On my drive home I was indulging in one my favorite pastimes, listening to NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, with Scott Simon. Apart from hearing a segment on Brigham Young's nineteenth wife, I heard a story that made me wonder, not just in the sense of being curious, that too, but in the same way as the encounter that becomes an event causes me wonder, which is to face the Mystery. The story, called Virginia Woolf, At the Intersection of Science and Art, is about a chapter in a book by Jonah Lehrer. The book is Proust Was a Neuroscientist, the chapter is "Virginia Woolf: The Emergent Self" (an excerpt of which you can read here).

Questions surrounding personal identity, like, are we the same person through time? If so, how is that accomplished, especially given that every seven years or so our bodies are comprised of completely different matter, are the stuff of contemporary philosophical metaphysics that spill over into epistemology, which investigates the possibility and ways in which human beings know, seeking to articulate, to give an accurate account of human knowledge, what counts as knowledge, etc. In analytical schools of philosophy the working definition of knowledge is a justified, true, belief.

The thing that becomes immediately evident from such an account is that one can believe anything and truth, even about facts, due to the advancement that results from human inquiry and the different angles from which things can be viewed, is too daunting. So, the thinking goes, we focus on justifying beliefs on the basis of facts and our experience of reality. In other words, to give a coherent account of our experience, which accounts lead to something like inter-subjectivity instead of ham-fisted objective truth in the realist sense. Now, do not get hung up on this account, it is far too simplistic to mint any philosophical coinage, but it can serve as an acceptable point-of-departure. It is also important to note that by rejecting what I call a ham-fisted realist account of truth, I am not showing my hand as an idealist á la Bishop Berkeley. It means I don't find correspondence theory descriptive enough and opt for a phenomenological approach to questions of truth and the world, à la Maurice Merleau-Ponty, et. al. I mentioned epistemology recently in regard to leading Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga's epistemological method of warrant in my post The on-going need for natural theology.

Back to the piece by Robert Krulwich, which is well-done and in which he masterfully intersperses commentary, dramatic readings from Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway, with remarks by Lehrer himself. The central question, which Krulwich asks, is "How can my mind be such chaos and still produce a coherent me?" Lehrer answers, " That's the mystery," only to go on to say, "There is no single cell in the brain that is you," that, on investigation into the brain, "There is no there, there". What is mistaken about this fascinating story is that is assumes that personhood, our identity can be located in the brain. This kind of reductionism, despite the best efforts by scientists and philosophers over several decades now, yield no satisfying results. It is kind of like trying to scientifically determine why the Big Bang occurred. While this is not a direct analogy, the questions are of the same species. The important point is that science is not equipped to answer what are properly metaphysical questions. Of course, there is no problem trying because the more we learn the better off we are and the better we are able to understand ourselves. It also helps pose better scientific and better philosophical questions, the latter assist the former in the advancement of medicine.

My hearing this story follows closely on the heels of yesterday's reading of John Waters' piece, in which he correctly states: "We know in the deepest part of our hearts that we cannot be redeemed by science or ideology". This is only true because the mystery of the human person cannot be reduced to a scientific discovery or an ideological position. Nonetheless, the late modern world in which we live relentlessly tries, often in tandem (i.e., science and ideology working together) to accomplish such a reduction. This happens to the point that many so-called scientific and political theorists act as though it were true. Hence, the default position of Western society, as the Holy Father has observed, especially in his public dialogues, while still a cardinal, with the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, has changed from living and thinking as if God exists to the opposite position. The supposed objectivity of living as if God does not exist is not objective, or neutral because, as Pascal sought to show, there can be no neutrality on this question.

It is the question of truth that Pope Benedict took up in his lecture, which he was to give at Rome's La Sapienza University, in which he observes:

"The danger for the western world – to speak only of this – is that today, precisely because of the greatness of his knowledge and power, man will fail to face up to the question of the truth."

René Descartes
To live as if God does not exist is the triumph of Descartes' method of doubt, which, it is alleged, laid the groundwork for modern science. This cannot be true due to the fact that people engaged in science do so with the implicit faith that their experiments will yield information, that is, facts about reality. According to the classic scientific method, which is as much an over simplification as my analytical account of knowledge, a hypothesis is generated and then tested. The results of the test (i.e., the experiment) either confirm the hypothesis, disprove the hypothesis, or are inconclusive. If successful, the results can be critiqued through peer review and replicated by others who follow the method of the experiment exactly. What also gives lie to the alleged objectivity of such a view is that there are no such things as neutral facts. True, a fact is a fact. For example, under the circumstances that normally adhere in the earth's atmosphere, in your living room, say, when you release an object, like a book containing Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, it will fall to the floor one hundred out of one hundred times, unless your living room is somehow transformed into a zero-gravity chamber. This is a fact. What to make of that fact, especially how it flows from and leads to other facts? We call the weaving together of facts in order form a coherent picture of reality, which picture we use to draw conclusions, interpretation. Interpretation is never neutral. It cannot be neutral because most often assumptions must be made, that is, premises, the truthfulness of which have not been proven, must be introduced. Also, in most instances, certain gaps in knowledge, the facts about which are not known, have to be filled. This is certainly true in both elementary symbolic logic and in modal logic.

One certain way that we realize our identity is expressed well by Lehrer, which view he has arrived by studying the writings of authors who focus, like Proust and Woolf, almost solipsistically on the interior consciousness of their characters, is "that the mind works a bit like a novelist . . . we're constantly telling a narrative about ourself to ourself". Since there is no precise location in the brain that can be identified as the novelist, the question, the one that Krulwich asks, becomes "who's the storyteller?". To which Lehrer, again replies, "That's the mystery".

This is where this touches, not just on spirituality, but on theology, the object of which (who turns out to be a subject) is ultimate reality. So, is our narrative true, does it give a coherent account of the facts? What count as facts? How does my account of my experience of reality jive, or not, with that of others? Does my encounter, that is, an event that leads me to wonder count as a fact about my life? Well, it has decisively changed my life. It has helped me be more honest about my past as well as my present engagement with reality. Finally, it is a part of my narrative, which, by means of this encounter, becomes part of God's story, the story of the world, of its redemption and sanctification.

A question in search of an answer

Today I was at lunch by myself, which represents for me the only moment alone in a people-intensive day. While at table I was reading the June issue of Traces ( Vol. 10- No. 6- 2008). After finishing "Darkness and the Lighter" about Fr. Carrón’s assembly with teachers, to which I turned at the beginning of a day when I had to rush out the door without much time for prayer and reflection, I turned to John Waters’ response to the last words of Nuala O’Faolain, a well-known Irish journalist, who died on 9 May, entitled "The Utopia of a Hope Uprooted from Tradition" (pgs. 32-3). O'Faoalin's last public words were given in an interview with Marian Finucane, which aired on 12 April. The part of the interview to which Waters, who is also Irish and who describes himself as a former colleague and more recently an "ideological" opponent of O’Faolain’s, took up was this exchange from her interview:

M(arian) F(inucane): Do you believe in an afterlife.
N(uala) O'F(aolain): No, I do not.
MF: Or a God.
NO'F: Well that's a different matter somehow. I actually don't know how we all get away with our unthikingness. Often last thing at night I walk the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by the moon and behind the moon the Milky Way and, you know, you are nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe unimaginably vast up there and unimaginably mysterious. And I have done that for years, looked up at it and given it a wink and thought 'I don't know what's going on' and I still don't know what's going on, but I can't be consoled by mention of God. I can't.

I will not do Waters, who created a controversy in an interview by saying that blogs and bloggers are “stupid” (who can blame him, have you read some of their stuff?), the injustice of trying to paraphrase his beautiful reflection, which moved me deeply as I sat at lunch. I am not a publicly demonstrative person, but I was really quite overcome in that moment by these words: "As human beings, we have within us a question, a need, a longing, a plea–about our lives, our origins, and our destinies.

"This question demands an answer. Indeed, we are this question and, like all questions, we have an answer. We do not know what, ultimately, we desire, but we know that, like Nuala, we are filled by a desire that life go on, that our loved ones not be lost or forgotten, that love, beauty, knowledge go on and never die. We know in the deepest part of our hearts that we cannot be redeemed by science or ideology."

What became clearer to me through Waters' words is that by understanding myself as “this question,” to which Christ is the answer, I see precisely how I am a direct relationship with the Mystery.

You can read "The Utopia of a Hope Uprooted from Tradition" in its entirety by going to the Traces webpage and going to the archives link, taking it from there.

We must not be defeated by the world

If we do not let the Lord work in our lives, even in the bad circumstances, "then we are defeated; we are overcome by pain and evil. It is just as well that the Mystery did not think it useless to have mercy on our nothingness and, through a fourteen-year-old girl, entered into history," said Fr. Carron recently to a gathering of teachers. Mary's "Yes", Carron continued, "was the most important fact in history, but we do not really believe it, so when we are faced with a difficulty or a failure, we are defeated. We talk a lot about family, society - all important factors - but do we have an 'I' able to communicate? This requires us not to be defeated" (Traces, Vol 10- No. 6- 2008 pg 26)?

Remember today, on this day of abstinence, this penitential day, that the "victory that conquers the world is our faith" in Jesus Christ, who, indeed, by His perfect deed, conquered the world, even death (1 Jn 5,4-5). Let us live today in the awareness of this fact, in the awareness that the victory over all that afflicts us has already been secured.

Self-control

The second condition of freedom, then, is self-control. Self-control is just a more palatable way of saying mortification. Mortification is a bad word because we associate it with extreme practices, like self-flagellation, etc. This is not what Giussani is suggesting, however. Mortification is penitence and penitence is metanoia. Metanoia is the word our Lord uses when he proclaims, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 3,2). The first word of that sentence in the original Greek is metanoia, which means to turn around, or change direction. This is Jesus' invitation to us to turn and follow him.

In the context of freedom it means going with what truly corresponds to your heart (i.e., that which leads you closer to your destiny) instead of going where you might temporarily want to go, being attracted by what turns your head and/or changes your path away from destiny. Denying what you want in such instances and turning back toward destiny is mortification, dying to self. Here Giussani introduces the example of the doctor who becomes a friar and goes to Tanzania to serve and then meets a blond to whom he is attracted, after taking final final vows, designated T and b respectively. T is the choice made in freedom, the response to what corresponds to the friar's heart, that vocation, that way of life, that authentic mode of existence that will lead him to destiny. So, even when T does not seem as attractive as b, it is the former that leads to destiny (Is It Possible to Live This Way? pgs. 68-9).


Hence, "you govern yourself according to the destiny you are aware of. This always implies a tearing away, a wound. In Christian terms it's called penitence or mortification. Mortification means that it seems like a death, like a renunciation, but it isn't! Because if someone chooses this T, he then sees this b in another light, he does not lose it" (pg. 73). He can still love b, but with a self-denying love that is "true and eternal" (ibid). Mortification is a death. It is a dying to self, which is necessary to realize destiny. One of the most beautiful things about the movie Nacho Libre is that, in the end, Ignacio, the friar, and Sr. Encarnacíon, despite their attraction to each other, do not break their vows and run away together, but stay at the orphanage and continue to be true to their religious vows and their service to the orphans, which is their path to destiny.

We do not reach our destiny by seeking to satisfy every desire of which we become aware, but of realizing what we truly desire, that it is infinite, bigger than the world. Therefore, the things of the world, while good or, at least neutral, have to be approached from the perspective of awareness of your destiny and, even when they exert great pull, tugging you against destiny, self-control, which amounts to mortification, is what is needed. Hence, self-denial is a necessary component of the spiritual life. When we fast we exert self-control, when we abstain, the same. When we decide to deny ourselves something we like, something that it is not wrong for us to have, for a time, it is self-control. Then, when we are faced with a desire that threatens us, we are better equipped to deal with it.

It is not possible to live this way in isolation, that is, by yourself. "The companionship's most external and evident value - most clearly evident - is that it calls you back to the religious sense, to destiny" (ibid). Indeed, as the Prince of Morrocco found out in his encounter with the golden casket in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, when, instead of seeing the face of the lovely Portia, he sees death, with this message written in his hollow eye:

"All that glisters is not gold;/Often have you heard that told./Many a man his life hath sold/But my outside to behold./Gilded tombs do worms enfold" (Act II, scene vii).

We have "an enormous wound", original sin. "So the community tells you not to be scandalized by temptation and not to be scandalized even at the mistakes you make, but to indomitably take up the path again" (pg. 75).

Freedom is not perfectly expressed in choosing, by having freedom of choice. We have freedom of choice because freedom is imperfect. This imperfection is easily demonstrated: "Error, the possibility of error, pertains to freedom that still isn't free, that still isn't freedom, that hasn't reached total satisfaction" (pg. 70). Jumping off the thought train, this is why learning to judge in light of the fact of the encounter, which is an event, is so crucial. Again, making correct judgments consistently can only be done when living in the awareness of destiny and not putting yourself, that is, your fleeting desires, first. This is why the fifth and final passage of faith is your responsibility to act. Freedom is necessary in order to act.

It is not because, in some Orwellian twist, freedom is a dictator that it is not perfectly realized by having choices. It is because perfect freedom seeks what corresponds to the heart, it seeks what satisfies all our desires. When you find satisfaction, that is, perfect happiness, choice is no longer necessary. To wit: what else would you choose?

The culmination of Christian morality; love of the Lord

I have been insisting for awhile now that the Church has nothing to say to people about morality until "our listeners have glimpsed God's delight in their existence" (Radcliffe, What Is the Point of Being a Christian, pg. 59). I was both surprised and gratified to stumble on a great passage by Don Giussani in Is It Possible to Live This Way?: An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, Vol. 1. In the second chapter of this book Giussani comments on a passage from the last chapter of St. John's Gospel in which Peter (i.e., Simon), James, John, Andrew, Thomas, and Nathaniel had been fishing all night and caught nothing. At dawn, as they approached the shore, they saw a charcoal fire and a man. The man asked them if they had caught anything to eat. They answered that they had not. The man told them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, which they did. They caught so many fish that they were not able to pull the net back in the boat. It was then that Peter realized it was the Lord. So, Peter, true to his character (which I love), jumped out of the boat and swam to shore (Jn 21,9-17).

Here is where Don Gius' commentary picks up:

The Lord "is near Simon and He says to him, very softly, without the others realizing, He says quietly, 'Simon, do you love me more than these?' This is the culmination of Christian morality: the beginning and the end of Christian morality. He didn't tell him, 'Simon, you betrayed me. Simon, think how many mistakes you made. Simon, how many betrayals! Simon, just think that you can make the same mistake tomorrow and the day after . . .Think about how fragile you are, what a coward you are in front of me.' No! 'Simon, do you love me more than these?' He went to the depths of everything, to the bottom of everything; so this bottom of everything pulls everything along with it" (pg. 77- red-lettering of our Lord's words mine).

After this brief commentary on the Gospel, Giussani quotes the Angelic Doctor to the effect that "every living thing gives proof of its life by that operation which is most proper to it, and to which it is most inclined" (Summa Theologica Secunda Secundae Partis, q. 179, a. 1). What is most proper to the life of human beings, according to Aquinas, is "acting in accord with reason" (ibid). Taking a bit of a leap, we can conclude with Msgr. Giussani that "nothing is more intelligent than following . . . the companionship in which the Lord, who calls us, has placed us" (Is It Possible to Live This Way p. 76). Of course, for us the companionships in which the Lord has placed us are our families, our Schools of Community, and our parishes. I think in terms of a companionship dedicated to following the Lord, which is a companionship that challenges us, that corrects us, that is, having companions on the way to whom we are accountable because of our mutual love for the Lord, which makes possible our love for each other, our genuine concern for each other- these are our families and then our Schools of Community. Ideally, yes, our parishes. This is precisely where as participants in SoC we can act as leaven.

While on this subject, my homily and the entire Mass of which it was a part is now available to watch, courtesy of our fantastic diocesan newspaper, The Intermountain Catholic. Tomorrow, the necessity of mortification (a.k.a. self-control) to realizing destiny, that is, true freedom, which, as it turns out, is not freedom of choice.

(Thanks to Suzanne for the graphic, which I pulled off Venite a vedere)