Iowa on Dawkin

A review of Dawkin's "The God Delusion" by Marilynne Robinson, a former professor at the University of Iowa. Well, she is not former: I am. That is, I am her former student. She is permanent faculty at the IWW. We used to talk about Idaho. Now she talks about Darwin, God and Dawkin:

Richard Dawkins is an Oxford professor and the author of a series of best-selling books that popularize a version of evolutionary theory. According to Dawkins, evolution is driven by “replicators”–genes, and also “memes,” viruses of the mind that spread and persist in human populations. Those genes and memes that replicate most effectively become dominant, with every consequence for the natural world and for civilization and history. The usefulness of this notion, which does have the virtue of simplicity, is a question obscured by the demands Dawkins has placed on it. By his lights this is the universal etiology, a fully sufficient refutation of religion in every form and the basis for a new view of humankind. Under the name of Darwinism it has been thrown into the rhetorical wars that seem, to the combatants, to pit science against religion. As argument it has taken on the character of this environment, getting lost in the miasma of its own supposed implications.

It is never a surprise to find Dawkins full of indignation. In his new book, The God Delusion, he has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry. Truly this book is a sword which turneth every way, to judge by the table of contents at least. There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation. It is the “God delusion,” which has afflicted almost everyone almost anywhere through the whole of recorded time, that has made us behave so badly. And Science (by which he really means his version of Darwinism) is our potential rescuer from this vale of tears. We need only to become more Dawkins-like in our thinking. This is a fairly cheery view of things beside others on offer, at least as regards the ongoing life of the planet, which he seems to assume.

Still, it is a difficult thing to set reason aside, and the habit of critical thought, and the sense of the past, not to mention the morning news. While I was reading this hook, I noticed an article about a speech the British physicist Stephen Hawking delivered in Hong Kong. In it he said that the early colonization of other planets would be necessary to save humankind from extinction, given the likelihood of disaster that would render Earth uninhabitable. He mentioned nuclear war and biological weapons as probable agents of catastrophe. Another scientist, when asked for his view of Hawking’s remarks, noted that Hawking was speaking outside his area of expertise. Much better, said he, to think in the short term about burrowing under Antarctica.

I have never seen the suggestion anywhere that the threat of imminent catastrophe on a “biblical scale”–a phrase favored by journalists– which has hung over the world for more than half a century, might have consequences for the stability of the global public mind. Is it really any wonder so many people turn to mass-market apocalyptics? It is amazing, when the movers and shakers of the so-called postwar have devoted so much effort and rhetoric to policies with names like Mutual Assured Destruction, that anyone could be surprised to find some significant part of the populace reading up on End Times. But here is Richard Dawkins to dispel the clouds of fear and gloom – that is, religion. He is by profession a dedicated promoter of the Public Understanding of Science. In his view, understanding is clearly not to be achieved by looking at history, or at present or potential consequences of science and its practice for that same Public. I note these omissions because Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime.

Since Dawkins’s declared intention in this book is to hearten the many atheists who, he is sure, exist, but who conceal their convictions for fear of disapproval or rejection, no doubt his tendentiousness is meant to be enjoyed by the like-minded, as is so much that is called

“objectivity” in these fulminating times. Yet Dawkins is in earnest in presenting himself as a man in possession of liberating truth – another characteristic of the genre – and his readership is sure to be much wider than the crypto-atheist community. So it seems fair, if not strictly possible, to take him as seriously as he takes himself.

These are, certainly, troubled times. The tectonics of culture are suddenly active, and all the old rifts and stresses and pressures that seemed to have fallen dormant have awakened at once, with a great deal of portentous rumbling and spouting. The God Delusion is another instance of this phenomenon. Like so much of the contemporary clamor, it is out to name and denounce the great Satan, which in this case is religion. This view is commonplace now, in part because the institutions of religion, like the institutions of journalism and government, have done a great deal to trivialize or disgrace themselves lately.

The gravest questions about the institutions of contemporary science seem never to be posed, though we know the terrors of all-out conflict between civilizations would include innovations, notably those dread weapons of mass destruction, being made by scientists for any country with access to their skills. Granting for the purposes of argument that Dawkins is correct in the view that the majority of great scientists are atheists, we may then exclude religion from among the factors that recruit them to this somber work. We are left with nationalism, steady employment, good pay, the chance to do research that is lavishly funded and, by definition, cutting edge – familiar motives of a kind fully capable of disarming moral doubt. In any case, the crankiest imam, the oiliest televangelist, can, at his worst, only urge circumstances a degree or two farther toward the use of those exotic war technologies that are always ready, always waiting. If it is fair to speak globally of religion, it is also fair to speak globally of science.

There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins’s view of science. Consider this sentence from his preface, which occurs in the context of his vision of a religion-free world: “Imagine . . . no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers.’” In a later chapter he condemns Jews for discouraging “marrying out” and complains that such

“wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness” is “a significant force for evil.” It is of course no criticism to say that he values the tradition of Judaism not at all, since this is only consistent with his view of religion in general. He seems unaware, however, that there was in fact significant intermarriage between Jews and gentiles in Europe as well as secularism and conversion among the Jews, and that this appears only to have fired the anti-Semitic imagination. While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in Europe, it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale – Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

There is indeed historical precedent in the Spanish Inquisition for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science. To illustrate the point: Dawkins tells the story of Edgardo Mortara, the Italian Jewish child taken from his family by the police in 1858 and reared by priests because he had been secretly baptized by a maid in his parents’ house. A terrible story indeed. And how might it have been worse? If the child had fallen, as in the next century so many would, into the hands of those who considered his Jewishness biological rather than religious and cultural. To Dawkins’s objection that Nazi science was not authentic science I would reply, first, that neither Nazis nor Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for fully half a century. This is not to single out science as exceptionally inclined to do harm, though its capacity for doing harm is by now unequaled. It is only to note that science, too, is implicated in this bleak human proclivity, and is one major instrument of it.

The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison. What is religion? It is described by Dawkins as a virtually universal feature of human culture. But there is, commingled with it, indisputably and perhaps universally, doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism. Dawkins, for his part, considers religion wholly delusional, and he condemns the best of it for enabling all the worst of it. Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science? Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions having to do with cloning in South Korea? If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

I wish, then, to speak of science in the highest sense of the word, as the astonishingly fruitful human venture into understanding of the world and the universe. The reader may assume a somewhat greater admiration on my part for religion in the highest sense of the word, though I will not go into that here. Science thus defined does not claim to understand gravity, light, or time. This is a very short list of its mystifications, its inquiries, all of which are beautiful to ponder. These three are sufficient to persuade me that conclusions about the ultimate nature of things are, to say the least, premature, and that to suggest otherwise is unscientific. The finer-grained the image of reality physicists achieve, the more alien it appears to every known strategy of comprehension.

The odd thing about Dawkins’s work, considering his job description, is that it does not itself seem the product of a mind informed by the physics of the last century or so. A reader might find it instructive to start with his last chapter, in which he does acknowledge the fact of quantum theory and certain of its implications. This chapter is an interesting lens through which to consider the primary argument of the book, especially his use of physicality and materiality as standards for determining the real and objective existence of anything, along with his use of commonplace experience as the standard of reasonableness and – a favorite word – probability. He does this despite his awareness that the physical and the material are artifacts of the scale at which reality is perceived. For us, he says, “matter is a useful construct.” Quoting Steve Grand, a computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence, he offers these thoughts on the fluidity of matter: “Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.” Earlier, Dawkins attributes the origins of the illusion that we have a soul to the persistence of a childish or primitive tendency toward dualism – “Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a ’soul’ which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body.” Yet the image of deeper reality invoked by him here suggests a basis for the ancient intuition of the persistence of the self despite the transiency of the elements of its physical embodiment.

I do not wish to recruit science to the cause of religion. My point is simply that Dawkins’s critique of religion cannot properly be called scientific. His thinking is reminiscent of logical positivism. That school, however, which meant to carry out a purge of language it considered meaningless, specifically metaphysics and theology, by subjecting statements to the “scientific” test of verifiability, plunged into all sorts of interesting difficulty, as rigorous thought tends to do. Dawkins acknowledges no difficulty. He has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information.

The chapter titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God” reflects his reasoning at its highest bent. He reasons thus: A creator God must be more complex than his creation, but this is impossible because if he existed he would be at the wrong end of evolutionary history. To be present in the beginning he must have been unevolved and therefore simple. Dawkins is very proud of this insight. He considers it unanswerable. He asks, “How do they [theists] cope with the argument that any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide?” And “if he [God] has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know,” and “a first cause of everything.. . must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word

‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers).” At Cambridge, says Dawkins, “I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology.” Dawkins is clearly innocent of this charge against him. Whatever is being foisted here, it is not a scientific epistemology.

Evolution is the creature of time. And, as Dawkins notes, modern cosmologies generally suggest that time and the universe as a whole came into being together. So a creator cannot very well be thought of as having attained complexity through a process of evolution. That is to say, theists need find no anomaly in a divine “complexity” over against the “simplicity” that is presumed to characterize the universe at its origin. (I use these terms not because I find them appropriate to the question but because Dawkins uses them, and my point is to demonstrate the flaws in his reasoning.) In this context, Dawkins cannot concede, even hypothetically, a reality that is not time-bound, that does not conform to Darwinism as he understands it. Yet in an earlier book, Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins remarks that “further developments of the [big bang] theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds.. . .”

That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.

The God Delusion has human history and civilization as its subjects, inevitably, considering the pervasiveness of religion. Dawkins dwells particularly on Christianity, since he is most familiar with it, and because its influence is and has been very great. On the one hand, he professes a lingering fondness for the Church of England and regrets that familiarity with the Bible, a great Literature, is in decline. On the other hand, he finds the Old Testament barbarous and abhorrent and the New Testament mawkish and fairly abhorrent as well. His treatment of these texts depends to a striking degree on a “remarkable paper” by John Hartung, an associate professor of anesthesiology and an anthropologist. The paper, titled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality,” originally published in 1995, is available on the Web. Dawkins and his wife are thanked in the acknowledgments. Curious readers can form their own impression of its character. A sympathetic review by Hartung of Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples is also of interest. These are murky waters, the kind toward which Darwinism has often tended to migrate.

Dawkins says, “I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible's] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.

There are two major objections to be made to this reading. First, the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33–34 says “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself.” In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins’s own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.) Second, Jesus provided a gloss on 19:18, the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. With specific reference to this verse, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”Jesus tells a story that moves the lawyer to answer that the merciful Samaritan–a non-Jew– embodies the word “neighbor.” That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. In general, Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, though becoming in one aware as he is of its contributions to the arts, dissipates under the slightest scrutiny.

Nor is Dawkins’s argument from history impressive. He cheerfully posits a “Zeitgeist” that wafts us to ever higher states of ethical sensitivity, granting lapses, specifically those associated with Hitler and Stalin: “We are forced to realize that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he seems from our vantage-point today. How swiftly the Zeitgeist changes – and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world.”Dawkins fails to note that the racial anti-Semitism that arose in Germany in the later nineteenth century had appeared to recede, until Hitler and others revived it. The article on anti- Semitism in the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911. describes the movement as a German “craze” that had “shown little activity since 1893.” According to the article, “While it remained a theory of nationality and a fad of the metaphysicians, it made considerable noise in the world without exercising much practical influence.” So, although Dawkins’s Zeitgeist might seem a harmless fudge, a spiritus ex machina meant to rescue his Darwinian atheism from the charges of bleakness and emptiness, it excuses his consistent inattentiveness to history. It is precisely the swiftness with which the Zeitgeist can change that makes it profoundly unworthy of confidence.

If the only bad effect of the notion to yield a highly selective reading of the past by dismissing the modem horrors as anomaly, that in itself would he grounds for objection. But it enables a misreading of the history it chooses to acknowledge. For example, Dawkins quotes a passage from an essay by T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s contemporary and champion, in which Huxley says the black man will not “be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival [that is, the white man], in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.” Dawkins cringes at this, but, he says,

“good historians don’t judge statements from past times by the standards of their own.” He finds evidence for his advancing moral Zeitgeist in the crudeness of Huxley’s racism: “The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century.”

But *was* Huxley in the vanguard? The essay from which Dawkins quotes,

“Emancipation – Black and White,” published in 1865, is an explicit rejection of the belief in racial equality active in America before and for some time after the Civil War. Huxley dismisses “standards” that had long been salient among his contemporaries. He is saying that emancipation may well prove to have very mingled consequences –

“emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man” – and that the egalitarian hopes the movement inspired should be rejected. This was the crucial period of Reconstruction and of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which established the full rights of citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in this country. Its passage was the work of emancipationists, and it was meant to create meaningful political equality for African Americans, among others. The vanguard in the period in which Huxley wrote were those Christian abolitionists whose intentions he dismissed as, of course, at odds with science. Huxley’s racism, like Hitler’s, is not a standard from which ineluctable progress can be inferred but instead a proof of the power of atavism.

Dawkins allows that our upward moral drift is a “meandering sawtooth” – he is admired for his prose – but he seems not to be alert to historical specifics. The United States never suffered a more grievous moral setback than when it allowed thinking like Huxley’s to make a dead letter of the 14th Amendment. As for the lesser issues of justice that arose in the wake of slavery, Huxley had this to say: “whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward Lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.” No, he wasn’t joking.

Finally, there is the matter of atheism itself, Dawkins finds it incapable of belligerent intent – “why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?” It is a peculiarity of our language that by war we generally mean a conflict between nations, or at least one in which both sides are armed. There has been persistent violence against religion –I n the French Revolution, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Soviet Union, in China. In three of these instances the extirpation of religion was part of a program to reshape society by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been served by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the history of modern authoritarianism.

Indeed, Dawkins makes a bold attack on tolerance as it is manifested in society’s permitting people to rear their children in their own religious traditions. He turns an especially cold eye on the Amish:

“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of

‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture.”

The fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens this beleaguered planet as little as any to be found in the Western world merits not even a mention.

Yet Dawkins himself has posited not only memes but, since these mind viruses are highly analogous to genes, a meme pool as well. This would imply that there are more than sentimental reasons for valuing the diversity that he derides. Would not the attempt to narrow it only repeat the worst errors of eugenics at the cultural and intellectual level? When the Zeitgeist turns Gorgon, the impulses toward cultural and biological eugenics have proved to be one and the same. It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

A Lenten Meditation

What prompts people to move from mediocrity (or worse) toward a radical reversal to the morally good and the best?

Supposing, of course, the illuminating grace of God (available to anyone who really and honestly wants it), evidence indicates that there are almost numberless reasons why. Christ surely is the most powerful of all the reasons. Despite the faults of individual members of the Church, who fail to live up to what they profess, thoughtful people recognize that the only fair way to judge any institution is according to its principles and the example of those who live in accord with them. That simple fact points to the sheer goodness and beauty of the saints, those who live heroically well what Catholicism is and teaches.

They are prime illustrations of the evidential power of beauty.

Meditations for Lent

It is a great mistake to be afraid of God your Father and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave, trembling with fright before his master. True, He is infinite Majesty, but He is also infinite Goodness and infinite Love. There can be no greater Lord than God; neither can there be a more ardent lover than He. Therefore, it is a great mistake to think that to converse with God is wearisome and bitter. No, it cannot be. If your God is wearisome and bitter he is false: you commit idolatry.

Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends. Consider that no one - whether friend or brother, father or mother, lover or spouse - loves you more than your God.

Your God is ever beside you: He is even within you. The heart of man is, so to speak, the paradise of God.

Jesus Christ: Love's Answer to Our Suffering

The answer to human suffering must be someone, not just something. For the problem (suffering) is about someone (God—why does he... why doesn't he ...?) rather than just something. To question God's goodness is not just an intellectual experiment. It is rebellion or tears. It is a little child with tears in its eyes looking up at Daddy and weeping, "Why?" This is not merely the philosophers' "why?" Not only does it add the emotion of tears but also it is asked in the context of relationship. It is a question put to the Father, not a question asked in a vacuum.

The hurt child needs not so much explanations as reassurances. And that is what we get: the reassurance of the Father in the person of Jesus, "he who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9).

The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. Clues are abstract, persons are concrete. Clues are signs; they signify something beyond themselves, something real. Our solution cannot be a mere idea, however true, profound, or useful, because that would be only another sign, another finger, another clue—like fingers pointing to other fingers, like having faith in faith, or hope in hope, or being in love with love. A hall of mirrors.

Besides being here, he is now. Besides being concretely real in our world, he, our answer, is also in our story, our history. Our story is also his-story. The answer is not a timeless truth but a once-for-all catastrophic event, as real as the stories in today's newspapers.

It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon, and he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn't give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.

He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. Love seeks above all intimacy, presence, togetherness. Not happiness. "Better unhappy with her than happy without her"—that is the word of a lover. He came. That is the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet through our heads. He came. Job is satisfied even though the God who came gave him absolutely no answers at all to his thousand tortured questions. He did the most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself. It is a lover's gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" he came, all the way, right into that cry.

In coming into our world he came also into our suffering. He sits beside us in the stalled car in the snowbank. Sometimes he starts the car for us, but even when he doesn't, he is there. That is the only thing that matters. Who cares about cars and success and miracles and long life when you have God sitting beside you? He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was "despised and rejected of men." Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, "Oh, no, not again! I can't take any more!"? He was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. "He came unto his own and his own received him not." Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world. His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own chosen people. What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of bloody prejudice? We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust.

How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn. We add to his wounds. There are nineteen hundred nails in his cross. We, his beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct and distant to him. And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her. "Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you." He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn his face from us, however much we turn our face from him. He endures our spiritual scabs and scars, our sneers and screams, our hatreds and haughtiness, just to be with us. Withness—that is the word of love.

Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, "No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still." Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in this century not even a Christian but a Hindu. Does he descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of suicide? Can he be there too? Yes he can. "Even the darkness is not dark to him." He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind—perhaps not until the next world, until death's release.

For the darkest door of all has been shoved open and light from beyond it has streamed into our world to light our way, since he has changed the meaning of death. It is not merely that he rose from the dead, but that he changed the meaning of death, and therefore also of all the little deaths, all the sufferings that anticipate death and make up parts of it. Death, like a cancer, seeps back into life. We lose little bits of life daily—our health, our strength, our youth, our hopes, our dreams, our friends, our children, our lives—all these dribble away like water through our desperate, shaking fingers. Nothing we can do, not our best efforts, holds our lives together. The only lives that don't spring leaks are the ones that are already all watery. The only hearts that do not break are the ones that are busily constructing little hells of loveless control, cocoons of safe, respectable selfishness to insulate themselves from the tidal wave of tears that comes sooner or later.

But he came into life and death, and he still comes. He is still here. "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Mt 2 5:40). He is here. He is in us and we are in him; we are his body. He is gassed in the ovens of Auschwitz. He is sneered at in Soweto. He is cut limb from limb in a thousand safe and legal death camps for the unborn strewn throughout our world, where he is too tiny for us to see or care about. He is the most forgotten soul in the world. He is the one we love to hate. He practices what he preaches: he turns his other cheek to our slaps. That is what love is, what love does, and what love receives.

Love is why he came. It's all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of his own people's hammering hatred, hammering at his heart—why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.

Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know—we must know—that he is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished. And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open. His withness with us enables us to be with those who refuse to be with us.

Perhaps he is even in the sufferings of animals, if, as Scripture seems to say, we are somehow responsible for them and they suffer with us. He not only sees but suffers the fall of each sparrow.

All our sufferings are transformable into his work, our passion into his action. That is why he instituted prayer, says Pascal: to bestow on creatures the dignity of causality. We are really his body; the Church is Christ as my body is me. That is why Paul says his sufferings are making up in his own body what Christ has yet to endure in his body (Col 1:24).

Thus God's answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened 2,000 years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.

How? This can be done on one condition: that we believe. For faith is not just a mental choice within us; it is a transaction with him. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone... opens the door, I will come in and eat with him" (Rev 3:20). To believe, according to John's Gospel, is to receive (Jn 1:12), to receive what God has already done. His part is finished ("It is finished," he said on the cross). Our part is to receive that work and let it work itself out in and through our lives, including our tears. We offer it up to him, and he really takes it and uses it in ways so powerful that we would be flattened with wonder if we knew them now.

You see, the Christian views suffering, as he views everything, in a totally different way, a totally different context, than the unbeliever. He sees it and everything else as a between, as existing between God and himself, as a gift from God, an invitation from God, a challenge from God, something between God and himself. Everything is relativized. I do not relate to an object and keep God in the background somewhere; God is the object that I relate to. Everything is between us and God. Nature is no longer just nature, but creation, God's creation. Having children is procreation. My very I is his image, not my own but on loan.

What then is suffering to the Christian? It is Christ's invitation to us to follow him. Christ goes to the cross, and we are invited to follow to the same cross. Not because it is the cross, but because it is his. Suffering is blessed not because it is suffering but because it is his. Suffering is not the context that explains the cross; the cross is the context that explains suffering. The cross gives this new meaning to suffering; it is now not only between God and me but also between Father and Son. The first between is taken up into the Trinitarian exchanges of the second. Christ allows us to participate in his cross because that is his means of allowing us to participate in the exchanges of the Trinity, to share in the very inner life of God.

Freud says our two absolute needs are love and work. Both are now fulfilled by our greatest fear, suffering. Work, because our suffering now becomes opus dei, God's work, construction work on his kingdom. Love, because our suffering now becomes the work of love, the work of redemption, saving those we love.

True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without a Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross. Look at a crucifix. St. Bernard of Clairvaux says that whenever he does, Christ's five wounds appear to him as lips, speaking the words, "I love you."

In summary, Jesus did three things to solve the problem of suffering. First, he came. He suffered with us. He wept. Second, in becoming man he transformed the meaning of our suffering: it is now part of his work of redemption. Our death pangs become birth pangs for heaven, not only for ourselves but also for those we love. Third, he died and rose. Dying, he paid the price for sin and opened heaven to us; rising, he transformed death from a hole into a door, from an end into a beginning.

That third thing, now—resurrection. It makes more than all the difference in the world. Many condolences begin by saying something like this: "I know nothing can bring back your dear one again, but.. ." No matter what words follow, no matter what comforting psychology follows that "but," Christianity says something to the bereaved that makes all the rest trivial, something the bereaved longs infinitely more to hear: God can and will bring back your dear one again to life. There is resurrection.

What difference does it make? Simply the difference between infinite and eternal joy and infinite and eternal joylessness. Resurrection was so important to Christ's disciples that when Paul preached the good news in Athens, the inhabitants thought he was preaching two new gods, Jesus and resurrection (anastasis) (Acts 17). The same Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. ... If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied" (1 Cor 15:14, 19).

Because of resurrection, when all our tears are over, we will, incredibly, look back at them and laugh, not in derision but in joy. We do a little of that even now, you know. After a great worry is lifted, a great problem solved, a great sickness healed, a great pain relieved, it all looks very different as past, to the eyes of retrospection, than it looked as future, as prospect, or as present, as experience. Remember St. Teresa's bold saying that from heaven the most miserable earthly life will look like one bad night in an inconvenient hotel!

If you find that hard to believe, too good to be true, know that even the atheist Ivan Karamazov understands that hope. He says,

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

Why then does Ivan remain an atheist? Because though he believes, he does not accept. He is not a doubter; he is a rebel. Like his own character the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan is angry at God for not being kinder. That is the deepest source of unbelief: not the intellect but the will.

The story is the oldest and best known of stories. For it is the primal love story, the story we most love to tell. Tolkien says, "There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true." It is suggested in the fairy tales, and it is why we find the fairy tales so strangely compelling. Kierkegaard retells it beautifully and profoundly in chapter two of Philosophical Fragments, in the story of the king who loved and wooed the humble peasant maiden. It is told symbolically in the greatest of love poems, the Song of Songs, favorite book of the mystics. And the very loveliness of it is an argument for its truth. Indeed, how could this crazy idea, this crazy desire, ever have entered into the mind and heart of man? How could a creature without a digestive system learn to desire food? How could a creature without manhood desire a woman? How could a creature without a mind desire knowledge? And how could a creature with no capacity for God desire God?

Let's step back a bit. We began with the mystery, not just of suffering but of suffering in a world supposedly created by a loving God. How to get God off the hook? God's answer is Jesus. Jesus is not God off the hook but God on the hook. That's why the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is crucial: If that is not God there on the cross but only a good man, then God is not on the hook, on the cross, in our suffering. And if God is not on the hook, then God is not off the hook. How could he sit there in heaven and ignore our tears?

There is one good reason for not believing in God: evil. And God himself has answered this objection not in words but in deeds and in tears. Jesus is the tears of God.

- Peter Kreeft

Mystery Within Us

The Apostle Paul says: "Who has known the mind of the Lord?" (Rom. 11:34). To this I would add, "Who knows his own mind?"

Let those who pretend that God's nature is within their comprehension explain their own nature first. Do they understand the functioning of their own mind? How does it comprehend knowledge? We are made in the image and likeness of God. Our minds are, in a sense, diminished copies of God's. If I suppose I can comprehend the original, but experience that I cannot comprehend the diminished copy, what does this say of me?

The Gnostic Cult of Christmas Gift Giving

Showing a devotion to man not otherwise shown to God.

Cry Abba

When we cry "Abba" it is the Spirit Himself. This is a great mystery. For Saint Thomas this expresses the most profound and the most intimate experience of our Christian life, the summit of mystical life.

When under the breath of the Holy Spirit we can say with Jesus "Abba, Father" - not only with our lips but in the silence of love, as a cry - we have a divine experience of our sonship, of our birth to divine life. We enter into this eternal generation of the Word of God (the Logos), of the Son who is in the bosom of the Father (here we know this from the Gospel of John). We are grasped by Christ, seized by Him (this is the proper moment of our Christian life) so that He might take possession of our inmost heart, of our will, so that we might have the same sentiments as Him, the same cry as Him, and say in all truth, "Abba, Pater."

It is this one must consider of fatherhood. Fatherhood is at the point of departure and at the term because it is going to remain eternally; this cry - "Abba" - will remain eternally. In heaven we will eternally, unceasingly say "Father," and we will say it in the light of the beatific vision, gazing upon the Father and understanding that there is nothing greater than Him. And we will say "Father" in the light that Jesus gives us, this light that comes from the Son, "Light from Light." We will say it in His light, and we will discover eternally what we glimpse already as of this earth, in the obscurity of faith and in love. We will discover eternally that there is nothing greater than saying "Father." We will discover that the eternal Word, the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, also eternally gazes upon the Father and that the Holy Spirit also eternally gazes upon the Father and that the Father is eternally their source of light and love. We will then understand that the mystery of the Incarnation is there to reveal the Father to us. We will understand that the Holy Spirit is given to us that we might discover the Father and that all Scripture is given to us that we might understand the Father's gaze of love upon us and His attraction of love. All of Scripture is there that we might enter into this attraction of love. In heaven we will understand this in full light; here, on earth, it is in the obscurity of faith. But we know that saying "Father" is truly what is greatest. If Jesus is the Bridegroom, it is so that we might be able to say, with Him, "Father." If the Holy Spirit is given to us and envelops us with His love, it is so that, with Him, we might be able to say "Father."

It is for this reason that in our orison - our silent, interior prayer - we must constantly come back to this. We must ask the Holy Spirit to give us this experience. We must ask Him to help us grasp this filiation of love which we find in ourselves. We are in it. We must ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten us and to let us understand that this is the essential thing in our Christian life and that, in the end, this is our Christian life. It is from this filiation of love and in it that all the rest is enlightened. We must ask for this, for it is a grace. The Holy Spirit wants to give us this experience of love. He wants us to understand this more deeply than we have understood it until now. He wants to lead us into this mystery of filiation so that we might in all truth say "Father," in Church and also in listening to preaching. I am obliged to speak to you; you have the privilege of being silent; it is more contemplative. You can contemplate and you must contemplate and you must contemplate in saying "Father." You must enter into this contemplation of love understanding that He is there and that He gives you His light and He communicates to you His love so that you might be able to look upon Him in all truth and say, "Abba, Father, Pater."

Catechism

I. THE LIFE OF MAN — TO KNOW AND LOVE GOD

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Saviour. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.

So that this call should resound throughout the world, Christ sent forth the apostles he had chosen, commissioning them to proclaim the gospel: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." (1) Strengthened by this mission, the apostles "went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it." (2)

Those who with God's help have welcomed Christ's call and freely responded to it are urged on by love of Christ to proclaim the Good News everywhere in the world. This treasure, received from the apostles, has been faithfully guarded by their successors. All Christ's faithful are called to hand it on from generation to generation, by professing the faith, by living it in fraternal sharing, and by celebrating it in liturgy and prayer. (3)

Notes:
(1) Mt 28:18-20.

(2) Mk 16:20.

(3) Cf. Acts 2:42.

Eucharistic Meal

Let’s be open and clean. Let’s drag this out into the light and discuss. Let’s not be shocked and resentful; let’s love the lonely. Perhaps, coming from a fanatic, the message of God’s love will regain some of its wonderful outrageousness: "Listen. I have a secret. I eat God, and I have His life in me. It’s the best thing in the world; it leads to everlasting life. But first, you have to die to yourself."

- Matthew Lickona, Swimming with Scapulars

Proving God's Existence

Tracking back to an earlier series of posts: can God's existence be proven?

And please, this is just an image from the Sistine Chapel.
It is not, alas, God Himself.
Don't ask.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XVIII

The analysis of the previous posts forms a useful pedagogical foundation for a serious and more intelligible exploration of the arguments for the existence of God. The analysis does not show, however, that a proof for God's existence is possible.

Heh, heh - logicians are funny.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XVII

There still remains one last proposition which people might have in mind when they assert, "It's impossible to prove that God exists." This is the sixth proposition, which is that they themselves are not aware of any argument which proves that God exists.

This, of course, may indeed be true although justifying this position can be more complex than it at first appears. It seems that this position can be warranted by people simply internally examining what they know and what they do not know. If one is asked what the first five Chinese dynasties were, it is rather simple for one to confess ignorance. One is hardly mistaken about whether or not one knows this. The same seems to be the case regarding one's knowledge of a proof for God's existence.

Two different circumstances need to be distinguished, however. These two circumstances differ on the matter of whether someone is aware of any arguments for the existence of God. If people who are unaware of any argument for the existence of God assert that they themselves are not aware of any argument which proves that God exists, then their belief in this is certainly correct and warranted; for they know what they are not aware of. One could say that they are unaware of any arguments which prove that God exists because they are not aware of any arguments (which purport to prove that God exists). See: ignorance.

The situation is different for people who are aware of one or more arguments for the existence of God. If they assert that they are not aware of any argument which proves that God exists, much more is required for their belief to be warranted. Unlike the first situation, they are aware of at least one argument for the existence of God. Therefore, in order for them to be justified in believing that they are unaware of any arguments which prove that God exists, they must provide evidence for why the arguments are not proofs; but this is a more complex burden of proof for their belief than simply reporting their ignorance of any arguments for God's existence.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XVI

Someone might argue that withholding assent on the question of God's existence is the position of agnosticism, but this is not in conformity with the history of the term. See: agnosticism.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XV

Before turning to the last proposition someone might have in mind when asserting that it is impossible to prove that God exists, we can consider what would be sufficient evidence for the first five propositions. Taking into account the fact that one one or more of these propositions cover what is logically possible, or what human being can do or actually do for all time or for the entire past, it seems that there is only one thing which would be sufficient evidence for these five propositions: a proof that God does not exist. If one could prove that God does not exist, then one have proven the truth of these five propositions.

Someone could instead try to prove that human reason is limited or defective and for this reason is incapable of proving God's existence. There are two problems with this position, however. First, such an argument would not disprove the first proposition, since a proof for God's existence might still be possible even if no human being is able to discover it. Second, it is hard to understand how a limitation or defect in human reason makes it incapable of proving God's existence, but not incapable of proving that human reason is limited. If human reason is limited or defective how is it able to prove that human reason is unable to prove God's existence? Why would a limitation in human reason extend to man's capacity to prove that god exists, but would not extend to man's capacity to prove that human reason is limited? It seems quite arbitrary to claim that human reason is limited when it comes to proving that God exists, but not limited when it comes to proving that human reason is limited and is unable to prove God's existence. Indeed, there is no guarantee that a proof regarding the capacities and limitations of human reason would not be as complex or difficult as any proof for the existence of God.

If it is true then that only a proof that God does not exist would be sufficient evidence for the first five propositions someone could have in mind when asserting that it is impossible to prove that God exists, at least two interesting consequences follow. First, people who hold any of these five propositions assume a burden of proof to demonstrate that God does not exist. This is a burden many of them will probably be surprised to learn they have; for while the first five propositions do not logically entail that God does not exist, the evidence which would warrant a belief in any of the five propositions commits one to the view that God does not exist. Thus, people might be less willing to accept any of these propositions if they realize that this forces them to argue that God does not exist.

A second consequence is that this shows that there is less difference between agnosticism and atheism than people might think. If agnosticism denies that man's reason is capable of proving God's existence, but an acceptance of agnosticism is only warranted by a proof that God does not exist, then an agnostic must either move to the position of atheism, continue his belief in agnosticism while admitting that it is unwarranted, or withhold assent on the question of whether God's existence can be proven.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XIV

The previous remarks explain why one has not shown that St. Anselm's Ontological Argument, or the five ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, or John Duns Scotus' apriori causal argument for proving God's existence are not proofs simply because there is disagreement about them or some people are not convinced by them. In order to show that these arguments are not proofs one must show that the arguments have an invalid form or that at least one of the premises is not true.

On the basis of these remarks one can conclude the fifth proposition (that "no human being up to the present moment has proven that God exists") is false if simply a certain set of logical conditions have been realized. If just one person some time in the past formulated a sound argument for God's existence, then the fifth proposition is false. It could be an argument which is not extant and was lost. This is why the fifth proposition is not proven even if one could show that all of the extant arguments for God's existence are in fact not proofs; for it is possible that someone in the past formulated a proof which was lost.

These remarks reveal the difficulty in proving that no one up to the present moment has proven that God exists, for this requires a knowledge of the past which is impossible for any human being nowadays to have.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XIII

What must be considered in the context of whether the fifth proposition (that "no human being up to the present moment has proven that God exists") is true, are the relevant conditions to the truth or falsity of the proposition. This question invites a further clarification of what people have in mind by the word "prove" with respect to any of the six possible propositions they might have in mind regarding a proof for the existence of God.

It is crucial to distinguish between logical and non-logical factors or conditions. Consider the previous explanation of a sound argument in which it was stated that the following minimum conditions are required for a proof: the argument must have a valid form and the propositions constituting the argument must be true. These are logical requirements for the argument being a proof. As it was previously mentioned, a person need not know that an argument is valid or the propositions constituting it are true in order for an argument to be sound. Neither is it a requirement for the argument to be sound that there be a complete or widespread agreement that the argument is sound, or that the argument be convincing to many people, or that the argument be easy to understand. These are non-logical conditions which are not necessary conditions for an argument to be sound. To maintain that they are requirements confuses the logical and epistemological realms.

Moreover, a condition for an argument being a proof is obviously not that the argument has been passed down through history.

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XII

Once again, after the distinctions made in the previous post, it is still necessary to distinguish, as was done before, between what a human being is capable of and what a human being does. Thus, the fourth proposition which one might have in mind when one says, "it's impossible to prove that God exists;" namely, that "no human being up to the present moment has been able to prove that God exists," is not equivalent to the fifth possible proposition; namely, that, "no human being up to the present moment has proven that God exists." As with the relationship between the second and third propositions, the fifth proposition does not logically entail the fourth. In other words, it does not follow that no human being up to the present moment has been able to prove that God exists, even if no human being up to the present moment has proven that God exists. Thus, it is difficult to know what evidence could be offered that no human being up to the present moment was able to prove that God exists; for that no one did it is not sufficient evidence.

For this reason, many people might find the fifth proposition - that "no human being up to the present moment has proven that God exists" - a reasonable position to hold believing it to be fairly obvious that at least up to the present moment no one has actually proven that God exists. They will, in all likelihood, take the widespread presence of disagreement and disbelief about God's existence to be undisputed evidence for this.

But is this belief warranted?

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven XI

If the proposition, "no human being for all of time proves that God exists" is true, it does not follow that the proposition, "no human being for all of time is capable of proving that God exists," is true; for from the fact that no human being does something is does not follow that no human being is able to do that. This suggests how difficult it is to prove that "no human being for all of time is capable of proving that God exists." In other words, if no human being for all of time ever proves that God exists, it does not follow that no human being was capable of proving that God exists.

Moreover, the propositions that "no human being for all of time proves that God exists," and, "no human being for all of time is capable of proving that God exists," refer, not just to the past and present, but also to the entire future of mankind. Therefore, even if one were to assume that no one up to the present moment was able to prove God's existence or had proven God's existence, what evidence could be offered that no human being in the future would be able to do this, or actually do this?

Once people realize this they begin to appreciate how difficult it is to prove either that "no human being for all of time proves that God exists," or that, "no human being for all of time is capable of proving that God exists," and usually then maintain that no human being up to this moment has been able to prove that God exists ; admitting again that they were not precise in stating what they meant when they said, "It's impossible to prove that God exists."

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven X

OK, so we're back.

As was mentioned previously, people generally take the proposition that no human being can prove that god exists as an easier position to establish than that "No sound argument with the conclusion that God exists is logically possible." They are sometimes surprised to learn, however, that to assert that no human being can prove that God exists is also not entirely clear for two reasons.

First, it must be pointed out that "can" refers to what human beings are capable of, not to what they have actually accomplished. If human beings actually do something, then obviously they can do it; but if they do not actually do something, it does not follow that they are incapable of doing it. Just as there are many things which human beings do not do which, nonetheless, they are able to do, so also it does not follow that human beings are incapable of proving that God exists simple because they do not actually do this. Therefore, the proposition that no human being can prove that God exists must be distinguished from the proposition that no human being actually proves that God exists.

But a second ambiguity still remains, however, since the temporal modality of these propositions is unclear. To assert that no human being can prove that God exists might be a proposition about what is presently so, or instead what is so for all of time. The same applies to the proposition about what human beings actually do.

This distinction generates the second and third propositions which one might have in mind when one says "It's impossible to prove that God exists," namely: "No human being for all of time is capable of proving that God exists," and, "No human being for all of time proves that God exists."

Whether God's Existence Can Be Proven IX

The remarks made in the previous post reveal a possible confusion people might have concerning the notion of a proof when they assert that it is not possible to prove that God exists. They might tacitly identify provability with empirical verifiability so that their claim regarding the impossibility of proving God's existence actually refers to the impossibility of empirically proving God's existence. By doing this their assertion that God's existence cannot be proven would be more exactly formulated as, "It is impossible to prove empirically that God exists."

But the response I would offer is: this assertion is to be granted - it is impossible to prove empirically that God exists. Even arguments for God's existence which begin with the structure of the world (e.g., Thomas' "Five Ways"), require the introduction of premises which are not verifiable empirically. The problem then is not with the claim that God's existence is not empirically verifiable, but with the tacit assumption that unless a proposition is empirically verifiable it cannot be verified. This assumption encounters the same problem mentioned in the previous post. The assertion that what is provable is limited to what is empirically verifiable is itself not empirically verifiable; therefore, according to the very proposition itself there cannot be sufficient justification or evidence for accepting it.

In this way, it is completely unwarranted to maintain that in order to be a proof, in addition to being sound, an argument must be constituted by premises which are empirically verifiable, for this assertion itself cannot be verified empirically.