God as Explanation God as Experience

1. God as Explanation God as Experience

2. Demea In Hume’s dialogue concerning natural religion, the Christian Demea is strung along by Philo, the sceptic. Demeaagrees with Philo that the argument from design does not work …God is surely beyond all human ideas and experience. Demea would therefore agree with Richard Dawkins. But she does so because she believes that such a being is not what we Christians would mean by God.

3. The ‘via negativa’ Creator – beyond creation: an implication of Genesis 1 All the things we see are not God, and therefore we can only say what God is not. (not-finite, not-mortal). ‘Via negativa’ spirituality: we reach God by gradually shedding all our attachments to what we can imagine or conceive, in order to reach with our desire into the one who is beyond all things.

4. Philosophical Pitfalls Poor Demea: If we have no reason from the evidence of our senses to believe in God and if God is beyond thought, then we can have no reason at all to believe in God. Immanuel Kant accepted that all ‘arguments for the existence of God’ are flawed – even though he believed in God.

5. Wittgenstein The fact that a reality cannot be put into words, does not necessarily make it unreal. The young Wittgenstein: pure, logical language describes a world interpreted through the senses. Only such language can really be true or false. But… ‘We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.’

6. A. J. Ayer • Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof we cannot speak, of that we must be silent.’ • A.J.Ayer: if a statement can’t be tied down to a possible sense experience, or logic, then it is ‘metaphysical’ (beyond physical) and meaningless. • Talk about God, ethics and beauty was literally nonsense.

7. The Anthropic Principle But some modern scientific theories raise valid and important questions whose possible answers take us beyond what we can observe. Yet neither question nor answer is meaningless. The ‘anthropic principle’ is the claim that the universe has just the structures, just the laws and just the history that allows for creatures like us to emerge and appreciate those structures, laws and history. The valid question is, why is the universe just so?

8. A new meta-physics • Here are three answers • 1) There are an infinity of universes Obviously the only one we can observe is the one that sustains our existence. • 2) The laws of the universe are self-generating, they are the only laws that there could be. (Hawking) • 3) The universe is so structured because behind the order of the universe is an intention that intelligent life should develop. (Theistic)

9. Sufficient Explanations • One of the most interesting questions we can ask of Dawkins’ explanation of biological and human life is, ‘is it sufficient or complete?’ • Aristotle took it for granted that if we were explaining things in nature we would include ‘purposiveness’ – what things were for – alongside explanations about how things got there. • In fact we cannot explain human artefacts sufficiently, unless we include human intentions alongside physical descriptions.

10. We could explain a robot by giving an account of how the electric cable was laid, how the switching mechanism worked and the chemical composition of the components. • This would be accurate, but it would also be incomplete. We don’t really ‘understand’ a robot unless we understand its role in traffic control. • We can similarly suppose that Dawkins’ account of the origin of intelligent life is a completely accurate account of the material origins (it may be). But does that mean that it is complete?

11. The intelligible universe: a return to logos • At least because of beings like us, purposiveness and reasons are built into universe. There are things in the universe that do happen for a reason and we can appreciate those reasons. The non-theistic philosopherThomas Nagel: ‘There is a real problem about how such a thing as reason is possible. How is it possible that creatures like ourselves, supplied with the contingent capacities of a biological species , whose very existence appears to be radically accidental, should have access to universally valid methods of objective thought?

12. If the natural order can include universal mathematically beautiful laws of fundamental physics of the kind we have discovered, why can’t it include equally fundamental laws… that we don’t know anything about, that are consistent with the laws of physics and that render intelligible the development of conscious organisms some of which have the capacity to discover by prolonged collective effort some of the fundamental truths about that very natural order (Quoted in Parfit, On What Matters vol II, p 524)

13. The God of Dawkins and the Christian God • At one level Dawkins is right, we don’t need to suppose a divine being to explain the mechanics of evolution. • Yet this does not yet show whether everything that needs to be said about evolution has been said. • The God of the Christian tradition is not a ‘super-complex’ part of the universe. This God is both beyond creation and sustains it in existence.

14. Furthermore… • We can legitimately ask questions about why the universe is intelligible and why we are there to understand it. There are several reasonable answers to these questions, some of which include something like the Christian God. • Therefore it is neither unreasonable nor unscientific to believe in the Christian God.

15. Why do we believe? • Argument – explanation – ‘proof’? • Education and Upbringing? • Experience?

16. Is my experience ever reason for someone else to believe? • You were dreaming. • You were only imagining. • You were having an epileptic fit. • You were having a psychotic episode. • You were misinterpreting your experience. • We have a tendency inherited through evolution to assume an agency in natural events where there is none. • A miracle is the violation of a law of nature, it will always be more reasonable to suppose either that the evidence is faulty or that we have not fully understood the laws of nature.

17. The Limits of Argument When all the questions that can be asked and answered have been asked and answered, the problems of life remain untouched. Yet our lives are filled with signs, ‘meaning-events’, which point us towards the God of the covenant. There is a gap between what we can describe and ‘prove’ and the things that matter most to us in life.

18. McGilchrist: modes of perception, modes of reason. • The brain and the world: two modes of perception, two modes of reason. Here is where we construct our world.

19. Right: rich holistic immediate intuitive open to possibility

20. Left: analytic, focused, verbal, planned Tree Tree Tree Tree Direction of pub Bridge over stream Road over bridge Road over bridge Gate: access to road Stream, don’t want to get feet wet Route to gate

21. Between two views • The right-brains intuitive take on reality needs the left brain’s analytic capability and is aware of the left brain. • The left-brain is unaware of the right brain and ‘believes’ that it is the only controller of reality. It readily talks the right-brain viewpoint out of the picture. • But the left-brain’s focus and trust in its own analysis can lead it to miss a reality or dismiss it on principle.

22. The Porcupine syllogism • Porcupines are monkeys • Monkeys climb trees • Therefore porcupines climb trees

23. Reason narrow and Reason wide Ayer: if we can’t say it truly or falsely, it is non-sense. Wittgenstein: when we have asked and answered all the questions that science can ask and answer, the problems of life remain untouched. What ‘it is reasonable to believe’ may sometimes simply miss realities that matter most deeply, where that reality does not fit its expectations.

24. Time and Freedom • Existential thought: when all the accidents of circumstance are taken away, what is it to be a human ‘I’ contemplating the world and action in it? • Christian meditation on the four last things becomes ‘being unto death’. • Exploring the human self – the bare ‘will’ stands before the space of possibilities. • Being human is standing before a future that we choose in freedom

25. Anti-religious existentialism • Suspicion of religion. • Compels human beings • to do what is evil • Tantumreligiopotuitsuaderemalorum • (Lucretius on the legend of the human sacrifice of Iphigeneia) • Usurping human freedom.

26. Rahner and the Transcendental Experience • We have an ancient Christian tradition, that we find God by stripping away the ‘things of this world’ that are not the same as God. • We lay aside thought in order that our will, our deepest desire may find the one who loves us. • This project is shared with an existential philosophy that takes us into a space where we stand, lonely before the space of unbounded possibility.

27. Space of possibilities

28. Karl Rahner • Beings open to a horizon of boundless possibility, but that horizon is precisely the boundary of our awareness of the creator – the one who holds us in being and invites us to a relationship with him. • Most of the time we do not attend to this horizon. Nevertheless everything we do as human beings implies that horizon. • Even if we never put it into words, we stand on the edge of the ‘transcendental experience’ • In certain privileged moments, simply by being conscious human beings, we are opened up to an explicit awareness of the horizon and the ‘transcendental experience’ becomes a particular religious experience.

29. The heavens are telling the glory of God • The things that matter deeply to us are beyond words, but that does not mean they are unreasonable, provided that we do not limit reason to what can be captured in words. • Simply by being human in a world sustained by God, we exist in a constant relationship with God. • God’s reality is on the horizon of our consciousness and in certain privileged moments any part of creation before us can open us to that horizon and we recognise the reality and the love.