Chapter 2 Longing to Make Sense of Things

Chapter 2





Longing to Make Sense of Things

In his brilliantly argued critique of the “New Atheism,” the leading British cultural critic Terry Eagleton ridicules those who think religion was invented to explain things.¹ Eagleton has in mind the faintly ludicrous overstatements of Christopher Hitchens on this matter, such as his brash assertion that, since the invention of the telescope and microscope, religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”² “Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place,” Eagleton retorts. “It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster, we can forget about Chekhov.” For Eagleton, believing that religion is a “botched attempt to explain the world” is on the same intellectual level as “seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”

Yet despite Eagleton’s correct judgement that there is far more to Christianity than an attempt to make sense of things, Christians do believe that certain things are true, that they may be relied upon, and that they illuminate our perceptions, decisions, and actions. Faith enables us to see things in different ways; it thus leads us to act in ways consistent with this. Whatever else the Christian faith might be, it is unquestionably concerned with believing that God exists and that this existence possesses significance for human identity, agency, and action. As the Harvard psychologist William James pointed out many years ago, religious faith is basically “faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.”³

Christians have always held that their faith makes sense in itself and makes sense of the enigmas and riddles of our experience. The gospel is like an illuminating radiance that lights up the landscape of reality, allowing us to see things as they really are. The French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil (1909–43) made this point especially well. Although a late convert to Christianity, she came to a deep appreciation of its power to shed light on our experience of the world.

If I light an electric torch at night out of doors, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world.⁴

The ability to illuminate reality is an important measure of the reliability of a theory and is an indicator of its truth.

So how do we proceed in developing theories about reality? How do we make looms that weave threads of facts into tapestries that show patterns? How do we construct frameworks of meaning? Sometimes we inherit them from our families, or we borrow them from our friends—a sort of intellectual hand-me-down, a way of thinking that has worked for someone else, and which we hope will work for us as well. Sometimes we absorb these from our culture. Everyone else seems to believe something: so we go with the flow and believe it as well. Most people I know believe that the twenty-first century began on 1 January 2000. In fact, it began on 1 January 2001.⁵ Yet nobody seems bothered about this discrepancy between popular opinion and fact.

We live in a culture in which some social assumptions and conventions seem to lie beyond challenge. However, the distinguished Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wisely criticizes our tendency to trust the “prevailing ideological fashion of the day whose commonality is taken for the proof of its sense.”⁶ The prevalence of a belief may not be a reliable indicator of its truth, but simply a reflection of transient intellectual or cultural fashions. What seems to be permanently and globally accepted today is often discarded as an outmoded way of thinking tomorrow. Postmodernism, for example, has inverted many of the seemingly unassailable judgements of modernity, thus opening up a significant generational difference within contemporary Western thought. There’s nothing wrong with critically evaluating the ideas we find around us. The problems start when we simply accept what we are told and refuse to think for ourselves.

Yet there is an alternative to passively absorbing our cultural and intellectual environments: we can develop our own way of thinking, steer our own way, and sort things out for ourselves. So how might we go about doing this? A classic approach to this question was set out by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). He termed his approach “abduction,” although in recent years it has become more widely known as “inference to the best explanation.” It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy for investigating the world that is characteristic of the natural sciences. So how does it work?

Peirce sets out the process of thinking that leads to the development of new scientific theories or ways of thinking about reality as follows:

Abduction is the process by which we observe certain things and then work out what intellectual framework might make sense of them. The great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes uses this same method, although he mistakenly calls it “deduction.” Sometimes, Peirce suggests, abduction “comes to us like a flash, as an act of insight.” Sometimes, it comes about through slow, methodical reflection as we try to generate every possibility that might make sense of what we observe.

Peirce gives close thought to how scientists develop their ideas and identifies this process as underlying the scientific method. Science begins by assembling a series of observations, then goes on to ask what framework of interpretation makes most sense of what is observed. It might be a hand-me-down, a theory borrowed from an earlier age. Or it might be a completely new way of thinking. The question that needs to be answered is this: How good is the fit between theory and observation? The phase “empirical fit” is often used to refer to this correspondence between what is seen in the world and what can be accommodated by a theory.

Consider the movements of the planets against the starry heavens. These have been observed for thousands of years. But what is the best way to make sense of them? In the Middle Ages, it was thought that the best explanation for these observations was what is often called the “Ptolemaic” model. This theory held that the earth stands at the centre of all things, and the sun, moon, and planets all revolve around the earth. It was a neat model, but by the end of the Middle Ages, it was clear that it just wasn’t good enough. The observations didn’t fit the theory well enough. The Ptolemaic model was groaning and creaking, unable to accommodate increasingly accurate and detailed observational evidence about the movements of the planets. It became clear that a new approach was needed. In the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler proposed that all the planets, including the earth, rotated around the sun. This “heliocentric” model proved to be much more successful at making sense of the movements of the planets against the night sky. The close empirical fit between theory and observation suggested strongly that this theory was right. It is still the standard model adopted by astronomers.

But it’s not just science that works in this way. Peirce himself was clear that lawyers also depend on abduction for their professional successes. They have to develop a theoretical lens that illuminates the evidence and brings it into sharp focus. The criminal justice system involves reaching agreement on the best explanation of the evidence laid before the courts. What is the “big picture” that makes most sense of the evidence? In the end, the theory that will persuade a jury is going to be the one that weaves as many as possible of the clues together into a coherent narrative. If there are rival ways of interpreting this evidence, the best theory is likely to be the most comprehensive, the simplest, and the most elegant. The key question before the jury is, Which is the better explanation of the evidence: the theory of the prosecution or the theory of the defence?

Here we see the quest for the big picture that makes sense of individual snapshots, the grand narrative that makes sense of individual stories, and the grand theory that connects the clues into a satisfying and coherent whole. For what applies to scientific and legal theories also applies to our attempts to make sense of life as a whole. It is as if our intellectual antennae are attuned to discern clues to purpose and meaning around us, built into the structure of the world. We need a frame of reference which helps us understand who we are, why we matter, and what we are meant to be doing.

History reinforces our appreciation of how important this quest for meaning is for human identity. Our distant ancestors studied the stars, aware that knowledge of their movements enabled them to navigate the world’s oceans and predict the flooding of the Nile. Yet human interest in the night sky went far beyond questions of mere utility. Might, many wondered, these silent pinpricks of light in the velvet darkness of the heavens disclose something deeper about the origins and goals of life? Might they bear witness to a deeper moral and intellectual order of things, with which humans could align themselves? Might nature be studded and emblazoned with clues to its meanings, and human minds shaped so that these might be identified and their significance grasped? Might a longing for eternity have been planted in our hearts, to lead us home?

Our distant ancestors studied the stars, aware that knowledge of their movements enabled them to navigate the world’s oceans and predict the flooding of the Nile. Yet human interest in the night sky went far beyond questions of mere utility. Might, many wondered, these silent pinpricks of light in the velvet darkness of the heavens disclose something deeper about the origins and goals of life?

Thoughts like this have captivated the imagination of generations, from the dawn of civilization to the present day. True wisdom is about discerning the deeper structure of reality, lying beneath its surface appearance. The book of Job, one of the finest examples of the Wisdom literature of the ancient Near East, speaks of wisdom as something that is hidden deep within the earth, its true meaning hidden from a casual and superficial glance (Job 28). Wisdom is something that must be sought out; it is not found on a surface reading of nature. We cannot be content with simply skimming the surface of reality: we need to find the deeper patterns of truth lying under and behind superficial appearances. The wise are those who find a pattern which others have missed. As the philosopher Michael Polanyi shrewdly notes, where some people just hear a noise, others hear a tune.⁸

So why do we need these frames of reference? Why do so many people think they are so important? The answer lies partly in our quest for a reliable foundation for our lives. We all need to build our lives on the stable, solid, and secure rock of truth, rather than on the shifting sands of opinion. Yet there is a deeper issue here. Life is about more than just understanding things: it is about being able to cope with ambiguity and bewilderment, and then finding something worthwhile to give us direction and meaning. To use a phrase developed by the great British intellectual historian Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), we need “thought-spectacles” to allow us to discern the complex patterns we see around us, and bring them into sharp focus.⁹ But which set of spectacles allows us to see things most clearly? What picture do they disclose? And where do we fit into it?

The importance of this point was emphasized by Viktor Frankl (1905–97), whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps led him to realize the importance of discerning meaning in coping with traumatic situations.¹⁰ Survival depends on the will to live, which in turn depends on the discernment of meaning and purpose in even the most demoralizing situations which are directly experienced as threats to survival and self-preservation. Those who cope best are those who have frameworks of meaning that enable them to accommodate their experiences within their mental maps. Frankl quotes the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in making this point: the person “who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” Frankl is speaking of the discernment of meaning, not its invention. Without the capacity to make sense of events and situations, and to attribute meaning to them, we are unable to cope with reality.

We need a mental map of reality that allows us to position ourselves, helping us to find our way along the road of life. We need a lens, a set of spectacles, which brings into clear focus the fundamental questions about human nature, the world, and God. And we need a way of checking out whether they may be trusted. Christians hold that the vision of reality granted to each of us is only a tiny fragment of a much greater truth that lies beyond us. As Paul famously remarks, “now we see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). The Christian faith declares that a reliable map exists, and that it helps us position ourselves in relation to the great questions of life. It may be a sketch-map, rather than a detailed map of the terrain. But it’s good enough for our needs. We don’t see the full picture in this world; but we see enough clues to know that there is a picture and that we are an important part of it.

So what clues might help us find this deeper level of meaning? We’ll explore this question in the next chapter.

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