6. Climbing in the Mist
CLIMBING IN THE MIST
Truth, of course, must be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
—G. K. Chesterton
It is far better to debate a question before settling it than to settle a question before debating it. While the process does not always guarantee an inerrant conclusion, it often protects against vacuous leaps from ignorance to ignorance. Surely the high stakes involved in matters of life and destiny demand a response that is cohesive systematically and meaningful existentially. Nothing is as important as the truth, and no knowledge so dangerous as a lie, in an issue of such high import.
For this very reason, many thinking individuals go through a great personal struggle. They know that they must choose amid the cacophony of voices that lure from without and the divergent drives that impel from within. And often, those voices transpose harmonious sounds into discordant ones because of their prejudices and misconceptions.
Christianity, for example, has suffered much at the hands of its detractors, who have framed it as a mindless mass of material that strains credulity. Distortions and contrivances abound as some scholars have manipulated the Bible into pronouncements as farfetched as specifying the age of the earth. Having erected a straw man, they demolish it with ease. Scholars once said that their task was one of “demythologizing,” that is, removing so-called myths from the biblical text. But so bent upon the destruction of the Bible were some that when the “myths” were not to be found, they superimposed some of their own upon the text and drew inferences from them that were never intended. They constrained the text into their predisposed conclusions.
Yet rather than lay all the blame on its critics, a greater tragedy is the way the Christian faith has suffered at the hands of its supposed defenders. From bishops attired in ecclesiastical regalia disavowing the virgin birth, to the commercialized version of Christianity offering dolls for donations, the honest seeker does not know whether to laugh or cry. The marketplace of ideas is no longer analogous to a bazaar where one barters for one’s soul, but is more akin to an auction where one is bidding for the least bizarre, so that he or she may return home without the feeling of being duped. Amid the confusion of so many beliefs, and the almost circus-like atmosphere of some so-called religious offerings, a person is not only overwhelmed but apprehensive. He thinks he can at best select that which is the least ridiculous. The great danger of such cynicism is the false conclusion that the truth about God can never be known.
Finding ourselves in this swirling cosmos, this matter of God’s existence and life’s proportionate meaning must be settled by each of us. Thankfully, as we climb in the mist, we are not without road signs. The nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning has said:
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
I have attempted to argue, as C. S. Lewis did, that to find their way, atheists must make sense out of a random first cause, denounce as immoral all moral denunciation, express meaningfully all meaninglessness, and find security in hopelessness. This is a tall order, even for a wizard with words. Once involved in this battle for meaning, Lewis decided that he would surrender and let God be God. Engaged in a philosophical struggle, he could no longer make sense of life while attempting to sever Christianity from its claim to truth. Lewis was caught in a maze of different options, and though having become a convinced atheist, the persuasiveness of Christ and his message finally conquered the mind of this brilliant thinker. He, in turn, through his writings, went on to influence both child and scholar in large numbers. The person of C. S. Lewis himself is incidental to my argument, but what he said is germane. He typifies the struggle of many as they journey from atheism to Christianity. The mood and the moment of his Christian commitment is well captured in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. In one memorable description he wrote:
To find their way, atheists must make sense out of a random first cause, denounce as immoral all moral denunciation, express meaningfully all meaninglessness, and find security in hopelessness. I had always wanted above all things, not to be “interfered with.” I had wanted “to call my soul my own.” I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had always aimed at limited liabilities. . . . You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, when ever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The prodigal son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.[1]
“Kicking and struggling” is indicative of the resistance Lewis put up because of his perception that Christianity was a thing to be shunned. “Resentful,” he said, because he had fought it with great philosophical might, and the defeat of his arguments was not an easy admission. Yet, “surprised by joy,” because, for the first time, as he breathed the mountain air of spiritual reality, life was brought into focus.
How does one move from atheism to Christ? It is a steep climb. Every step matters, for the slide downward becomes unstoppable. Contrast, for example, the sentiments of C. S. Lewis with those of Eugene O’Neill, the famed American dramatist. His plays are unquestionably some of the finest of our time. One of his friends, noticing a preoccupation in the themes O’Neill addressed, said, “For O’Neill, the quest has always been for God.” Yet, if his play Long Day’s Journey into Night is truly autobiographical, he did not find God. His remorse is evidenced in the sad conclusion of the play, in the words of the mother facing the events driving her and others toward disaster.
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They are done before you realize it, and once they are done, they make you do other things until, at last, everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.
O’Neill, perhaps speaking of himself through the character of the son, said that only on certain occasions at sea did he ever feel “the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears, and hopes, and dreams.”
Whatever promptings in our minds O’Neill’s words might make, there is no mistaking the manifest difference in the two autobiographical titles, Surprised by Joy and Long Day’s Journey into Night. It is the difference God makes.
How, then, does one rise to the perspective that sustains this point? In the words of Mao Tse Tung, no friend of theism, “Even the Great March had to begin with a first step.”
The Possible Roads
The starting point has to be an understanding of the process by which we come to affirm beliefs as true or false. How does any individual human being, as a subject in this world of conflicting claims, relate to objects around him and arrive at a correct understanding of reality? This issue has occupied philosophy from the beginning of time and is the decisive first step to knowledge. An error here will only be multiplied in the distant pursuits of every branch of learning, just as a slight error in a computer’s database can be compounded. An erroneous starting point snarls the journey into truth.
Professor Colin Gunton began his excellent book Enlightenment and Alienation with the question, “What happens when we perceive, or think that we perceive, the sights and sounds, textures, tastes and smells of the world in which we live? On the answer to that question depend the answers to all kinds of questions.”[2]
This pursuit of truth is nowhere near as simple as it may at first appear, for it brings into the context of decision-making the nature of reality (which outwardly changes), the kinds of reality (material world, realm of thought, etc.), and the ways of knowing (the senses or the mind). In short, the mist can get quite thick. It would be very easy, here, to digress into distant terrain and begin an intense philosophical battle with representatives of the different schools of thought. Between the two extremes of Rationalism (the quest for indubitable rational certainty) and Fideism (which roots all knowledge in faith) there comes an avalanche of other methods, each in its own way claiming to have reached the truth. These include Agnosticism, Experientialism, Evidentialism, Pragmatism, and Combinationalism. The last of these categories I will be discussing later.[3]
Rational certainty has always been that glittering dome, imagined or otherwise, on the huge edifice of philosophy. The modern father of the quest for rational certainty is René Descartes. He found his starting point in cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore, I am.” David Hume chiseled the statement down further and said we must eliminate the “I” and reach an even more fundamental assertion: “I think, therefore thinking exists.” Hans Driesch, Danish biologist, went one better and said, “I am something (I can’t be sure of what) at this very moment when I raise this question.”[4] All this is reminiscent of the student at New York University who intimidatingly asked the question of his professor, “Sir, how do I know that I exist?” A lingering pause preceded the professor’s answer. He lowered his glasses, peered over the rim, and riveted his eyes on the student. His simple response finally came, “And whom shall I say is asking?” Fortunately or otherwise, some things in life are just undeniable.
Descartes placed supreme confidence in the power of unaided human reason. Employing the method of doubt and applied mathematics, he envisioned a complete fundamental science of nature, demonstrable with mathematical certainty. The mind to him was like a box into which, and by the limitations of which, reality would be encompassed. Descartes sought a firm foundation of knowledge built on the doubting capacity of the mind. From that he would build with the blocks of clear words, distinct ideas, and concepts whose meaning was determinate. But this Cartesian position, pushed to an extreme, paid a dear price in its attempt to pass from the mist-filled valley of doubt to the mountain of clear knowledge.[5] That price was a diminished or destroyed confidence in the senses. In a reaction to this the British empiricists came on the scene and gave priority to sense experience.
The quest for rational certainty is admirable, and it is imperative that the shortcomings of this ideal not diminish some of its strength. The role of reason is pivotal and cannot be lost in the final checklist of a worldview. For now, however, I just want to point out the counter side of this approach and bring a necessary caution. It is impossible, when dealing with all of reality, to force mathematical certainty into every test for truthfulness. Life is just not livable that way, and in fact, science would collapse if it consistently believed that at every step. Einstein himself challenged this illusory certainty in mathematics, saying, “As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”[6] It would be better to describe our pursuit as that which seeks a high degree of certainty, or meaningful certainty. A meaningful and high degree of certainty, rather than mathematical certainty, is more attainable.
We must recognize that a person comes to reality not from a single strand of truth testing, but from a convergence of one’s own multifaceted framework. Every life is an admixture of the rationality of the mind, the intimations from the senses, the influences of the imagination, and the commitments of the will. The struggle comes in knowing where and when each must operate. To mutilate man’s process of knowing into these constituent parts, as if they operated independently of each other, is to disfigure him as a person and to destroy the nature of reality. If rational certainty were the only way, and all knowledge of reality could be affirmed only on the basis of critical analysis by the mind, then a child could never know and experience God. Is this not one of the suicidal leaps of pantheism, where religion has become so sophisticated and obscure that it is only within the exclusive domain of the scholar to understand who we are? Hence, the debates of many Eastern philosophies often confuse terms and incomprehensible concepts in attempting to understand what we mean when we talk about “self.”
Once again I state that the role of reason is foundational and how it functions is indispensable to a tenable worldview. Reason tells us that human beings are composites. Any attempt to dislocate or reduce us prejudices the conclusion. The detached rationalist, however, could end up falling in love with one lonely, little truth. The exaltation of relational certainty to dizzying heights as the sole arbiter of reality overshadows the individual. It is not at all surprising that alienation followed on the heels of the Enlightenment. Where rational certainty had become the master, and the power of unaided reason held exclusive sway on truth, the masses felt alienated from the real world. The average human being does not discuss Kant and Descartes over dinner. The rigorous and contributive nature of their systems notwithstanding, a high and wide wall has been erected that the masses will never be able to climb. In the face of such estrangement, and the sense of being shut out, existentialism (the power of the will to conquer despair) was waiting to be born. Can we forget the 1960s when university students, in many instances joined by the most well-known professors of the day, sat on the lawns of campuses, smoking pot and denouncing all authority? Sheer intellectual pursuit had failed.
Having said that, it is equally important for the pursuer of truth who approaches life purely from one’s sense perception to observe the same caution. If the telescope proved anything, it warned us of the erroneous perceptual assumptions that we can make if perception reigns supreme, for it does not always reveal things as they are.
Maintaining Our Balance
If reality, then, impinges upon us in a multiplicity of ways, we need a paradigm or worldview that reasonably explains the truth-tested realities of this world, which can then be blended together to give life a composite unity.
Let me borrow an illustration from Francis Schaeffer to demonstrate the need for this approach. Suppose you were to leave a room with two glasses on the table, Glass A and Glass B. Glass A has two ounces of water in it, and Glass B is empty. When you return at the end of the day, Glass B now has water in it and Glass A is empty. You could assume that someone took the water from Glass A and put it into Glass B. That, however, does not fully explain the situation, because you notice that Glass B has four ounces of water in it, whereas Glass A had only two ounces in it when you left in the morning.
You are confronted with a problem that at best has only a partial explanation. Whether the water from Glass A was poured into Glass B is debatable. But what is beyond debate is that all of the water in Glass B could not have come from Glass A. The additional two ounces had to have come from elsewhere.
God has put enough into the world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing, and he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone. Science may be able to explain the two ounces in Glass B. It cannot explain the four ounces in it.
The Christian worldview, biblically based, presents a powerful and unique explanation of these other “two ounces.” With remarkable persuasion, contemporary apologists have shown the theistic framework to be not only credible, but also far more adept than atheism in dealing with the real questions of philosophy.[7] With this as a foundation, the Christian worldview erects an equally persuasive superstructure. Whichever starting point we take—either the philosophical followed by the biblical or the biblical by itself, which for many is sufficient—the cogency and convincing power of the answers emerge very persuasively. The original “two ounces,” as well as the additional “two ounces,” are best explained in a theistic framework. The arguments range from the simple to the intricate, depending on the question and its context.
Jesus splendidly coalesced extremes in his earthly ministry by bringing balance and detail to truth. He mesmerized the lawyers, doctors, and religious teachers of the day with his authority and unassailable arguments. It was said of him that he left the scholar of the day amazed, but what was more, “the common people heard him gladly.” Paul the rabbi, Luke the doctor, and Peter the fisherman, all grasped reality as they had never grasped it before when he opened the doors of their minds and hearts to the truth.
But herein lies the challenge. The one responding to the question is always torn between the need to satisfy the demands of the subject being dealt with and the capacity of the questioner to understand the concepts. Renowned Cambridge professor Stephen Hawking, for example, is commended for his gift in using the technical data of his expertise to explain the nature of the universe in a popular treatment. However, it does not take long for the reader to realize that the more penetrating the question, the more Hawking’s answers elude even the highly trained.
One needs to climb high enough to recognize that the mist has been dissolved, and yet not so high that one enters air too rarified to breathe. How may we know that we have reached such a vantage point? If we can clearly define our goal, then we will possess a way of ascertaining our position. And the goal may be best described as subjecting the intimations of reality to adequate truth tests so that one may arrive at a worldview that answers the questions of our origin, condition, salvation, and destiny. A worldview may be defined as the philosophical glasses that a person wears to look at this world of ideas, experiences, and purposes. The worldview functions as an interpretive conceptual scheme to explain why we “see” the world as we do and act as we do.[8]
Every individual has a worldview, either by design or default. Neutrality is an illusion. Implicit in what I am saying are two inescapable factors. First, that in order to withstand the scrutiny of truth, a worldview must have a mix of certain components. Second, a failure here leads to a faulty worldview with proportionate consequences. (The process involved in the defense and establishment of a credible worldview has been carefully explained in appendix 2.)
While we climb through the mist with our finite limitations and proneness to error, and attempt to reach this mountaintop of clear knowledge, the Bible categorically asserts the possibility of knowing the truth. God has spoken to us in many ways. He has not left himself without a witness. In fact, the Bible states that the evidence and manner of God’s communication leaves us without excuse. However, one indispensable prerequisite to a pursuit of truth is the honesty of intent. A mind that is bent on suppressing or hindering the truth will ultimately find the lie it is chasing. Scottish author George MacDonald stated it succinctly, “To try to explain truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation.”[9] Richard Weaver, former professor of English at the University of Chicago, reinforced the idea:
How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong. Reason alone fails to justify itself. . . . If the disposition is wrong, reason increases maleficence: if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good.[10]
Sustaining this idea of the proper attitude toward truth, Jesus pointed to a child as the illustration of the kingdom of heaven, not to the qualities of being childish and error prone, but to the sincerity and teachability of one with childlike innocence.
Scientific or philosophical pursuits, and a belief in God, ought not to be seen as contradictory approaches to reality. That assumption misunderstands their nature. It is not accidental that it has generally been in the milieu of Christian belief that investigation in science and thought have flourished. A love for God prompts a love for knowing the world that he has created. The quest for knowledge and truth, therefore, is not hindered, but guided by the very purposes of God. G. K. Chesterton said, “God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.”
How does God persuade multisensory human beings to come to the truth? Let us climb to see the view from above the mist, and penetrate its density through the eyes of God.
Questions for Study and Discussion