Meditations on the limits of our knowledge

 

 Thinking about God, philosophically. Two openings to God seem available to us, apart from direct revelation. We can start with the universe and try to think back to its origin as well as reflect on our responses to it. The line from the poet Gerald Manly Hopkins catches the experience I am referring to: “The world is filled with the grandeur of God.” Or we can we reflect on the experience of the sacred and the absolute claim of the Good. Here I follow Kant: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” – adding the experience of the sacred, which might have been out of Kant’s reach (unless his ‘sublime’ is a synonym). In the experience of the sacred or the absolute demand of goodness, we experience something that feels like a leak from another world. Our experience travels to the edge of the world, to its horizon, glimpsing darkly through a glass a dimension that transcends space and time. 

        Now the skeptical or naturalistic response to these two openings must be: they are illusions. No middle ground exists: either such experiences are illusions or they are a dark window into what lies beyond Being as we can experience it. Is there a knockdown argument that proves they are illusions? Such experiences take place in time and space – in someone’s brain. All explanation is by definition showing how the phenomenon under question has its place in the natural world – understood as a closed system in which events cause other events according to mathematically predictable patterns. Thus, we explain such experiences as we explain everything else: scientifically. Or culturally perhaps, such experiences arise from the attempts of the individual to make sense of their life by reading into phenomena our deepest wishes. These wishes, finding no natural or human cause that could possibly satisfy them, we imagine lead us to transcendence. But everything real has an explanation, and all explanation takes place within the closed system of nature. Thus our wishes or hopes – no spiritual phenomena – either have a footing in this closed system, or they are mere wishes or hopes.

 

 

The ground under our feet. We cannot – so Kant – think beyond the realm of the human: the realm bound by space, time, and causality. We can only stand on this ground. There is no ground that reaches beyond. And no matter our subjectively certain we may be, no sublime experience offers the slightest logical proof that our experiences of the divine are not illusions. To achieve knowledge of what these experiences are, we must not look at them from the inside, from the 1st person perspective, but from the outside, as astronomers learned to look at the solar system. We must look for a naturalistic explanation – such as an anthropologist explains the religious rites of ‘primitive’ cultures. Religion must be explained as any other phenomenon – explained in terms of its social or evolutionary development and function, and then physically as brain events. There is no opening to another world. 

        If this way of thinking is right, then religious thought and experience is a fiction – one that might have practical or evolutionary advantages. Such advantages, however, do nothing to explain what the fictitious experience really is. Whatever is in us – if anything – that presses some of us to imagine windows looking out into eternity, it must be explained in these terms. If we cannot ultimately live meaningfully without projecting a narrative or a vision onto the whole as a limited whole (sub specie aeternitatis), again that does not allow us to leap beyond the system of nature in which we are, as it were, held tight. 

      This is not a knockdown argument. Even if we accept – as I do – that science tells us something about reality, science as science does not force us to discount the 1st person perspective. The proposition that reality is reducible to what scientists can explain within the closed system of nature they must posit to do science at all, cannot be scientifically elevated to a metaphysical interpretation of Being as such. Our inner lives become meaningless or illusionary only within a metaphysical (not scientific) system that denies a priori (deducing from propositions taken to be axioms) the possibility that our 1st person perspective can be a window onto anything. About what lies beyond science, science itself has nothing to say. This is not an argument proving that the two openings, cosmological and sacred-moral, are truly openings. It does put the burden of proof on those claiming such experiences are fictions to justify their metaphysical argument.

 

 

Subjective, objective – no thanks. I dislike the ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’ dualism – a hangover from Descartes and logical positivism that is still powerful culturally together with the fact-value dualism that underwrites it. Rather than the subjective-objective distinction, I prefer to distinguish between a belief, thought, or judgment that logically must embody the concrete life of the individual, their quality of self-awareness, as opposed to such mental acts taking place in a restricted context – like science or forensics – that are logically, epistemologically worldview neutral. Affirming the import of an experiment in physics or a mathematical proof means accepting the ‘rationality’ (the method) of physics or math, which implies bracketing out all other aspects of my concrete life. Some beliefs, thoughts, or judgments we can justify apart from who we happen to be (i.e. purely as a scientist, etc.) and the core convictions we happen to hold. Other beliefs we cannot justify independently of who we are, our core convictions, and the larger life world we are a part of. 

           My understanding of the experiment has nothing to do with whether I am Christian or atheist, secular humanist or nihilist, shallow or profound, narcissistic or mature. Making a judgment about Macbeth, however, does depend on having the right ‘horizon’ to read it with understanding. Much of my concrete life – core beliefs, memories, etc. – serves as the window (more of less clear, more of less rightly positioned) through which the meanings show themselves to me through my translations of them – not into another language, but into my understanding of them. Our understandings of Macbeth are like translations: each distinct, with overlaps and differences; each growing out of the original though with irreducible differences that come from the ‘translator,’ who is always also an interpreter. Only for someone with no insight into Shakespeare could these various understandings of the play be merely ‘subjective.’

But they aren’t ‘objective’ in the sense of logical positivism either, which doesn’t mean they make no claim to be ‘translations’ of a reality that is the original.