My Grand Apologetics Project: Part 4

See these past post:

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3-a.html

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3b.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-3c-f.html

Part 4: The Grand Scheme

a. Remembering Part 1

Now that I have laid down my analysis of so much of the human experience, I am ready now to bring it all together. Nothing I say here is to be taken at any kind of attempt at a 'proof'. To understand why, go all the way back to the beginning of this blog series. I do not think that an absolute proof of God's existence can be offered. I think these matters to be more like disagreements in philosophy or politics. People argue about free will. There are determinists, indeterminists, compatibilists, incompatibilists, and so on. Each side in philosophy makes it's case, each gives reasons for a position, but none seems to be able to offer any kind of proof that would command the ascent of anyone who understood all arguments. That doesn't mean there is no truth one way or another. We either have free will or we don't. Free will either necessarily requires a libertarian freedom or it doesn't, and so on. What eludes us is certainty. And so, everything I say here is by it's very nature uncertain. But I think the case is good, as good as any case can be regarding these types of matters. Science is awesome because it gives us a level of certainty. Where science cannot be used, we must learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. This is one such example.

b. The Synthetic Impulse

Most people have a hard time living in two worlds. Reason's tendency is to synthesis, to fit the whole range of human experience into an overarching worldview. This is not only a need of the mind, however, it is also a need of the heart. It is not enough for us to experience and just move on. We know almost instinctively that 'the unreflective life is hardly worth living'. After all the experiential analysis I've undergone, it seems that every day we stand confronted, confronted by the very encounters which make life worth living, confronted by a quality of life that stands beyond with the facts of life. We cannot remain here. So we must do some worldview building.

One way to approach this is through an eliminativist-reductionist stance. This stance, which I will call E-R here, encourages us to look only for the physical cause of the experiences listed above, and to ignore the phenomenology altogether. For instance, one may give an evolutionary account for every experience I listed above. And I don't deny that these experiences can be explained, at least in part, by such an account (more on this later). The problem with this approach, is that it only satisfies the need of the mind, and not the heart. For if we deny that anything can be learned from the phenomenology of our experiences, then while we may now have a holistic belief system, we will not have a holistic way of life. It is our living, as much as our believing, that must be made whole. And in a reductionist account, we are encouraged to live a life of split personality. The evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, in his brilliant lecture "Stranger Than We Can Imagine", expresses this view perfectly. He says there that we should not treat people as "merely" machines and animals, even though we know that is all that they are. Few people can really live this way. We have a basic instinct to bring our living and our knowing together. The reductionist worldview can make all our knowing one, it cannot make our living one.

To hold this view one must accept that one 'at some times' lives AS IF the world is turned upside down. One must play act that joy is the center of the world. One must hope for particular things, even as one knows the entirety of the world to be hopeless. Again, there may be some people who can live this way. But for the rest of us mere mortals, this is no real option. The synthetic impulse is just to strong in us.

The only other option is to then fit the counter-worlds we step into from time to time, into the world as we know it to be.

c. Bringing It All Together

So here we stand, with a need to be able to create a picture of the world, where the seriousness of the world is sometimes turned upside down. Where joy is in some sense the center of the world. Where time does not have absolute hold on all we do. Where what we do has ultimate significance. But we stand with the knowledge that the worlds we step into where all these hold true, cannot impose themselves on us the way the world of mundane experience does. We know that all these experiences are but wisps, but the cracking open of some door. How do we decide to throw that door open, when we can never be sure that the act will not lead to self-deception? How do we choose to look at the world through the lenses of these experiences, without risking all that we are and all we know to be true?

In the end, you can't. This all takes us back to the first great insight of our analysis, in Part 2: the dawning experience of life as venture, and the embracing of life as a place where we are radically vulnerable, but where this vulnerability is ultimate 'good'. One can only come to religion by answering these questions: "is a life of risk and venture the highest kind of life there is? Is vulnerability something to be embraced and celebrated?" This is a matter of insight, and intuition. It is a choice you must make for yourself, there is no evidence one can offer either way. Do you share that initial experience of true living as risk and venture? Do you draw from your experience of selfhood a sense of radical, embraced vulnerability?

If you answer yes to these two basic questions, then you find yourself in a place where the experiences that were spoken of earlier confront you. They stand now at the center of life truly lived, they are the substance of the adventure that you are always embarking on.

d. Hope: The Tie That Binds

Buoying our understanding of life as adventure, we are confronted with our experience of hope. Remember our hypothetical, terminally ill patient from 3d? One can reasonably ask what standard of evidence is needed to justify such a hope. Certainly, one cannot hope for what one knows is untrue. But beyond that, we understand that hope stands in lesser need for justification than, say, a scientific theory explaining the behavior of some obscure molecule. So confronted with the need to make our life 'one' in both living and believing, and experiencing life not as a not one world but many, we ask whether we can justify in any way our bringing together of these experiences into an overarching intellectual structure. One of the experiences, however, that stares us in the face is hope itself. In the end, our question simply becomes, 'do we live in a world that justifies our hope?'

Peter Berger tells the following story: a child cries out in the night after a bad dream. That child's parent picks them up, holds them in their arms, and says "everything will be alright." This is a paradigmically human response, one does not need to be religious to respond in this way. But this very human experience brings up an ultimate question: 'is the parent lying to the child?' The answer can only be 'no' in a world where the other experiences we spoke of have some kind of truth behind them. Whatever, their origins in the physical world, what they say to us as people must be true in some sense if we believe there is truth behind the mother's words. For if physical facts and explanatory posits are all that we allow into our picture of the world, it is clear that "everything" will NOT be alright. The child will some day suffer and die, just as the mother must some day suffer and die. We tell our children there are no boogeymen, but we know that any cursory examination of history will show this to be false. This isn't to say that atheists cannot be good parents. The lie may be made out of love, it may be a good and justified lie. But it is a lie nonetheless.

Each of our individual hopes, which come to us as having relaxed standards of justification, are surrounded by a cloud, a background that we must face if we are truly in need of synthesis. Nothingness, entropy, death, they are physical facts that stand around all our future plans, hopes and dreams. When we struggle with the question of justification and evidence, when we struggle with the question of whether we will respond to the content, and not the fact, of these experiences as having evidentiary weight, we may ask what level of evidence we really need. For the question on one level is simply this: 'can we hope in hope'?

And so, for those who have chosen to embrace vulnerability, and who see life as an adventure, and who are assaulted by the synthetic impulse, I suggest that these experiences I have spoken of can act as a kind of evidence for something. Such a person is within their 'epistemic rights' when they choose to build a world-view which puts at its foundations all the experiences I spoke of before, and seeks to make sense of the world through the lenses of their phenomenologies: humor, play, hope, moral experience, and aesthetic experience. But these rights can only be asserted with an open mind to the uncertainty they represent. We must be upfront of the grounds on which we stand.

e. What Kind of World Is This?

If you have travelled down this road with me so far, and you have answered all the pertinent questions in one direction, you should be able to see now where we are. We stand in need of a world-view where the universe is not indifferent to our risks and ventures, where life as it is normally lived is turned upside down, where joy is at the center, where time is not the final word, where our moral experiences have lasting significance, where beauty says something important, and where hope is always a justified attitude. Anyone with any contact with culture and society should be impressed by now that such a worldview is not something we have to make up tout court. It exists already, in some of the great religions of the world. They have a word for something a lot like this. That word is "God".