The Comfort of Certainty

"Only once, as far as I remember, in all my lifetime have I experienced the pleasure of praise--not for what it might bring but in itself.  That pleasure was beatific; and the praise that conferred it was meant for blame.  It was that a critic said of me that I did not seem to be absolutely sure of my conclusions."

--Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 1.10. (1897)

I often turn to Peirce not just for technical philosophical matters but also for insights like this one.  What sort of people am I interested in surrounding myself with?  It is most comfortable to surround myself with people who share my views and who espouse them with the air of certainty.  But as Peirce reminds us in "The Fixation of Belief," the great danger there is that in so doing I cut myself off from seeing my own errors and from improving my thinking. 

As with so many things worth remembering, it is hard to keep this in mind.  We need not just people who think differently from the way we think but also communities that will help us return to those words and ideas that sharpen us and provoke us to thought.  This is the challenge of theology and of philosophy, and of liturgies, both sacred and secular - to remind us of what we ought to remember while at the same time challenging us to resist the comfort of resting in what seems sure.  As Augustine writes, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O Lord."  Until then, until our hearts find rest in the absolute, we should be wary of certainty, which is so often the enemy of learning.

Bugbee and the Tillage of the Soul

In the opening entry of The Inward Morning, Henry Bugbee writes

“I have yet to discover how to say what moves me to the endless search and research, the reflective turning over in my mind of experience.  The turning over is all so much tilling….All this tilling can be but a burying deeper of what ought to be coming out.  The moments in which something reliable has seemed to come of it all have impressed me as sudden.  Insight is earned, to be sure, but it is not steered, and it must find its own articulate form.  If it is to become more than sporadic and utterly ephemeral, one must pay attention to it, it must be worked out.”  

(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp.33-34.

This is as much about philosophy as about mysticism; but it is a philosophic attention to mysticism.  The difficulty is not discovering what moves me to search; that is already known, albeit in a way that is not easily said.  The difficulty is in learning how to say it.  “God” and “the soul” and “eternity” all present themselves as shorthand for this motive.  It is enough to say them, sometimes, but they are placeholders.  They must not be said in vain.  We do not possess God; we seek God.  God is, as Eriugena intimated (in his description of what it means to create), both that which we seek and that which impels our seeking.  God’s creativity and origin-ality are complex, even if God is simple.

"Come, Let Us Reason Together": Thinking About God

A student in my philosophy of religion class recently asked me, "Do we really need to put this much thought into God?  Is it not okay for me to believe without all the philosophical questions?"

On the one hand, yes, it is okay for you to believe without being a philosopher.  As William James points out, we often decide to believe religious, ethical, and aesthetic propositions on insufficient evidence, and we often do so justly.  Sometimes you've just got to choose, even if you can't prove you've made the right choice.

And I'm sympathetic with this student's position.  Faith can be, as James puts it, passional.  When people question our passions, or put restrictions on them, that can feel like a violation of something very personal and intimate.  In those times we feel that the person telling us we may not believe is a dogmatist and a tyrant.

On the other hand, I think there are some good reasons to spend time thinking philosophically about God. Here are five reasons why I think religious people - and specifically but not exclusively Christians - ought to do so.  

First, if your belief is based in Jewish and Christian scriptures, you might find the commandment to "love the Lord your God with all your...mind" to be sufficient reason.  If you love God, why would you withhold your mind from your worship?  And if you claim to be giving your whole self in worship but withhold your reason, aren't you in danger of committing the error of Ananias and Sapphira?

Second, thinking about God brings us into community with others.  It's a way of putting our beliefs into words, and when we do that, we invite others to consider them with us.  

Third, lots of people have opinions about God, and some opinions about God lead people to do violent things to others.  If we disagree with that violence, and want to stop it, we have two choices: we can oppose it with equal and opposite violence, or we can try to reason with others.  Perhaps more importantly, we can reason with those who might one day become violent and help them form reasonable and peaceable beliefs. It's hard to reason about others' opinions if we aren't able to reason about our own opinions.

Fourth, even if our reasoning about God is inconclusive (as it often is!) it is a kind of exercise for the mind, one that might prepare us for the conversations I just mentioned and also for solving lots of other kinds of problems.

Finally, thinking about God can help us discover idols in our own thinking.  It's a kind of self-examination.  If you take God seriously, then you probably want to make sure you don't worship the wrong thing.  My experience tells me that when I think about very difficult problems, part of me gets tired and wants to settle on any old solution so that I can be done thinking.  But that settling on a workable solution might well get in the way of finding the best solution.  Similarly, settling for an easy theology might get in the way of finding the best theology.  Will I ever find the best theology?  I admit I'm not sanguine about this.  But why should that keep me from longing and trying to make the theology I have better?  At any rate, surely I should try to avoid believing in the wrong thing.  I find Merold Westphal's position to be a helpful one: skeptics of religion are often better idol-detectors than I am.

What do you think?  

"To have more is not to be more"

In Lewis's novel Out of the Silent Planet, the antagonist Weston attempts to explain why his civilization is superior to another.  He says,

"Your tribal life...has nothing to compare with our civilization--with our science, medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which is rapidly annihilating space and time.  Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower."

For Weston, the annihilation of space and time is proof of advancement.  I am reminded of Rabbi Heschel's words about the Sabbath in his book Between God and Man, where he advances a quite different view:

"Technical civilization is man's conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely time.  In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space.  To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective.  Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time.  But time is the heart of existence."

The conquest of space - that is, of gaining power over things and making them our servants - comes always at the expense of time, which we often expend as though we could withdraw from that deposit infinite sums without deficit.

Crime, Punishment, and the Great Community

How should we treat criminals?  "The reply is: Treat them as if you loved them." 

-- Charles S. Peirce, 4 May, 1892

Peirce's Parable of the Puritan

Peirce once wrote a school-essay responding to a prompt that asked whether there was any valid excuse for the intolerance of the "Pilgrim Fathers." (MS 1633)  Peirce replied with a parable, which I will paraphrase here:

On judgment day, a Puritan was called before God to give account of his life. The Puritan admitted his faults, and then pulled from his breast pocket a document that he claimed contained a justification of "hard-heartedness." When he handed this to God, someone laughed aloud at the possibility of making such a justification. The scoffer was seized by angels and taken to kneel before God, where "he will be told by the Judge that He considered it worthwhile to see what the Puritan had to say. But that he the scoffer as he judged shall be judged."

Puritans and Vaccinations

In light of recent political debates in the United States, this seems worth noting: the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards died of smallpox on March 22, 1758.  His death was the result of a bad inoculation, which is, of course, tragic.  But it is worth remembering that he received the inoculation to protect himself from the disease, and, apparently, as a way of showing that he thought the science behind it was trustworthy enough to take a risk and set an example for others.  We sometimes think of Puritans as being benighted, ignorant and pathologically anhedonic.  Edwards' active intellect and his attention to the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton suggest that this description of Puritans is facile and false.  (Thanks for nothing, H.L. Mencken.)


Of course, there are other issues at stake here, like the ethical question of whether vaccines should ever be mandated,  and whether the facts about the HPV vaccine are being reported accurately.

But what strikes me about Edwards' death is the possibility that in choosing to receive a vaccine, Edwards risked--and lost--his own life for the sake of others.  I would not require others to follow his example, but I think that Christians (and especially those who revere the memory of the Puritans) might take his example to heart.

Scientia Cordis

"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."

-- Charles Peirce, "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," (1868).