Who mourns for language games?

No, I don't get frustrated by claims that Obama wants to establish "death panels" to rid us of costly seniors (whose real concern is that they live for decades after retirement, and fear they are useless and unwanted), or of claims Obama is not an American citizen (where did that one go, anyway? Buried under it's own incredibility, I suppose). As Rick Perlstein points out, crazy has always been with us, at least in American politics. Rather, I get frustrated by the reigning question of religious belief, the one that has been imposed on us since at least the 19th century:

One of the five leaders is Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Of his belief in God he says:

“I think I’d prefer to talk about being confident that God exists, or trusting that God exists.

“It’s not knowing as you know a state of affairs in the world, it’s much more of a sense that you’re in the presence of something greater than you can conceive. I suppose from my teens I have just been aware of that something greater than I can put words to in whose presence I live.”

It's actually a good answer, because faith is nothing more than trust. "Faith" is another term that has been warped into something akin to blind credulity or, as Williams James described it, "Believin' what ain't so" (although, as James tried to point out, that is not the only definition of "faith" at all). The assumption behind the question put to the Archbishop is that existence is a thing that can be known, just as any object can be known. But even David Hume had trouble with that claim. His analysis of the self taking in all the sensory input which, he claimed, is all we know and all we can know, was that there was no self, since he (himself!) couldn't observe one. So all those observations just--"and then a miracle occurs!"--added up to an illusion of a self. Which doesn't go very far to explain how those stimuli add up to perceptions, much less how those perceptions add up to the illusion of selfhood. But since existence itself is not subject to empirical analysis, it's generally not deemed worthy of empirical study, either.

After all, what is the science of being? Indeed, Western philosophy has split on this very issue. Anglo-American philosophers by and large eschew the subjects of interest to "Continental" philosophers, and continue their pursuit of empiricism and pragmatism (empiricism's cousin). Continental philosophy is much more interested in questions of phenomenology, which have to do with the almost undecidable (and sometimes indecipherable) questions of "being." While the question "Does God exist?" assumes a simple definition for the word "exist," Martin Heidegger spent a lifetime trying to define the word and explain just what "being" is.

Kierkegaard tackled this subject head on, pointing out we can never prove the existence of Napoleon, except by establishing an historical record of events connected to someone identified as Napoleon (and S.K. fits into the Continental/phenomenological branch of Western philosophy). As Johannes Climacus puts it:

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advance interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed he exists.

The works of Napoleon, in other words, don't establish Napoleon's existence unless I have already concluded that Napoleon does, indeed, exist. And as for the existence of God? Well, first, you have to posit that God is possible.

But then, what are the god's works? The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all. Or are the wisdom in nature and the goodness or wisdom in Governance right in front of our noses? Do we not encounter the most terrible spiritual trials here, and is it ever possible to be finished with all these trials? But I still do not demonstrate God's existence from such an order of things, and even if I began, I would never finish and also would be obliged continually to live in suspenso lest something so terrible happen that my fragments of demonstration would be ruined. Therefore, from what works do I demonstrate it? From the works regarded ideally--that is, as they do not appear directly and immediately. But then I do not demonstrate it from the works, after all, but only develop the ideality I have presupposed; trusting in that, I even dare to defy all objections, even those that have not yet arisen. By beginning, then, I have presupposed the ideality, have presupposed that I will succeed in accomplishing it, but what else is that but presupposing that the god exists and actually beginning with trust in him.

The question, you see, makes a category error. Does a platypus exist? Well, if you mean by that is a platypus an animal that can be identified, an object that can be classified as "animal" and sub-catetogorized down through the Linnean system, then, yes, it "exists." But if you ask "Do you (your humble host) exist?", you mean something quite different, although you've used the same word in seemingly the same way. Except you haven't, of course. When you ask "Does a platypus exist?", you are asking whether the animal identified as "platypus" is or has been alive in the world. When you ask "Do I exist?," you are asking "Do I have being?" And to ask that is to assume the answer in the question; or at least to assume a definition of "being" that includes a definition of me so that I can have being.

There are really two problems here: one is empirical, one phenomenological. Empirically, an animal identifed as a platypus can be located in the world. Phenomenologically, whether the platypus has being is a matter of definition, for both being and the platypus. As Kierkegaard explains it:

For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

The thing in my hand can be identified (labelled, if you prefer) as a stone. That does not prove its existence, it simply gives an object a name. Neither do I prove the existence of a person; I simply identify them by name or by societal placement (a "criminal"). How do I ever demonstrate the being of the platypus, or the criminal? And how do I define "being" so that it doesn't include the stone, but also excludes a corpse? Indeed, how can you be sure I'm not simply a clever Turing test? Or that my name doesn't identify the writer of these posts? One might as validly assert that my social security card, or my diplomas, assert my existence. But all they prove is that pieces of paper with a common name are objects in the world that can be known empirically. When I die (i.e., cease to exist), they will still be objects in the world. But if they exist, how can I not exist? Easily, of course; but clearly those pieces of paper don't establish my existence.

If I am the Invisible Man of the Silverberg story, do I exist? Well, yes, and no; and what a pitiable state that would be. If I proclaim my existence and no one acknowledges it, do I cease to exist, like Apollo on Star Trek? Well, if you posit that to be the god's existence, yes. But if you don't....

The problem is not Rowan Williams' answer to the question, it's the question. The best response, actually, would be to ask the interlocuter: "Do you exist?", and when they said yes, ask them to prove it.

The result would be quite diverting.

I think. I think I am. Therefore I am. I think.

We begin with Eddington:

I find a difficulty in understanding books on philosophy because they talk a great deal about "existence",  and I do not know what they mean.  Existence seems to be a rather important property, because I gather that one of the main sources of division between different schools of philosophy is the question of whether certain things exist or not.  But I cannot even begin to understand these issues, because I can find no explanation of the term "exist".

The word "existence" is, of course, familiar in everyday speech;  but it does not express a uniform idea - a universally agreed principle according to which things can be divided into existing and non-existing.   Difference of opinion as to whether a thing exists or not sometimes arises because the thing itself is imperfectly defined,  or because the exact implications of the definition have not been grasped;  thus the "real existence" of electrons, aether, space, colour, may be affirmed or denied because different persons use these terms with somewhat different implications.  But ambiguity of definition is not always responsible for the difference of view.  Let us take something familiar, say an overdraft at a bank.  No one can fail to understand precisely what that means.  Is an overdraft something which exists?  If the question were put to a vote,  I think some would say that its existence must be accepted as a grim reality,  and others would consider it illogical to concede existence to what is intrinsically a negation.  But what divides the two parties is no more than a question of words.  It would be absurd to divide mankind into two sects,  the one believing in the existence of overdrafts and the other denying their existence.  The division is a question of classification, not of belief.  If you tell me your own answer,  I shall not learn anything new about the nature or properties of an overdraft;  but I shall learn something about your usage of the term "exists"  -  what category of things you intend it to cover.

It is a primitive form of thought that things either exist or do not exist;  and the concept of a category of things possessing existence results from forcing our knowledge into a corresponding frame of thought.  Everyone does this instinctively;  but there are borderline cases in which all do not employ the same criteria,  as an example of the overdraft shows.  A philosopher is not bound by traditional or instinctive conventions to the same extent as a layman; and when he similarly expresses his knowledge in this primitive frame of thought, it is impossible to guess what classificatory system he will adopt.  It would be rather surprising if all philosophers adopted the same system.  In any case I do not see why such a mystery should be made of it,  nor how an arbitrary decision as to the classification to be adopted has come to be transformed into a fervid philosophical belief.

I do not want to make sweeping charges on the basis of a very limited reading of philosophy.  I am aware that in the recondite works the meaning of the term is sometimes discussed.  But, after all, philosophers do occasionally write for the layman;  and some of them seek to repel the scientific invader in language which he is supposed to understand.  What I complain of is that these writers do not seem to realise that the term "exist", if they do not explain the meaning they attach to it, must necessarily be as bewildering to the scientists  as, for example, the term "curvature of space", if left unexplained, would be to the philosopher.  and I think it is not an unfair inference from this omission that they themselves attach more importance to the word than to its meaning.

It is not every sentence containing the verb " to exist" that troubles me,.  The term is often used in an intelligible way.  for me ( and, it appears, also for my dictionary) "exists" is a rather emphatic form of "is".  "A thought eists in somebody's mind," i.e. a thought is in somebody's mind - I can understand that.  " A state of war exists in Ruritania,"  i.e. a state of war is in Ruritania -  not very good English, but intelligible.  but when a philosopher says "Familiar chairs and tables exist", i.e. familiar chairs and tales are....,  I wait for him to conclude.  Yes:  What were you going to say they are?  But he never finishes the sentences/  and I do not know what to make of it.

Speech is often elliptical,  and I do not mind unfinished sentences if I know how they are meant to be finished.  "A horrible noise exists"  presumably is intended to be completed in such form as " A horrible noise is- disturbing me".  But that is not how the philosopher intends me to complete his unfinished statement. "noises actually exist " - and I really have no idea what completion he does intend.  I myself, when I am not intimidated by the existence* of critics determined to make nonsense of my words if it is possible to do so, often say that atoms and electrons exist.  I mean, of course, that they exist - or are - in the physical world,  that being the theme of discussion in the context.  We need not examine the precise ellipsis by which a mathematician says that the root of an equation exists, when he means that the equation has a root;  it is sufficient to say that he has no idea of putting forward a claim to include the root of a mathematical equation in the category of things which philosophers speak of as "really existing".

In the preceding chapters I have discussed a number of things which exist in the physical universe;  that is to say, that are in, or are parts of the physical universe.  We have seen that "to exist in",  even in the equivalent expression " to be part of", is not free from ambiguity,  and is made definite only by the conventions discussed in connection with the concept of analysis.  The question whether the physical universe itself exists has not arisen.  I have, in fact, avoided saying that it exists - which would be an unfinished sentence.  Ordinarily it would be unnecessary to be so particular.  The existence or non-existence of things is a primitive form of thought; and, if I had used the term, it would mean no more than that I was forcing our observational knowledge into such a frame** as it is forced into several other frames that we have discussed.  Knowing, however that as philosophers we must seek to get behind these forms of thought,  I have thought it best in this book to avoid introducing it even temporarily.

* No;  you have not caught me this time.  The critics intimidate me just as much, whether philosophy concedes to them "real existence" or not.

** If we wish the assertion to mean more than the expression of a primitive form of thought, we say "really exists".

Eddington has a point.  Wading through Heidegger's Zein und Seit, one never does quite grasp what "Being" is.  Well, not as a concrete object. Then again, one can read Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic and still have no clear idea what "Beauty" is.  And frankly, the physicist who explains to me patiently and deliberately the tenets of quantum mechanics is just repeating so many words, to me.  Jargon, really.  The physicist insists the concept of quantum mechanics, or even Einsteinian physics, have reality.  I, ultimately, just have to accept that as true.

I've read a very detailed, very technical account of how an internal combustion engine actually manages to produce power.  The explanation went down to the molecular level of the combustion of the fuel, IIRC.  I'm sure it was soundly reasoned and based on the finest understanding of scientific principles and informed engineering.  It still just meant the car starts when the key turns and there's gas in the tank, and all the systems of the automobile function as they were designed to.  It doesn't really make it clearer to me that the engine exists, or that the power it generates has reality.

These are, in other words, enormously slippery concepts.  As I often tell my students, I can't bring abstract concepts like "Justice" or "Beauty" into the classroom so they can identify them the next time they see them.  What is "Justice"?  Where does it come from?  What does it look like?  How do you define it?

Lawyers and politicians have been working on that one for centuries, and so far the closest we've gotten is that we know it when we don't see it.  Could I ever meaningfully say that Justice exists?  And would I mean it in the same way as saying that a platypus exists?

What Eddington is encountering is what Wittgenstein called "language games."  We use words in different ways depending on so many different things:  culture, context, meaning.  And "meaning" is hardly what's confined to the dictionary (which is not the objective arbiter of language after all; dictionaries since Samuel Johnson's day have only recorded the way words are used.  "Awful" for example, once meant "full of awe."  But even if a dictionary insisted that was the only meaning of the word today, we'd consider it a pretty awful definition.).  Wittgenstein argued this confusion arising from such freewheeling use of language as if it were the stuff of reality is what leads to most philosophical conundrums, like:  "How far is up?" or "How long is a piece of string?"

Okay, okay, but seriously, folks.  Take my wife:  please!

I digress....

We can say, for example, that a stone exists.  That's a perfectly sensible English statement which does not seem immediately contradictory or strange, especially if the stone is large and you just stubbed your toe on it.  Clearly it exists apart from your perception of it, or you wouldn't have run your toe against it in the first place (you didn't perceive it until your toe struck it).  But would we also say a stone has existence?  Even if we aren't quite sure just how to define "existence," we'd hesitate to use this sentence, this concept.  Conversely, we can easily say a unicorn does not exist.  Yet it isn't the same thing as saying a unicorn doesn't have existence.

I mean, neither does a stone.

Now it's a bit clearer, to be fair to Heidegger, why Being and existence don't get squarely defined in his philosophy; especially since his philosophy is all about the nature of Being and existence.

What, then, is "existence"?  What do we mean when we say we have existence?  Eddington insists it is "primitive thought" (by which he means to be pejorative.  But "primitive" is almost as acceptable in discourse today as the "n-word" is.  It's a bit too harsh, in other words.  We stumble over it.  Well, I do, anyway.  "Primitive thought" is too simplistic a concept for me, too dismissive. It smacks of arrogance.), but is it really "primitive" (or just simplistic) to think in terms of existence or non-existence, of either/or?

A stone exists, or it doesn't.  And it has existence; or it doesn't.  Now, whether that gets us anywhere worthwhile, whether that tells us anything worth knowing, is worthy of debate.  But it is primitive to examine the issue?  I don't think so.

Do humans have existence?  We're back to Kierkegaard's question; because, if we have it, what is it we have, and how do we prove it?  How do we establish existence?

But what is this unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man [sic] and his self-knowledge? It is the unknown. But it is not a human being, insofar as he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let us call this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it. It hardly occurs to the understanding to want to demonstrate that this unknown (the god) exists. If, namely the god does not exist, then of course it is impossible to demonstrate it. But if he does exist, then of course it is foolishness to want to demonstrate it, since I, in the very moment the demonstration commences, would presuppose it not as doubtful--which a presupposition cannot be, inasmuch as it is a presupposition--but as decided, because otherwise I would not begin, easily perceiving that the whole thing would be impossible if he did not exist. If, however, I interpret the expression "to demonstrate the existence of the god" to mean that I want to demonstrate that the unknown, which exists, is the god, than I do not express myself very felicitously, for then I demonstrate nothing, least of all an existence, but I develop the definiteness of a concept. 

I start there not because I'm interested in establishing the existence of God; but because S.K. gets us to this question of establishing existence at all, through the arguments about the existence of God.  As the argument goes:  if what you seek to establish as existing doesn't have existence, then it is impossible to establish that it exists (which takes us back to my example of the stone.  But even if the stone exists, are we now willing to say the stone has existence?  If so, what do we mean by that, now?).  If it does exist, then why demonstrate it?  From there the argument slides into the establishment of a concept ("the unknown"), and away form our purposes.  But it is still a good prologue to what follows:

It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists--worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

And our stone comes back for us to stumble over again!  It cannot be proven that a stone exists, or, in our example, has existence.  But we can establish that this thing which exists (look!  It's in my hand!  Even now it breaks forth!  Can you not perceive it?!) is a stone.  We can, in other words, identify it.  We can name it.

Never underestimate the power of naming.  Many have pointed out over the centuries it was the first power given to Adam.

But to prove existence, as Kiekegaard says, I continually start with the presupposition of existence.  This is, among other things, the bedrock principle of existentialism, although Sartre used it to turn against essentialism (which is another line of argument entirely).  Our question is this: if we are presupposing existence, what, precisely, are we presupposing?  That this stone in my hand exists because it has mass, weight, breadth, hardness?  Is that all it takes to exist?  Is that what existence comes down to?

Does the mind exist, then?  Eddington speaks approvingly of thoughts existing in the mind.  Does the mind have mass, weight, breadth, hardness?  Does a thought?

And we don't get any closer to a definition if we choose to settle on a single individual as our example:

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advance interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed he exists.

 Kierkegaard points out that existence can never be demonstrated.  But, again, this presupposes a definition of existence which is not itself clearly defined.  We've come quite a long way and gotten no further along.  Or maybe we have.

Existence seems to be a rather important property, because I gather that one of the main sources of division between different schools of philosophy is the question of whether certain things exist or not.  But I cannot even begin to understand these issues, because I can find no explanation of the term "exist".

Actually, the distinction between the Continental and Anglo-American schools of Western philosophy is not over whether "things" exist or not, but over whether existence itself is an important concept worth considering.  Kierkegaard follows the older line, the one that began to fall apart into the two schools we have now when European philosophy tripped over the stone of the Scot David Hume, and the German Immanuel Kant put the pieces back together again.  But before that split took hold and produced the flowering of the two schools, the consensus was pretty much here:  "Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated."

Indeed, why should it be?  How could it be?

We are up against the pretty problem of not being able to find what you don't know what to look for.  It's a basic issue in science:  if you don't know to look for it, you'll never find it.  If we don't know how to identify existence, to explain the term we are using, how are we ever going to demonstrate it?

Or are we stuck with Potter Stewart's definition of pornography?

Definitions are important in discussions.  Then again, Socrates should have taught us by now the perils of definition.  Just before his trial he meets the priest Euthyphro, who has brought an action for impiety against his father, whose negligence (and, we would say, cruelty, but we are anachronisms here) has resulted in the death of a slave.  Impressed with Euthyphro's piety, Socrates asks the priest to explain the concept to him, so that he, too (Socrates) will understand.

By the end of the dialogue Euthyphro has abandoned his suit and fled the scene, as the only possible way to escape Socrates' persistent destruction of every definition Euthyphro boldly puts forward.  Kierkegaard identified precisely this kind of "Socratic method" as the "Concept of Irony," and pointed out just how ultimately destructive and nihilistic the pursuit is.  Not, mind, without saying it has a value; just not the value we usually think it has.

So there are perils to insisting that definitions will give us, finally and precisely, clarity.  Definitions will only establish the boundaries of how we use a word and, as Socrates pointed out with poor Euthyphro as his foil (then again, Euthyphro is arrogant and we enjoy seeing his pompous balloon getting punctured), we use words in such contradictory and ultimately conflicting ways, and usually just to justify what we already want to think, or do.

Which sounds terribly cynical; but sometimes such cynicism can be the beginning of wisdom.

Oh, that you would rend this keyboard

Sorry, I think I left my keys over there. Won't be a minute...

and make me step away from it!

Something I  read over the weekend has prompted me to examine again the issue of the "proof of God's existence."  I can't find it now but the concept is a perennial chestnut, so here goes:

The Gospel According to John, Chapter 12:

Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.
 
“Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.Father, glorify your name!”
 

Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.
Jesus said, This voice was for your benefit, not mine.

Isaiah 64:

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
    that the mountains would tremble before you!
² As when fire sets twigs ablaze
    and causes water to boil,
come down to make your name known to your enemies
    and cause the nations to quake before you!
³ For when you did awesome things that we did not expect,
    you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.
⁴ Since ancient times no one has heard,
    no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
    who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.
Exodus 19:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the cloud descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently. As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him.

Exodus 20:

When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”

So, moving from bottom to top, when people accepted the existence of God, they really wanted God to keep God's distance, and they knew God's presence as theophany (thunder and lightning).  Or they wished God would produce some thunder and lightning because, you know, prove it to them non-believers!  Or they heard the thunder, and weren't sure what it was, even though it was solely for their benefit.


And things are so much different now?


If God's existence were established as firmly as the keyboard my fingers are dancing over...oh, wait, that's the wrong use of the concept.  Category error, sorry.  Let me start again.


If God's existence were established as firmly as my own existence...oh, wait, I can't do that, either.  If I don't exist, the proof is pointless.  If I do exist, the proof is not evident.  I can prove my identity:  that I am the person named on my driver's license (if it isn't a fake), that I'm the person named on the diplomas and certificates and licenses on my wall (if they aren't fakes), but I could be Don Draper or Dick Whitman and still exist; except you might say you don't really know who I am.   But could I prove my existence?  I don't know how to do that.

It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists--worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, back to Johannes Climacus again, but how do you get away from him when this is the topic for discussion?  The real question is:  if I am going to prove the existence of a person, I first have to identify what existence is.  If I cannot reason from conclusion to existence (that, by the way, is the form of argument Socrates used to establish the existence of the soul; if you reject that, what form is available to prove your own existence?), but must reason from existence to conclusion, then I have to presuppose existence, or do without it altogether.

Either way, I end up unable to prove anything about existence.  At most, we wind up here:

 If, however, I interpret the expression "to demonstrate the existence of the god" to mean that I want to demonstrate that the unknown, which exists, is the god, than I do not express myself very felicitously, for then I demonstrate nothing, least of all an existence, but I develop the definiteness of a concept.

My existence is not a concept merely, but a reality.  How do I prove it, however?  I am known; or at least knowable.  As Climacus points out, God is the unknown (to the philosopher; to the non-believer); to demonstrate anything about that is to develop the definiteness of a concept.  But concepts can never be definite; if there's anything in human history that has been established, it is that.

So what does this business of the "proof of God's existence" have to do with anything?  If God's existence could be established beyond doubt or question (a fictional occurrence, I grant you), we would still face the situation of John 12, where some hear the voice of an angel, some hear thunder, and no one realizes, as the narrator says, that it is the voice of God.  God speaks to Moses but the people of Israel hear thunder and see a cloud shot through with lightning.  Isaiah wants God to make a demonstration that will convince people even in a day when we think everyone was convinced, and yet God declines to do so.

The entire question is a rubbish argument, a 19th century holdover still resting on the idea that without God humanity cannot be moral or even behave itself, and the God required for that is the Cosmic Thunderer who will smite the unbeliever and the immoral actor, even though the God of the Hebrew Scriptures never smote one unbeliever or one immoral actor, even among the Israelis at the time of the Exile.  This is why atheists get so worked up about moral systems that don't require a deity to make the systems moral; they are still fighting the 19th century fight while everyone has moved on into the 21st century.  Does God exist?  It isn't even a serious question.  Does it matter, is the only legitimate answer.  If God did exist, would you live your life any differently?

Depends on the nature of this God you think exists, doesn't it?  If you think God could only exist as Cosmic Punisher waiting to smack you down for failing to mind your moral "p's" and "q's", then I'd say no, God does not exist.  Not that God.  Does a God exist who wants only to save you from hellfire and damnation?  No, I'd say that God does not exist, either. Does God exist who wants to be in relationship with you, because truth is a relationship?  Yes, I think that God does exist.  Doesn't say much about the nature of God, but it's a beginning, and it's an improvement on those other concepts.  There are several Gods of human conception; well, they all are, aren't they?  What else could the conception of God be, except human?  If God was wholly of inhuman conception, we couldn't begin to conceive God at all; so that limitation is hardly the silver bullet that slays the werewolf so many atheists think it must be.  But there are several Gods of human conception, and I suppose we could argue over which exist, and which don't.

But I'm far more interested (though you wouldn't know it, would you, from how I go on) in the more important question:  how should we then live?  And the "we" is more and more the important word in that question.  Because truth is a relationship; which means truth involves "we."

It's that point that drives the atheists crazy.  They think they're being left out.  They think the only way in is to knock this relationship down; to establish that is a relationship with an illusion, because only that which is known empirically can be true.

Which is funny, because there's nothing empirical about love, yet we've devoted whole industries to it, reshaped lives because of it, created art works in praise of it; and while no one can establish it empirically, I've yet to meet anyone who is taken seriously for doubting its existence.

To the cloud!

"I believe in you."

"I believe in God."

Two statements that should say the same thing, but that couldn't be more different in meaning.  And the difference lies, not in the prepositional phrase, but in the verb.  What do we mean when we say "I believe"?

We don't mean the same thing as "trust" or "faith," which are synonymous terms.  If I trust you, it doesn't necessarily mean I believe in you.  You might say I can't trust God unless I believe in God, but you've skipped right over the issue and again committed the error of using the term without examining the meaning.  So, if I believe in you, what do I mean?

I mean, at a minimum, to be supportive.  Obviously I don't mean the same thing when I say "I believe in God."  But what do I mean?  That I assent to certain propositions about the nature of a deity?  But do those propositions have to include "existence" in the way that word is commonly understood?  Can the concept include "being"?  And then, what does "being" mean?  If I say "I believe in God," am I saying I believe in a anthropomorphic deity, like Zeus or Apollo?  Or am I saying something about a more complex concept, a concept better grasped by the word "unknowing" than by definition (one of the ultimate acts of knowing)?

We wander off immediately, you see, into the concept "God".  What do we mean by "God"?  Some insist a bearded old man, a la Blake's engravings.  Did Blake even believe in such a concept of God? Or was it simply an artistic contrivance, a convenient shorthand the way a man in a coat (we'd call it a  robe, not meaning the kind of bathrobe or house robe we use today; "coat" is the Biblical translation) with long brown hair, a brown beard, and a kindly expression.  No one knows what Jesus of Nazareth looked like, but most Americans are convinced they know him when they see him, especially when he's with little white children.

I suppose we could settle that concept first, but the problem then is, we have to decide whether or not God "exists."  And the problem is, how do you define "exist"?  No, seriously:  does the computer screen you are reading this on "exist"?  In the same sense as your family, friends, co-workers?  You?  What do we mean by "exist"?  A stone exists, but not the way a cat does, and a cat doesn't quite exist the way my wife does.  The usual distinction is that my wife (if not the cat) has being.  But what does "being" mean?

And then apply that concept to what Tillich called the "Ground of Being"?  He didn't come up with that label to make God ineffable or more a product of philosophical rumination.  He was pointing to the fact that God as Creator is also source of life, or existence (which may be two different things).  God is the source of being (not Being, that's Heidegger, and perhaps a whole 'other complication) and so God cannot have being, any more than your thoughts mean you have thinking.  You think, and you have thoughts, and so you are the ground of your thoughts.  But you are not thought; that would be a reductive argument, indeed.

It's not an elegant argument, but the terms of the discussion are abstract and somewhat obtuse.  We can do three hundred pages on being and existence right here, or we can get to the nub for our purposes:  God is not a human being with superpowers.  God is God; Creator of the Universe and Ground of Being.  God is "I am."  God is without referent.  You are the children of your parents; the colleague of your co-workers; the brother/sister/cousin/niece/nephew in your family; mother or father or spouse.  You are in community with others, you know yourself by who you are not as much as by who you are.  Your "existence" is not merely a matter of identity, because if you lose your identity you do not cease to exist.  You may lose your "mind" to dementia, but you will still exist in the world, still be a person, still deserve the respect accorded to persons.

You are you even if you are not you, because you are a human being among human beings.  God is "I am."  God is without referent, even without peer.  God is not Zeus with a wife and other gods to argue with; God has no father Chronos, no Titans to fight for control, needs no other god to drive the sun across the earth or welcome souls to Hades or to stir the waves or carry messages or model beauty.  It is perhaps more correct to speak of God apophatically, since everything said about God directly is sure to be wrong.

Now, what do I believe in?

I don't even know what's being said when someone says "I believe in God."  To me it's an empty phrase, like "God Bless America."  Is that a command?  A prayer?  A wish?  A declaration of national pride?  Is it performative, or declarative, or simply decorative?  Saying "I believe in God" is not the same thing as saying "I believe in luck," or "I believe that children are our future" (well, what else is except the ones who will carry one after we're gone?).  "I believe in God"?  In what?  And what does it mean in that sentence to "believe"?

This is the kind of thing I wish I could crowd source.  Because, really, "I believe in God"?  I might as well be saying I believe in mac and cheese.  Which is not to say I reject the very idea of God and want an argument for God's "existence" (what a silly notion).  But to say "I believe in God" is to say nothing.  It's a null set.  It's a sentence without content, a sign that doesn't signify.

Isn't it?

"A description of something that actually takes place in human life"

Somebody's gonna have to clean this up!

Suppose I say that the body will rot, and another says "No. Particles will rejoin in a thousand years, and there will be a Resurrection of you." If some said: "Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?" I'd say: "No." "Do you contradict the man?" I'd say: "No."
...
Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgment," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near. It isn't a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: "You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein."
...
Whether something is a blunder or not--it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another.

So recently I wandered over to Crooked Timber, where a post announced that Robert Bellah had died.  Bellah is a very important sociologist in the field of sociological studies of religion, and while I don't think such a science (or any science) is dispositive of truth (I'm not, after all, a positivist), I studied Bellah's work in seminary (where I was first introduced do it) and recognized its importance.

And after all, Crooked Timber is an "academic" blog where often the talk is academic gossip of one sort or another, but just as often it is enlightening and informative.  But about the third comment in was a long quote from Bellah critiquing Dawkins's work in The God Delusion.  It wasn't a brilliant critique, but it was eminently defensible; and yet because it was about "religion" it was also eminently foolish, at least in the eyes of the commenter; who wondered why any information arising from an "age of ignorance" (i.e., any time before the Enlightenment) was taken seriously as anything except the prattle of stupid children.

I lodged my complaint with such stupidity and then, feeling I'd actually left a turd in the punchbowl (well, a second one, anyway), I decamped. (I'm argumentative, and that's not always the best way to behave; especially at someone else's blog.  It's too much like walking into a strange bar and picking a fight with the biggest guy in the bar, just because you can.)  But the experience prompted me to re-read Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion, and that's where I found this comment by A.C. Grayling:

Terry Eagleton charges Richard Dawkins with failing to read theology in formulating his objection to religious belief, and thereby misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one’s time to address what is built on those premises (LRB, 19 October). For example, if one concludes on the basis of rational investigation that one’s character and fate are not determined by the arrangement of the planets, stars and galaxies that can be seen from Earth, then one does not waste time comparing classic tropical astrology with sidereal astrology, or either with the Sarjatak system, or any of the three with any other construction placed on the ancient ignorances of our forefathers about the real nature of the heavenly bodies. Religion is exactly the same thing: it is the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers, which (mainly through the natural gullibility of proselytised children, and tragically for the world) survives into the age in which I can send this letter by electronic means.

Eagleton’s touching foray into theology shows, if proof were needed, that he is no philosopher: God does not have to exist, he informs us, to be the ‘condition of possibility’ for anything else to exist. There follow several paragraphs in the same fanciful and increasingly emetic vein, which indirectly explain why he once thought Derrida should have been awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge.

Eagleton is no philosopher?  Neither, I would say, is Grayling (and yes, I know who Grayling is).  "Religion...is the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers"?  Did his education stop in the early 19th century?  He falls, frankly, into the positivist error Eagleton points out in his review:

 Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

In a classic example of  a language game (which was the beginning of the end of positivism), Eagleton presents a compact summation of basic theological doctrine, and Grayling swipes it aside as meaningless because it is the product of  "the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers."  They are simply talking past each other, with Grayling refusing to give Eagleton any credence, lest Grayling have to learn something he doesn't know.  He might must as well have said an "age of ignorance;" his would be no less ignorant a remark.  And it fails entirely to get at the substance of what Eagleton said, because Grayling denies there is any substance to what Eagleton says; because theology is the equivalent of astrology or phrenology (which was actually considered a science).  Need one point out the extremist Christians who make the same claims about science?  And the difference in premises between Grayling and the science denier is substance?  or simply subject?

But if we take Grayling more seriously than he takes Eagleton (and dismissing an argument by declaring it without merit is not a product of rigorous logic; it is simply letting your knee-jerk be your answer), we are back  to the argument all atheists think is fundamental, but it is so only to them:  that the "existence of God" is first and foremost the question of religion.  And yet what "existence" means is always presumed, never defined.  Do you exist?  How would you prove it?  You can say you are alive.  You can even prove your identity (if I accept the indicia of papers and photos as proof.  But are they?  If you have amnesia, does a driver's license convince you the name by your picture is yours?  If you present a fake ID, does that prove your identity?  Or just prove your assertion of identity?  I ask simply to know how narrowly we can define this subject.).  Do you exist?  What does it mean to exist?  Is it the same as life itself?  Is it more, less, or neither?

I ask merely for clarification.  What is this concept "existence" and how does one "have" it?  Do I have it as I have the computer before me?  As I have a wife, a daughter, a life, a job?  I can easily define my family and friends in terms of relationships.  Do I have a relationship to existence?  If so, who is the "I" having this relationship, and what is "existence" that I can, or even must, have a relationship with it?

What is "existence"?  Is it "being"?  Then what is that?

We seem to be going in circles, and yet I am told this is the critical question:  if God's existence cannot be established, how do I believe?  But how do I establish existence at all?  Do atoms exist?  Do they exist as my daughter exists?  Her existence is bounded by life and death; does an atom die?  Her existence is bounded by memory; and when no one remembers her, does she cease to exist?

Where do I go to get these questions answered?  Science?  Atheism?

As Kierkegaard pointed out, I can identify a man named Napoleon with a set of actions, and thereby establish the identify of Napoleon with an individual.  But does that mean Napoleon exists, or did?  And what does "exist" mean in that sentence?  That he was "real"?  If a Turing Test program convinces me that a computer program is a human being, does that program have "existence"?  Why?  Why not?

But it's the positivism that is the falsehood.  God must "exist" before anything about the nature of God can be posited?  Why?  Because God must be a being among other beings, and therefore an individual, and therefore a supernatural individual, like Zeus or Apollo?  Does Grayling understand the first thing about monotheism, or radical monotheism?  He doesn't, because he says he doesn't have to:  prove God's existence first, then he'll consider the rest.  I might as well ask him to prove the existence of an atom before I accept the conclusions of modern physics.  What would he show me?  How would he do it?  If I don't accept the existence of the atom, what proof will persuade me?  Eagleton specifically says:  "God is not a celestial super-object of divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in.  Theologians do not think [God] is either inside or outside the universe...."  No, Grayling doesn't touch on that language, on Eagleton's attempts to make a summary of bog-standard Christian theology.  He simply assumes it's bosh and derides Eagleton for not thinking so, too.

Such are the intellectual arguments engaged by most Anglo-American philosophers.  The presumption is an atheistic one; not just a disinterest of denial of complete knowledge, but a denial that such knowledge is even possible.   It is also a blinkered and frightfully limited engagement with reality, which Eagleton describes in terms very familiar to anyone familiar with Anglo-American culture:

 There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.

 Dawkins and Grayling replace insight with platitudes, and understanding with cliches.  And they don't wind up all that far away from Rep. Reid Ribble.    There is, as ever, an intellectul argument to be had (but clearly neither Grayling nor Dawkins are equipped for it), but the ultimate question is still:  "How should we then live?"  And if the answer is "As a self-content and self-righteous Oxford don, comfortable with the products of global capitalism and critiquing only straw men of your own creation and only on purely intellectual grounds," then I really have no respect for you.

As if, of course, my opinion on such things matters to anyone else.

There are many valid critiques to religious practice and even arising from religious history:  I learned about many of them in seminary.   I'm also familiar with every published argument over the existence of God, and the refutations of each argument.  But this flat rejection based on an ignorance proud of what it knows nothing about turns Western philosophy on its head. Socrates famously declared that he knew nothing, and so asked those who claimed knowledge to teach him.  What he usually did, of course, was prove they understood less than Socrates did (and he also proved understanding was far more important than knowledge.  The foundations of Western philosophy rested on sophia, not techne; since the Industrial Revolution and the Triumph of the Empiricists, that has shifted.).   Consider the classic syllogism:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore:  Socrates is mortal.

Is it necessary for "Socrates" to exist, to make this syllogism sound?  No; because the syllogism makes no claim to either identity or existence; it speaks merely to a form of reasoning.  Logic cannot establish the validity of the propositions in that syllogism; it can only say that the syllogism itself is soundly constructed, and the conclusion arising from it is valid, within the system of logic.  Does logic automatically apply to the world?  No more than math does.  As I've pointed out to my students before, 1+1=2, except in biology where it =3, 4, perhaps even hundreds.  In biology individuals do not vanish into a new whole on the other side of the equation:  if they did, biology itself would soon come to a halt.  Granted, it isn't precisely the same thing to say that 1+1=2 is to say one male plus one female =?.  But then again, for most species, without one of each, there is never another; and that other is always (at least) the third.  You have to be very precise about how you discuss matters.

Is love, for example, analyzable by logic?   Is desire reducible to a mathematical formula, or to be best understood as the product of genes?  Do I love the music of Bach, or of polyphony and chant, because I am genetically predisposed to do so?  I find it quite unnecessary to explain it in those terms, and I'm not sure any such explanation would make sense, as well as a mockery of Occam's Razor. 

But back to Socrates and the syllogism:  is it really necessary for me to prove the existence of Socrates before I prove that Socrates is mortal?  No, because we are all familiar with the class of "man" and the concept of mortality, and since no one has yet experienced an immortal man (even Jesus died), we have no problem with the conclusion of the syllogism.  What, then, of the reality (or existence) of God? Can we posit that God is an experience like the experience of mortality among men?  No; by definition, God is beyond all categories of human experience.  God is infinite, God is eternal, God is creator ex nihilo, God's very speech is the act of creation; etc., etc.. etc.  All of this is beyond human experience, if not human understanding (to the extent it is, we enter into the realm of negative theology; let's keep this simple).  So God is impossible?

Perhaps.  An unstoppable force striking an immoveable object is impossible, since we can't posit the reality of one or the other.  But, as Wittgenstein said of Christianity:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.--Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994).

"A description of something that actually takes place in human life."  If that experience is foreclosed to you, is God impossible?  Well, if you can't love my wife the way I do, is my love for her impossible?  It is beyond your experience.  You have only my word for it.  No visible manifestation of my love is proof of its reality.  In fact, there is no proof of my love for her at all.  You either accept it, or you don't.  Does it, then, exist?  How would I prove it to you?  And more importantly, why would I bother?

 For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.' The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that :om. For we see now that we have been using the word 'miracle' in a relative and an absolute sense. And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: lt is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt as to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don’t mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Wittgenstein uses the term "existence" in that passage, but does he mean it in the same was as we say animals have existence?  No, of course not.  But reading the passage carefully, we can say with Wittgenstein that "...we see now that we have been using the word 'existence' in a relative and an absolute sense," because "The truth is that the scientific way of looking at existence is not the way to look at it as being."  In fact, I'm not sure there is a scientific way to look at existence.  And if we use the word "existence" in both a relative and an absolute sense, we need to nail down which sense we mean when we ask "Does God exist?"  The question is not:  is God's existence absolute, but rather:  is existence an attribute God must absolutely have?  And if it is, what does "existence" mean in that context?

Does science even deal with questions of existence in any but the relative sense?  That is, the platypus or the coelocanth exists in the relative sense that it can be shown to be present in the world; but in the absolute sense, existence requires neither platypi nor coelocanths.  Is there an absolute sense in which existence itself must be present; that the world cannot not exist, therefore it must exist, therefore there is an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing?

And yet, again:  what is more important to us?  Scientific advancement?  Or understanding our own existence?  As Terry Eagleton points out, there is nothing in Richard Dawkin's philosophy (or lack thereof) which compels him to consider questions of justice or equality (or lack thereof) extant in the world, although Dawkins does get quite worked up about the science curricula in American public schools (so his world does extend to at least this side of the pond).  But he's quite complacent about economic injustice and social inequality, so long as it doesn't affect him.  And what is more important to the rest of us:  that Dawkins is right in his science and his atheism?  Or that we consider the substance of our own existence, and what we are doing with our own lives on this planet, among all these people?

How should we then live?  And do we expect science to provide a satisfactory answer to that question?  Or would the right answer to that question explode all the books in the world, including those of Messrs. Dawkins and Grayling?

P.S.  The sculpture in the photo is "The Shattering of the Vessels" by Anselm Kiefer.  It's one of the sculptures I used to admire at to the St. Louis Art Museum.   Follow the link if you want to read about it.

This picture is just to give you a sense of scale.  And no, the pictures don't do it justice at all.

"Help thou my unbelief."

Pretty much like that....

"Belief," as in "Do you believe in the existence of God?", is only an issue for the church (or Christianity) if the baseline is atheism:  i.e., God cannot exist and cannot be "believed."

But most people are not atheists.  If they are indifferent to the claims of Christianity (for which apparently "belief" is paramount), then they are equally indifferent to the claims of atheism.  Both espouse the centrality of theistic thinking, one positively, one negatively; at least, that's the argument. And then it's just a matter of either/or, of who has the best argument.  And besides adherents to the arguments, who's interested in that?  Yes, there are people on the intertubes whose motivating purpose seems to be arguing about anything and everything, but especially politics.  Even most politicians, however, don't go in to politics to argue (though that seems to be their raison d'être since at least the "Gingrich Revolution"); they to it to serve in government (or line their pockets, if you want to be cynical).  There were once people who served in government to do what was right, generally.  Two names come to mind from the Congress:  Lyndon Johnson, in the Senate, and Sam Rayburn, in the House.  Turns out they were instrumental in helping Hawaii become a state, by overcoming objections from Representatives and Senators from the South.  Of course, they accomplished some other worthy goals, too.

They didn't do it because government was good or evil, was intrusive or exploitative, was a "deep state" or a "derp state."  They didn't do it because government was either/or.  Now, however, everything is either/or, to a pitched degree.  It's not the kind that is different, it's the degree.  There has always been a struggle between believers and non-believers; it's the degree of emphasis that's the issue.

Much as Christianity specifically has taken empiricism as the baseline for human understanding and epistemology (Christianity is on much sounder footing in Western philosophy connecting with phenomenology), so the discussion of religion in Western culture has taken atheism as the baseline, against which theism must assert its bona fides.  That is completely the wrong argument.  In fact, the problem is the diagnosis that an argument is what will "fix" the "problem" of the church.  Contrary to what may be common experience, people don't go to church to argue; and solving the "argument" of atheism v. theism won't bring people flocking back to church as if this were the 1950's redux.

People go to church because church means something to them, and because they find people of like mind there, people they can be friends with.  The Church of Meaning and Belonging can't get a foothold without the Church of Belonging existing first, and the Church of Belonging can't exist if people don't find people there they want to share time with.  Then there is the question of how they share their time, and why they share their time.

But why did "belief" become the dividing line of our thinking?  Why must we stand on one side or the other, with one side "wrong" and the other "right"?

Slate ran an interesting article about the "march for science," which turned on this concern:

Instead, the march revealed the glaring dissonance of opposing that trough of ignorance by instead accepting a cringe-worthy hive-mind mentality that celebrates Science as a vague but wonderful entity, what Richard Feynman called “cargo cult science.” There was an uncomfortable dronelike fealty to the concept—an oxymoronic faith that information presented and packaged to us as Science need not be further scrutinized before being smugly celebrated en masse. That is not intellectually rigorous thought—instead, it’s another kind of religion, and it is perhaps as terrifying as the thing it is trying to fight.

What the article argues for, ironically, is a more scholarly approach to knowledge, but does so in part by citing that Feynman article where the scientist relies on the hoariest of shibboleths (the "Middle Ages" were ignorant, then came the enlightened salvation of the Renaissance!) to make his point.   Talk about "an uncomfortable drone like fealty to the concept."  But that's that point, one drummed into me in seminary more than anywhere else in my education:  what you cling to as certainty is your idol, your false god, your deity made in your image.  It's a useful hermeneutic of suspicion to keep before one, because the either/or of belief (either you do ("fool!") or you don't ("wise!")), is just such a dead piece of silent, eyeless stone.

Jump to the end of the quote there, and "cargo cult" is connected with the broader non-science of Western culture:  religion.   Because religion is not "intellectually rigorous thought."  Except, again, as I said, the most intellectually rigorous education I ever had was in seminary, where every assumption was challenged and no answers were given.  I seriously doubt any student of any science had their assumptions, presumptions, and conclusions challenged as thoroughly as that.  Even law school only challenged how I organized my thought and how I analyzed situations.  Once I learned to "think like a lawyer," I had made it through the barrier between the laity and the learned.  I left seminary knowing much more about the challenges than the certainties, much less inclined to "march" for religion than to consider the place of humans in the world they were busy making.

How many scientists are trained to think that way, trained to actually call in to question everything they have been told in lower-school science classes for decades is true?  I don't mean the basic concept of science v., say, alchemy or astrology, but the conclusions of scientific research, of scientific thought, of accepted scientific theory.  Not to question it because it is wrong, but to question it because you can't truly understand what you don't critically examine.

When it comes to belief, everybody just believes:  that's the real foundation of modern Western philosophy.  Not Descartes' cogito, but his conclusion that he had to rest his thought on his cogito:  if he didn't accept something as a given, he couldn't establish anything.  His ability to think escaped his hermeneutic skepticism only because, without that escape, all he had left was skepticism.  You have to accept some givens in order to postulate a system.  If you insist your ideas are not founded in a belief, then you are insisting it really is turtles all the way down.  How many scientists study philosophy in order to understand empiricism, the philosophical basis of the scientific method?  How many study phenomenology, or world religions, or even take a course in philosophy of religion?  How many study formal logic, philosophy of science, the history of philosophy?  And yet in my seminary studies I studied philosophy, history, absorbed information and thinking from anthropology and archaeology, studied languages and how language affects our understanding, our perceptions, our thinking; examined and developed hermeneutics, systems of interpretation and analysis.  Do scientists study any of this?  Or do they just study the field of science they are interested in?

That paper from Feynman about "cargo cults" doesn't display much more than a muddled, popular understanding of religion, history, and human culture.  Anthropology is the scientific study of human culture, but what Feynman knows about that subject seems to be the pop culture notion of a "cargo cult" being one-for-one mapping of non-scientific, i.e., "religious," thought.  Anthropologists wouldn't even engage that kind of discussion, because it is as ignorant as saying the planets are set in crystalline spheres rotating around the earth.  I know this, Richard Feynman apparently doesn't; yet he is lionized for his "knowledge."  Except, in certain areas, it should be spelled "nollij."

What's happening in modern American society is a dissolution of cultural bands that once held the center together.  At least it seems that way, though I'm not so sure those bands were ever so strong or binding as we imagine.  Most of us either remember the '50's, or take our starting point for American culture from there, and tacitly use it as our starting point for what we believe (v. what we know, in this context) about where we are now.   I've quoted Eliot's "Choruses from 'The Rock'" time and again, about culture falling apart because of motor cars; words he wrote almost 100 years ago now.  Cars mean nothing to us now, now it's cell phones and social media dividing us up.   But, as Howland Owl said of nuclear physics, the situation ain't so new, and it ain't so clear.

We despise ambiguity; we want certainty.  Many a scientist, or one scientifically trained, will outright reject or find reason to denigrate, Kuhn's ideas about science and "paradigms," because Kuhn introduces a conditional ambiguity into science.  Similarly Schrodinger's cat tells us, not that the cat is neither dead nor alive, but that we can't predict with accuracy the reality of the state of the cat, we can only observe it by opening the box.  The ambiguity is inherent in the position of not yet observing the contents of the rigged box.  We want certainty, but the paradox of Schrodinger's thought experiment is that we can't have it without intervening (opening the box).  Kuhn's ambiguity is that science is a human system, prompted and guided by human interests (and by the drunk under the streetlamp).  But science must partake of the divine, the true, even if that "true" is the cosmos itself.  We want to link our understanding of the cosmos to the cosmos so what we know what we know is "true."

We despise ambiguity; we want certainty.  If I say I know God in my life, I'm immediately charged, or understood, as saying "God exists."  We want that certainty because if God exists, then certain things must be true.  But saying "God exists" is not the same thing as saying "A platypus exists."  Surely it's odd to find a platypus in the wild, but the existence of the platypus means nothing to my life, to my culture, to my world.  To say "God exists" is to say something entirely different than to say "My daughter exists," even though that statement has more meaning for me personally (and for her).  I tend to agree with Tillich on this one:  that the concept "existence" or "To exist" can't really be applied to a concept like "God" (and already someone will think I've slipped a card from the middle of the deck by using the term "concept," but it is the right term in this conversation).  My father is dead, but does that mean my father doesn't exist?  If by exist you mean "alive," then no, he doesn't exist.  But his absence creates a presence that is still quite real for my mother, for my family, and the memories of him are no less real than they were when he was alive.  Let's face it, most of what we know about friends and family is memory, especially as they grow older and move on.  I have a large extended family I seldom see anymore, yet they exist for me even as more and more of them pass on. Not only in memory, but in me:  I am who I am because of friends and family.  I am my father's son, just as my daughter is his granddaughter.  "Exist" goes far beyond a name etched into a headstone, or simply still drawing breath.

We want certainty, and we cheat to get it.  God must "exist" as people do, as trees do, as platypi do; because that is existence as we know it.  Except it isn't, of course; a tree I don't know about still exists, whether I know about it or not (unless you are a Berkeleyian, and I don't think there are many of those left around, though I would never say they don't exist!).  But does a tree have existence?

Ambiguity is the heart and soul of thinking; which may be why we despise thinking so much.  Thinking never leads to certainty; it only leads to more questions.  So, ironically, to march for science is to march for uncertainty; and to not understand that is to abuse scientific reasoning as much as to declare certainty about God is to abuse Christianity.  Am I certain about God?  It is not a question I can answer, because it is not a valid question.  I have faith in God, which is to say I have trust in God.  Does that mean something to you?  Perhaps no more than if I say I love my wife.  I cannot prove that statement, but who asks me to?  People said Bill Clinton could not love his wife, when he betrayed her trust so often and so publicly.  People questioned how Hillary Clinton could love her husband, and in a simpler world perhaps they would have conformed to some expectations and divorced, or at least been publicly miserable about each other.  They didn't, and we all had to realize whether or not they loved each other was not for our determination.  No one asks if my love for my wife exists, but perhaps we could ask if it is true.  Again, how would I prove it?  I've known couples who loved each other even after their divorce, or without any benefit of marriage.  Do such externals prove something that cannot otherwise be true?  How do I establish that truth?  If you say I cannot love my wife unless I prove it, my first question will be:  what does "love" mean to you?  If you say I cannot believe in God until I prove God's existence, I have two questions for you:  what does the word "God" mean to you?  And what is "existence"?  Is it a property inherent in materiality, or a property of being?

You can see where this goes.  We use language too loosely.  We don't like to think about what we are saying, so busy are we to say it.  Buckminster Fuller reportedly spent a year in silence, trying to recover the proper use of language.  I'm not sure language is recovered in silence, so much as the use of it is discovered, perhaps even revealed (surely a revelation is at hand!) in usage.  Rather like life itself; even the desert fathers lived in community, not in solitary isolation.  If they had not contacted some other living soul, how would we know they were ever there?

Do I believe in God?  I do.  Do you understand what I mean by "believe" and "God"?  Probably not.  Do I communicate anything except confusion when I answer the question?  Undoubtedly so.

Such is the ambiguity of the current situation.

Either/Or: In Which God Dies (#2 in a series)

The central question of religion of philosophy in the 20th century and now the 21st seems to be the proof of the existence of God. This is the either/or on which so much rises or falls. Yet it's a curious pursuit, since we cannot prove the existence of a platypus or a ceolocanth: we can only produce an animal or a fish we can identify as a platypus or a coelocanth. We do not thereby prove it's "existence," but then the popular discourse seldom questions the definition of "existence" that it is demanding proof of. That way, of course, lies phenomenology: Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre and Levinas, and even, to some degree, deconstruction and Derrida. Too much idealism, and too Continental; so we content ourselves with equating existence with presence, and when adequate reports of the presence of platypi and coelocanths are obtained, we ask no more of them. No such reports of "God" can be obtained, of course, because all such reports are subjective, and none can produce an object for examination, so the "proofs" fail and the subject is considered closed against those who assert any faith at all.

The problem is one Johannes Climacus considered over 150 years ago, in a little noticed discussion of the issue. Climacus first puts the issue in the context of the paradox. He praises the paradox, asserting: "the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion, a mediocre fellow." But he quickly looks beyond that:

But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

There is a buried epistemological assumption there, one we should not glide over lightly: thought "discovers," in proper Hellenistic fashion (we will leave the Platonists and Aristotelians to thrash out whether it is truly "discovery," or merely "recovery", and move on). Hebraic epistemology, at least as it pertains to matters of the God of Abraham, does not depend on discovery, but rather on reception. It is the revelation that enlightens; knowledge of God is given, not found, is revealed, not unearthed. The shift is a small but important one; indeed, it is central to the question of the importance of the will.

Thought, Climacus points out, wants most to think something it cannot think. It wants, then, to be able to think the existence of that which it cannot know except through experience. It wants to be able to discover, for itself, irrefutable proof of that which is by definition not subject to such proof. We cannot establish the existence of a platypus, but we can identify a specific monotreme as a platypus. We can dissect it, study it, classify it, discard it, and never prove the existence of it. But since we cannot do these things with Deity, we discard it. We demand proof of Deity's existence, even as we cannot imagine what that proof would be. We want to think the thought we cannot think, even if thinking that thought would be the downfall of the thought itself. So here is the first problem: we set ourselves a task we know is impossible and then, when it cannot be done, we declare the subject of the impossible quest responsible, and declare the impossible, at the very least, the question that must be answered and, since it cannot be, content ourselves with our paradox. Our passion can never be satisfied, never reach the collision, never face its downfall: and of how many passions in our lives can the same be said? Is it any wonder we are so passionate about the proofs of God's existence, and the inability of any of them to satisfy?

But that is only the beginning, and it still establishes nothing; it still leaves the passion waiting expectantly for a fulfillment it knows can never be, that it doesn't even want. Let's pursue the question, and find not what it's establishment would mean, but what the inability to establish it means. We have put so much on that issue, we have staked everything on its outcome. Even if we really don't want to know the answer, what answer do we presume there could be?

But what is this unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man [sic] and his self-knowledge? It is the unknown. But it is not a human being, insofar as he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let us call this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it. It hardly occurs to the understanding to want to demonstrate that this unknown (the god) exists. If, namely the god does not exist, then of course it is impossible to demonstrate it. But if he does exist, then of course it is foolishness to want to demonstrate it, since I, in the very moment the demonstration commences, would presuppose it not as doubtful--which a presupposition cannot be, inasmuch as it is a presupposition--but as decided, because otherwise I would not begin, easily perceiving that the whole thing would be impossible if he did not exist. If, however, I interpret the expression "to demonstrate the existence of the god" to mean that I want to demonstrate that the unknown, which exists, is the god, than I do not express myself very felicitously, for then I demonstrate nothing, least of all an existence, but I develop the definiteness of a concept.

What is lurking here is the analytic/synthetic distinction from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Is "existence," in other words, an analytic truth (one where the truth is established solely through analysis of its meaning), or is it synthetic (one which "add[s] to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it, and which no analysis could possibly extract from it,” i.e., one which can be based on empirical facts about the world.). The common assumption is that existence is synthetic; but the proofs of the existence of "the god" all presume the statement is actually analytical. Small wonder the result of all of these efforts is an epistemological black hole.

"It is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists--worse still, for the brave souls who venture to do it, the difficulty is of such a kind that fame by no means awaits those who are preoccupied with it. The whole process of demonstration continually becomes something entirely different, becomes an expanded concluding development of what I conclude from having presupposed that the object of investigation exists. Therefore in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who indeed does exist, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated.

The demands for proof of God's existence, of course, presume existence can be proven, and once it can, then proof of God's existence cannot be far behind. But the proof of existence itself is still wanting. As Climacus points out:

If one wanted to demonstrate Napoleon's existence from Napoleon's works, would it not be most curious, since his existence certainly explains the works but the works do not demonstrate his existence unless I have already in advance interpreted the word "his" in such a way as to have assumed he exists.

Napoleon, of course, is not necessary to his works, but the god is presumed to have an absolute relation to the god's works. So perhaps that is the difference that allows a proof of the god to be formulated:

But then, what are the god's works? The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all. Or are the wisdom in nature and the goodness or wisdom in Governance right in front of our noses? Do we not encounter the most terrible spiritual trials here, and is it ever possible to be finished with all these trials? But I still do not demonstrate God's existence from such an order of things, and even if I began, I would never finish and also would be obliged continually to live in suspenso lest something so terrible happen that my fragments of demonstration would be ruined. Therefore, from what works do I demonstrate it? From the works regarded ideally--that is, as they do not appear directly and immediately. But then I do not demonstrate it from the works, after all, but only develop the ideality I have presupposed; trusting in that, I even dare to defy all objections, even those that have not yet arisen. By beginning, then, I have presupposed the ideality, have presupposed that I will succeed in accomplishing it, but what else is that but presupposing that the god exists and actually beginning with trust in him.

Is it any wonder Rudolf Bultmann wrote his magnum opus on John's gospel with John open before him, and Johannes Climacus open beside him?

When he was in Jerusalem at the Passover celebration, many believed in him once they saw with their own eyes the miracles he performed. But Jesus didn't trust himself to them, because he understood them all too well. He didn't need to know more about humanity; he knew what people were really like. John 2:23-25, SV.

So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, since they had seen everything he had done at the celebration in Jerusalem. (They had gone to the celebration too). Then he came back to Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine.

There was an official whose son was sick in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had returned to Galilee from Judea, he approached him and pleaded with him to come down and cure his son, who was about to die.

Jesus said to him, "You people refuse to believe unless you see portents [semeia] and miracles [terata]."John 4:45-48

"Now my life is in turmoil, but should I say, 'Father, rescue me from this moment'? No, it was to face this moment that I came. Father, glorify your name!" Then a voice spoke out of the sky: "I have glorified it and I'll glorify it further."

The crowd there heard this, and some people remarked that it had thundered, others than an angel had spoken to him.

"That voice did not come for me but for you," Jesus rejoined.--John 12:27-30

In fact, after reading Bultmann, one wonders if Kierkegaard didn't have John's gospel in mind when writing the Philosophical Fragments. The Johannine distinction between semeion and dunamis seems almost tailor made for the philosophical concerns of his namesake Climacus. Either we see signs, proof, irrefutable evidence, or we do not believe! "The works from which I want to demonstrate his existence do not immediately and directly exist, not at all." They are signs, but only if we already see what they point to. If we don't see that, we don't see the signs, either, except as objects. And objects, no more than signs, can speak to us, and overcome our ignorance, our doubt, our lack of knowledge. Either we already know, and the sign merely confirms it for us, or we do not know, and at most what we hear is...thunder. Was it an angel who spoke to Jesus? Why didn't anyone in the audience get even that sign right? If that sign cannot demonstrate, finally and absolutely, the existence of the god, what can?

Climacus would leave the matter here:

The paradoxical passion of the understanding is, then, continually colliding with this unknown, which certainly does exist but is also unknown and to that extent does not exist. The understanding does not go beyond this; yet in its paradoxicality the understand cannot stop reaching it and being engaged with it, because wanting to express its relation to it by saying that this unknown does not exist will not do, since just saying that involves a relation. But what, then, is this unknown, for does not its being the god merely signify to us that it is the unknown? To declare that it is the unknown because we cannot know it, and that even if we could know it we could not express it, does not satisfy the passion, although it has correctly perceived the unknown as frontier. But a frontier is precisely the passion's torment, even though it is also its incentive. And yet it can go no further, whether it risks a sortie through via negationis or via eminentiae.*

But that simply leaves us where we began; although it explains rather nicely the energy some bring to this discussion, so determined are they to resolve once and for all the existence of the unknown; a resolution, of course, which can never be reached, at least not by the understanding.

And how do we understand this?

When we attend to the debates of philosophers and theologians about faith we are struck by the fact that every participant, no matter how he assails the faith of others, expresses some confidence of his own. And then we further note that confidence is usually professed not in one object only but in several and that often the effort to state this faith moves in a kind of circle from a first object to a second and perhaps a third and back to the first. The common, usually unanalyzed, association of faith with such terms as democracy, the people and education, or nature, experience, and reason, in popular statements about the things we can rely on has its counterpart in the more careful analsyses of academicians.

An example in philosophy of this expression of a pluralistic and circular faith is offered by A.J. Ayeer's radical book, Language, Truth and Logic...."We rely," he writes, "on our senses to substantiate or confute teh judgments which are based on our sensations." This is indeed a faith, an expression of sheer trust in what is not sensibly perceived, since the continuity and unity of sense-experience is not something that is sensed....A kind of structure of faith emerges in his confession. He relies on science because he is loyal to human life, not his own merely; and because science is based on sense-experience which he trusts. There are three objects of faith here: sense-experience, science and human values. And faith moves in a kind of circle justifying reliance on each of these objects by reference to the others.

And where does this lead? Back to the either/or:

In the midst of all these questionings and arguments about faith; in the controversies of the religious sects and philosophical schools; among the contentions as defenders of this and that faith attack others with different beliefs, we become aware of a strange fact. Belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, fideilty and infidelity toward one another is present in all those who contend or agree with each other as they argue about faith. Defensiveness of one's own beliefs and suspicion of those with other beliefs, distrust of their intellectual ability or honesty accompany men [sic] in all their encounters with each other. Confessions of loyalty to values of one sort or another and of reliance upon powers, no less than the implicit and explicit confessions of doubt or confidence in one another can be heard in the midst of all these arguments and analyses. Belief and trust and fidelity and their opposites are forever present as active attitudes in the very subjects who make them the objects of their inquiry or disputation.

So:

"Questions about faith, about its relation to action, to sight and understanding, about its objects and circular movements are important to us only because we have previously been required to answer the questions of faith."

When we are reduced to the either/or, the question of faith is put before us, and we have to answer. Faced with the unknown, we cannot explain it, but we cannot avoid it. And so we tried to see what would happen if we did without it; and so in the 1960's, a small group of theologians tried to proclaim God "dead." That theology alleged traced its roots back to Kierkegaard, to Bonhoeffer, even to Barth and to Tillich. There is a rather tedious revisionist history argument to be had about the length, breadth, purpose, and efficacy of the "God is dead" movement. But it actually asked a series of questions arranged around a central point: what is the metaphysical nature of God in a non-metaphysical world? One answer was to face the abandonment of metaphysics. The other answer was to reconsider the proposition that metaphysics had no meaning. And from that came reconsideration came phenomenology (out of German Idealism) and process theology (out of the ruins of the Principia Mathematica, following the acceptance of Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness.) But the clear question of the movement was: could we live without God? Could we reject the orthodox explanations of the nature of God (the heart of theology) and still practice theology? In what, in fact, did we have faith? What we could understand, if not see? Or what we could believe?

Was belief still an either/or? And could we ask that question without being accused of simply seeking publicity? (Ironically, Emory University shifted from an obscure college to a major research institution largely because of the notoreity of Thomas J.J. Altizer, a professor in the seminary at Emory, and one of the proponents of the controversial theology.) If we cannot prove God’s existence, must we necessarily lose faith in God? If we cannot establish the first object and then the second and perhaps a third and fourth, is it impossible for our faith to be generated by the movement among them? Or are: “Belief and trust and fidelity and their opposites …forever present as active attitudes in the very subjects who make them the objects of their inquiry or disputation”?, so that even the declaration that the ground of faith, God in this case, is dead, is gone, is simply another statement of belief and trust and fidelity or perhaps, its opposites? The argument of Climacus lingers, though: if God is “dead,” does that mean the unknown is no more? And if it cannot mean that, then how can the unknown, the god, be “dead,” destroyed, obsolete, removed from all further consideration? “But a frontier is precisely the passion's torment, even though it is also its incentive. And yet it can go no further, whether it risks a sortie through via negationis or via eminentiae.”

So for all that effort, where have we gone, except to the place where we began? And is it possible yet to know it for the first time?


*The via negationis is the way of negative theology; i.e., we can only speak of what God is not, not of what God is. It is a theology that has its own satisfactions and limitations, and while it much appealed to Luther, it is not the final word on the nature of God, or even the best word. The via emenentiae is the way of idealization, essentially the ground of Anselm's ontological "proof," i.e., that God is all that can be best possibly conceived, which ultimately is no more definitive nor satisfactory.

All the quotes from Philosophical Fragments, by the way, are from: Kierkegaard, Søren, Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985). Quotes from Niebuhr are: Niebuhr, H. Richard, Faith on Earth, ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press 1989).