Cass had a printed-out copy of his own Appendix folded up in his breast pocket, just in case, and he had taken it out to quickly review #33, discovering as he did so that he was having trouble moving his handshake-crushed right hand.
“So faith is unavoidable. If Bertrand Russell was right that faith is akin to theft, then he was thieving throughout his life. When he and Alfred North Whitehead were working on their Principia Mathematica, trying to deduce all of mathematics from logic, they were robbing left and right.
“I’m relying on faith in reason right now in making my argument that reason always involves faith. But of course that doesn’t bother me, since I already recognize the legitimacy of faith. You won’t find me cringing from embracing faith. But a man like Cass Seltzer supposedly keeps himself pure of all contact with faith.”
Fidley’s tone wasn’t pretty. If there was a stylistic war going on within the man, represented by the monogrammed cuffs on the one hand and the bone-crushing grip on the other, it was sounding as if the bone-crusher was prevailing.
“Now let’s take this a bit further, shall we? Let’s talk about that other great higher power called upon by the Bertrand Russells and Cass Seltzers. Let’s talk about science.
“The linear progress of science, we’re told, has carried us further and further away from religion. The whole great enterprise of modern science began in the sixteenth century with the Copernican revolution, which turned the old Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system on its head and showed us that we are not the center of the universe.”
Again, Cass thought he knew where Fidley was heading, though he seemed to be jumping around before finishing any arguments. Cass shuffled his papers so that the arguments from the Big Bang (#4) and from the Fine-Tuning of the Physical Constants (#5) were in front of him.
“Now, I’m not going to argue tonight—at least, not right now—that any of the recent and most sophisticated of scientific discoveries, coming from the best physicists and cosmologists of our day, are showing that the deeper we go into the mysteries of the physical universe the closer to religion we get. The line away from religion reversed itself in the twentieth century, right around the time that the biggest breakthroughs in physics and cosmology were happening. Mark Twain said that when he was fourteen his father was so stupid he could hardly stand to have him around, but that when he got to be twenty-one he was astonished at how much the old man had managed to learn in seven years. That’s how it’s turning out to be with religion and science, and maybe we can talk about that later.
“But right now I’m going to continue to show that those who protest the most against the reliance on faith are, even in their protests, manifesting their supreme faith.
“It was the philosopher David Hume who demonstrated just what a faith-based enterprise science really is. Science is in the business of discovering the laws of nature. It bases its conclusions about the laws of nature on empirical evidence. Sometimes we discover that what we thought was an inviolable law of nature actually isn’t, and so we discard it and try to find one to replace it. But when we find out that some particular law of nature isn’t quite right, we don’t give up on the lawfulness of nature. We never give up on that. We just give up on our old formulation of the laws of nature, and start searching for a new formulation that can accommodate the new evidence. And so we can ask—this is what David Hume in effect did ask—what would make us give up on the lawfulness of nature? Is there any kind of empirical evidence that would make us give up on that belief—not just give up on our belief that this or that is a law of nature, but on the whole belief that nature is lawful? Of course not. Anytime we get some counterevidence against a law, we go off searching for the right law. We never consider that maybe that counterevidence should be used against the whole idea that nature is lawful. Never! The idea just wouldn’t arise, because the whole enterprise of science is ruled by the search for laws. The unlawfulness of nature is unthinkable, not because there’s no evidence for it, but because nothing would ever be deemed evidence for it. And we can’t even offer any evidence for the lawfulness of nature—this is the tricky part of Hume’s argument—because even the notion of evidence already presumes nature’s lawfulness. If we were really going to ask for evidence for nature’s lawfulness, we wouldn’t be able to offer up any evidence without already presuming nature’s lawfulness. That’s what Hume showed.”
Fidley had paused and given a grand survey of the packed chapel. He had the audience’s full attention, and he knew it. Roz was not looking happy, and Mona was downright grim.
“Reason—logic and science—themselves demonstrate that faith is unavoidable. So it can’t be true, as this flock of ardent unbelievers has been trying to convince us, that there’s faith and religion on one side, and reason and science on the other, and that they are irreconcilable antagonists. Just as faith without reason is blind, reason without faith is crippled.”
So is Fidley claiming that Hume showed that faith in the lawfulness of nature is necessary for science to proceed, and that faith in religion is also necessary (for what?), and that science can’t say anything against it? That seems blatantly fallacious, and hardly the tactic that, in Lucinda’s words, “such a rationalist—University of Chicago and all” would take. But is that where he’s headed?
“And there you have it, my first prong of attack. Faith is unavoidable.
“Prong two,” Fidley says now, and calmly takes a sip from his glass of water. “Given that we sometimes have to rely on faith, when should we do it? What should we have faith in? Well, reason and science certainly. But what else? We need standards. To say that faith is necessary doesn’t throw open the floodgates to all beliefs willy-nilly. We can’t just start believing in superstitions, populating our world with leprechauns and Easter bunnies.
“You see, there’s serious faith, which is necessary, and then there’s frivolous faith. Faith in the laws of logic and the laws of nature is necessary if the world is going to present itself to us coherently. If I doubt logic itself, I don’t know how to proceed. There is no way to proceed. My knowing that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man will give me no reason to think that Socrates is mortal. Same thing if I were to start doubting the lawfulness of nature. If I doubt that nature is lawful, then I will never use the past as a guide to the future. Just because light has always traveled at 186,272 miles per second up until today, that would give me no reason to believe that it will do so tomorrow.
“The moral: there are faiths that are unavoidable if coherent lives are to be lived. That’s presumably why Cass Seltzer has faith in logic and in science. Cass Seltzer is a man of faith because he can’t live his life coherently otherwise.
“These kinds of faiths can be compared to financial investments. When you make an investment, you can’t know whether it’s going to pay you back. You can only make the investment and see what happens. Has your money worked for you or not? The same principle applies here. Does investing in a faith in logic and science work for us or not? Obviously it does. Without it, we’re flat broke. So this is a faith we should keep in our portfolio.
“Are there other faiths that are like this, that are comparable to the faith in science and reason? Well, what about the faith that your own individual life has a purpose? What about the faith that human life in general has meaning, that it matters to the universe that we are here and that we survive and flourish? What about the faith in the dignity of human life, your own and others’? How is it possible to live coherently, leading lives that are worthy of us, without faith in a transcendent purpose and meaning and dignity? These, too, are faiths that pay a good rate of return. To accept them is to see the value of one’s life increase exponentially.
“Skepticism in regard to reason and science renders our lives incoherent to the point of unlivable. So, too, does skepticism about the purpose and meaning of our lives, skepticism about whether we have any right to pursue our lives with the seriousness they demand of us. A David Hume could demonstrate the no
n-demonstrability of reason, but that didn’t keep him from reasoning. A Bertrand Russell or a Cass Seltzer can argue for the purposelessness of our individual lives, yet that doesn’t keep them from living purposefully, from living as if it all matters. Cass Seltzer pursues his life; in fact, from the looks of it, he pursues it pretty well. Even if he argues that he thinks his life is devoid of purpose, of worthiness, the very vigor with which he is pursuing it gives the lie to his claim. It’s just like the person who argues that we shouldn’t have faith in reason—he gives the lie to his argument by expecting that his argument will be taken seriously, since if his argument really worked we couldn’t take it seriously. Some faiths are unavoidable because without them our very lives become incoherent. Faith that we have a reason to live is a faith like that.
“That is my second prong,” Eighteen minutes have elapsed, and he has yet to affirm the resolution that God exists.
“But I haven’t said anything yet about God.” Aha! “I’ve waited for my third prong of attack to introduce Him. I should have convinced you by now that certain faiths are necessary for coherence, and I should have convinced you that among such faiths is that in our own purposefulness, our sense that our lives matter. You know, even someone who ends his life is taking that life seriously, so seriously that he can’t stand to live it. We just can’t inhabit our lives without taking them seriously.”
Cass could be projecting—he’s been known to project before—but he seems to sense a slightly more sympathetic note creeping into Fidley’s delivery as he swerves toward the existential.
“But how can an individual life acquire this seriousness? What can confer it? It requires something outside an individual’s life to make it matter, and that something must itself have agency and purpose. It must have intentionality, which means it must have a mind. And that is exactly what God is. The mind of God is the purposeful agency that confers purposefulness on each of us, even on Cass Seltzer.”
No, Cass had definitely been projecting.
“The faith in a God who loves each one of us, who cares about whether we each reach our full potential as human beings, is the very faith required for us to reach our full potential as human beings. The faith in a God who has made us in His image is the faith that confers worth on each of us. How else can mere human lives acquire transcendent meaning if not through a transcendent agency?
“How am I doing for time?” he finally thinks to ask Lenny, who answers jauntily that he’d used up his time several minutes ago, and earns himself a huge laugh. Lenny is now having the time of his life.
“Okay, then, I’ll make just one more point,” Fidley says, because obviously Lenny is not going to stop him. “And that’s that, if you have any doubt that rejection of faith in God impoverishes life and robs men and women of that sense of meaningfulness that makes their lives coherent, then all you have to do is look around at the hollow hedonism, neurotic narcissism, and dissolute degeneracy of a secular age that can’t even be alerted to the seriousness of life by a wake-up call like 9/11. It’s not just the immorality of our godless age that makes a person want to weep, but also the sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.”
Cass can see Fidley’s trapezius muscles contracting, and his right hand slashes the air one time each on the downward beat of “hedonism,” “narcissism,” and “degeneracy.”
Fidley walks back to his seat, and Cass remains sitting a bit too long, so that Lenny actually turns to him with a wide smile and a flourish of his hand to indicate the podium, which of course gets another laugh; at this point, Lenny can do no wrong. Cass stands and walks over to his lectern and looks out at the overflow audience, and the awareness of the absurdity of his standing here, before all these people, in order to negate the resolution ‘God exists,’ threatens to transport him clean out of who he is supposed to be and what he is supposed to be doing.
Here I am.
No, if any moment is the wrong moment for him to yield to his version of transcendence, this has to be it. He takes a good long look at the kid with the ponytail, he takes a good long look at Roz, and he brings himself back to the question at hand, which is: is he going to go after Fidley’s argument?
He doesn’t feel he has a grip on it yet. Fidley has appealed to elements of The Argument from Personal Purpose (#19), and The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason (#33), and he’s even introduced a snatch of The Argument from Pragmatism (#32) in speaking of beliefs that pay good rates of return; but he’s jumbled them up in such a way that the whole is giving the appearance of being greater than the sum of its parts, and Cass can’t see his way through the jumble yet. And then he’d thrown in Hume, too, for good measure. What would Azarya say about Fidley’s deployment of Hume? Hume is one of Azarya’s heroes. He’d all but memorized Hume’s essay “On Miracles” when he was an adolescent. Azarya would never stand for Humean skepticism’s being misused as a defense of theism.
Back when Cass had been a pre-med and taking exams, sometimes he would look at the questions for the first time and think in a panic that nothing was familiar, that because of some terrible misunderstanding he had studied the wrong text, and that there wasn’t a single question on the page that connected with anything that he knew. But then, like a cloud of silt settling out of turbid water and revealing the riverbed below, his mind cleared and the panic subsided, and each question of the exam emerged as an exemplar of a familiar principle. He’s hoping that will happen very soon.
On the spot, as Cass is making his preliminary remarks thanking Chaplain Shore and the Agnostic Chaplaincy of Harvard for sponsoring the debate, and thanking Professor Fidley for “initiating the discussion by firing such an intellectually serious salvo,” he’s decided to postpone discussing Fidley’s argument, and instead start out by making his own case independently. Why let Fidley define the terms of his opening argument anyway?
“Professor Fidley, in apologizing for the necessity of faith, concedes too soon in admitting that belief in God must rest on faith. If God makes any difference to the world—and what would be the point of believing in any God that didn’t make a difference to the world?—then we should be able to see indications of his existence when we observe the world we find ourselves in. And the fact is that this world does not present itself as being one in which there exists a powerful creator who cares about us. On the face of it, it seems a very different kind of world, which is what has inspired the theological line of argument that’s called theodicy: the attempt to reconcile the existence of God with the facts about our world that seem to suggest his absence.
“We can observe one feature of our world that is particularly relevant: suffering. Children die of disease; individuals are crippled by accidents and wracked with pain; whole peoples get exterminated. Just on the face of it, the obscene amounts of suffering we observe are not compatible with a God who’s both good and in control. Mind you, that’s just on the face of it. Believers look for ways of accommodating God’s existence with the searing facts of suffering, but they have to work hard at it, and the hard theodical work they need to do is what I mean by the world’s offering empirical evidence against God’s existence.
“So what are the ways that believers have offered to reconcile so much suffering with the existence of God? First there are the preconditions for free will. If we are truly to be moral agents rather than robots, then we must have the freedom to choose between good and evil. And, given that freedom, the possibility of evil must be there; and, given that possibility, sometimes it will be realized, and when it is realized, suffering will ensue.
“But the requirements of free will can only account for a small part of the suffering we see. It will, perhaps, allow the believer to write off, as cos-mically accounted for, the child who was overheard to whisper to his mother as they were both being marched to their deaths at the extermination camp at Belzec, ‘But I tried to be so good, Mama!’ Yes, people are given free will, and Belzec was a consequence, and so the theist can write off that chil
d’s pathetic cry as accounted for.
“But there is also abundant suffering that comes about not because of the exercise of others’ free will but because of natural disasters and accidents and the ravages of disease. And believers have to come up with some other way of dealing with these cases, since their occurrence has nothing to do with the exercise of free will. At this point you hear about the potential for achieving a greatness of the soul in overcoming tragedy. You hear that there are virtues—such as forbearance, and courage, and transcendence in the face of suffering, and compassion and love for those who suffer—which can only be exercised because suffering gives us the opportunity. The moral purpose of life, under this view, has to do with soul-making, and the full extent of what our souls can become can only unfold under the adverse conditions that God generously provides us.
“These are ingenious attempts to reconcile the facts of our world to the existence of a God who cares, and the very ingenuity they require shows how difficult the reconciliation is.
“And of course even here the explanation can’t cover all the cases, since so many of those who suffer are never given the opportunity to achieve soul-making at all—like people whose lives are snuffed out in an instant, together with all those who might have developed virtues in the grieving for them, or children who have no way to make sense of their suffering. Once again, their suffering, according to this rationalization, can perhaps serve the moral needs of others, and so can find justification.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 34