Christopher Kerwick

On not finding God Chris Kerwick, 30 Aug 2015 (entry for a blog of informal philosophical reflections) Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of scientific methodology.  Contrary to much popular thinking on the matter, science does not give us facts, not for the most part.  Science gives us imaginative ways of thinking about the world.  The scientist’s experientially inspired intuitions are formulated in hypotheses and are tested experimentally to validate or invalidate them.  Some hypotheses are found to throw light on our understanding; others lead to dead ends.  But the validated hypothesis does not become bald fact, not an immediate feature of reality.  It becomes an accepted (because insightful and fruitful) way of thinking about some aspect of reality.  Later on, if the hypothesis is found to be unable to deal well with some newly considered aspect of reality, or the same aspect approached from a new perspective, it may be reformulated or even overturned in favour of some new hypothesis, some new way of appreciating the aspect of the world under consideration.  That’s why we no longer teach our kids about the aether and instead talk about space.  Aether used to be considered a good scientific theory, but not anymore. What I like about scientific, as opposed to theological, method, is that the experience and insight of the individual is valued and imbued with authority.  If you find an accepted theory unsatisfactory, you are free to come up with a better one.  There is, in principle, no element in the scientific tradition not susceptible to being overturned, no theory that is not up for challenge or revision if it is found wanting.  If a received teaching ceases to make sense because it can’t deal with the data coming to light, and begins to inhibit, rather than facilitate, our ability to deal with our world, it is the responsibility of the scientist and the scientific community to do away with it, even if we are left in a theoretical wilderness for a while, until some new and better hypothesis is formulated. Science certainly has its cherished institutions and beliefs, but it also has a seriously strong individualistic streak, which is even more fundamental to it.  It is the ultimate do-it-yourself truth-finding activity.  As long as someone has the skills and resources, they should, in principle, be able to verify or invalidate any scientific theory for themselves, by repeating the line of reasoning and the experimentation originally used to validate the theory.  If they see holes in the theory, they are free to demonstrate why its reasoning is unsatisfactory or false, and to repeat the experiments to see for themselves that the evidence stacks up.   There is no need, in the end, to depend on the authority or honesty of others to justify one’s own beliefs.  And if a theory doesn’t stack up, you go out and create your own and keep tweaking it until you get it to a point where it helps you make better sense of the data than the old theory used to.  And if you can persuade the rest of the community to see things the way you do, then everybody celebrates, because science is advancing.  This is the opposite trend to that noticed in theology, which celebrates when it is demonstrated that what we have always been taught is true after all.  Science loves being proved wrong, at least after the event.  Theology rejoices in being proved right and if it is proved wrong, will tell you after the event that it never really believed the doctrine in question anyway. My question, however, is whether the scientific method can ever really tell us what we might want to know about God.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for listening to your own intuitions and not being bound by doctrines that don’t gel with your real lived experience, and seeking new ways of articulating your understanding of reality.  The champions of such individualistic articulations of God-experience through the ages are those we call mystics.  The problem for the would-be mystic, however, is that while it may be relatively easy to identify things that are wrong with received doctrines or theories of God, it may not be so easy to come up with satisfactory ones.  Indeed, it may in some important respects be impossible. The recognition of this problem is visible in the evolving definition of the word “revelation” in Christian theology.  In the early modern period in the Christian world, revelation came to be understood as a collection of facts revealed to us in the Bible or in church doctrine, which were inaccessible to scientific validation and had to be taken on “faith.”  Faith was understood as accepting certain propositions to be true because revealed by God.  But little by little, the factual nature of some of these doctrinal propositions (such as the doctrine that the earth was the centre of the universe) came to be challenged by science, to the point where even theology had to concede that they should no longer be considered part of the deposit of revelation.  As science developed persuasive doctrines regarding more and more about the way the world is, many folk came to believe that religion would soon have nothing to contribute to our understanding of reality.  Science would take over and religious faith would fade. But the theologians knew that they had something important to say even in the wake of the advance of science, and in the twentieth century began to find a more satisfactory way of saying it.  They began to speak of revelation less in terms of a set of factual propositions to be accepted intellectually on faith, and more in terms of God’s self-revelation to the person of faith.  Faith became a personal, relational reality.  God reveals God-self to a person in the context of some sort of personal relationship. There is something that I think it is important for science to concede here.  It may well be that there are some hypotheses that can’t be proved, some knowledge that can’t be got, because you can’t go out and get it.  This is the sort of knowledge that can only be gifted to you, that comes to you only when made available to you when you are caught up in intimacy with an other, a personal knowledge that can only be gained in the context of a lived relationship. And this sort of knowledge cannot be passed from the recipient of the interpersonal revelation to another person without loss.  The next individual can’t test and judge the testimony given because he or she can’t experience it the same way, can’t repeat it at will.  In order to get much of an idea of the truth of the testimony, he or she will have to enter for himself or herself into a relationship with the reality testified to, be it God or any personal reality, a reality that is not within his power to control, to calculate, or to observe at will.  Science can’t grasp God’s self revelation, or any interpersonal revelation, because such understanding can only be received as gift from an undomesticated other, which is the ultimate antithesis of science’s DIY methodology. It is not only science as a modern institution that can’t find God according to its normal way of proceeding.  It is also you or me, when we operate in a scientific mode, seeking to establish God’s existence as part of our own self-motivated quest to understand reality.  And it’s why psychology rests under a cloud of dubiousness as a science and is to some degree considered to belong to the humanities instead.  I can investigate you, establish that you exist, that you have this or that characteristic, that you have done this or that, write a book about you.  But that is different to knowing you.  What I know of you personally could never have been established by myself working alone or in collaboration with others but without engaging you personally and you likewise engaging with me.  And what I know of you personally defies all my attempts to articulate it.  It’s not that I can’t say anything, but that anything I do say will never approach a satisfactory picture of what I know.  Personal knowledge just is somewhat fuzzy, fragmentary and inarticulate.  It’s why the lovers often reach for poetry over prose, knowing that their experience can’t be straightforwardly or satisfactorily said. David Chalmers in recent times introduced us to the philosophically conceived zombie, a being which looks and acts human and appears to have normal emotional reactions, but which has no self that experiences the whole thing.  Zombies exist objectively, but have no subjective experience. Chalmers’ thought experiment throws an interesting light on the philosophical question of “other minds.”  How do I know the whole world, outside myself, isn’t just an objective, non-feeling, impersonal reality.  How do I know that everyone else in the world isn’t a zombie, and that I am not ultimately alone?  Science can’t really tell me if there is anyone out there.  It can only establish the objective truth.  It can only establish those things I can verify and that you can equally well verify independently.  The decision to live as though I’m not alone in the world – that is not a decision that science can recommend to me.  Nor can dogma command it.  Happily, there is no real need in any case because I already know by some sort of interpersonal instinct, an immediate sort of sympathy or empathy, a primal faith perhaps.  An experience of meeting and recognizing an other, who is at the same time utterly foreign and intimately present to me, my other self.  Even if you are my enemy, it is only because you could be my friend.  We understand each other. Does God exist?  Is “God” a useful concept?  Is reality ultimately personal?  Is there any genuine otherness, which suggests also the possibility of genuine me-ness and us-ness.  Are we truly selves dancing in and out of each others’ existences, or merely fleeting forms without substance, appearing and disappearing?  Is our togetherness in this life any more than a temporary respite from the aloneness that overtakes us in death? Do we even experience death, or is death the end of experience, its nullification?  I’m unclear in my thinking on all these questions.  But I remind myself that it may not be in my power to answer them definitively.  If an answer is to come, it may be that it can only be found in relationship, and that I am on that account to some degree at the mercy of that which is other and beyond my control, and that I cannot come to know it by thinking my way to it, or by establishing the objective evidence for it, not by searching, not even by praying.  You can’t just go out and find God, just like you can’t go out and get a friend just because you want one. The postmodernists have a point.  We are awfully egoistic and hate not having a handle on everything, so we tend to assume that the world is as small as our grip on it, and to ignore that fact that there may be much we don’t see or understand.  It is hard to be at the mercy of that which is truly other, to have to wait, to listen, to be ignorant and dependent, to be unable to control or have a grip on reality because its othernesses elude us and come to us only in fragments.  But then again, what if, just maybe, there is not only otherness but also the possibility of love.  Not just anxiety or indifference but the possibility of joy.  Not just lostness, but the possibility of being found. You can’t just wait to be found, I don’t think.  You can’t just sit around until love and joy come along.  We have to get on, we have to live if we’re not ready to die.  But perhaps there is something to be said for taking a moment aside from just-living when we have the chance, to sit and wonder, to be attentive, to wait, to listen, to play.  There is much to be said for play just in playing.  And , who knows, perhaps we will find we are not playing alone.