This came up in conversation the other day, but because two of the other people were John Fisher and Adam Cooper–who, while I love them to death and admire both their intellects, have a rather irritating tendency to not let you finish what you’ve said if they detect something they disagree with–I did not get it all the way out. So, I figured I’d throw something out there and see whether anyone else thinks I’m insane. Be reminded, I am trying to walk a fine line here, and if at some times it seems as if I am slipped into the precipice on either side, it is because I might have failed to adequately convey the idea in my head. It is a rather dangerous path from my mind to my mouth (or my fingertips, in this case) and many things can happen along the way. Still, it’s worth a try.
The conversation was on whether or not a legitimate demonstration or proof can be made for the existence of God, i.e. one that actually works. I maintained, and persist in maintaining, that regardless of the case, such a thing could never see the light of day. Why? Because once a thing is proved, belief is not in question. Proof makes it known, and knowing and the seeking of knowledge is the natural mode of man. Abraham had fath, and God credited it to him as righteousness, as both Genesis and St. Paul tell us. It didn’t say that Abraham knew, and got credit.
Faith, in my mind, is a meritorious act by the fact that it requires an act of will to accept it that goes beyond the acceptance of a point of provable fact. Once a syllogism is offered, for example, and it is demonstrated that it is sound and that all its presupposed “givens” are true, then it is considered absurd to disagree with it. God is not the same, however. Bear in mind, I am not speaking here of Aristotle’s uncaused cause, that big blob of thought-thinking-thought, but rather the personal, benevolent, loving, merciful, just, etc., etc. God that Christians, Jews, and Moslems worship. It is possible to demonstrate the absurdity of an infinitely regressive causation, and through reason alone reach the uncaused cause, but there is nothing to take you from there to the idea of a person equated with that uncaused cause, let alone the other things given to us in Holy Scripture and Tradition. For that, what is needed is an act of the will to live one’s life according to such a conviction; in fact, what we are called to is to believe so strongly that it actually becomes a mode of knowledge, albeit not at all like any other knowledge we can be said to have.
Lest anyone cry out that I am trying to tear Athens apart from Jerusalem, let me say that I believe in their union. Faith and reason together bring us to God. However, though the two may overlap, there are very clear places where reason cannot go. It lacks the competence. I consider this to be a well-ordered understanding of the relationship of the two, and not a reduction.
There is a famous line bandied about by St. Augustine, credo ut intellegam–I believe that I may understand. I am not an Augustine scholar, but I would argue that there is a linear progression in this statement, at least as far as God is concerned. Before you can inquire into and come to know God, you must believe in him.
Thus spake Der Wolfanwalt.
Filed under: epic rant
