Religion and the Supernatural - continued

     Schopenhauer’s protagonists are of course disparaging things like the Christian belief in the immaculate conception, Jesus walking on water or feeding the multitude, waking the dead, and rising from the dead after three days, ascending to Heaven in his physical body, etc. Or with Islam the archangel Gabriel speaking Arabic to a merchant warlord, revealing in detail all the answers to the questions of life in a final, definitive way. (I’ll restrict myself to Christianity, though the critique applies to all three monotheistic religions.) Even the existence of a personal God who has a plan for us and miraculously intervenes in time can be seen as an anthropocentric myth.  

    If the Jesus story were openly understood as myth or allegory – like the stories about Odin, for example, or Milton’s Paradise Lost – there would be no issue between Schopenhauer’s protagonists. The problem is that the faithful believe such things literally, as historical events. Philalethes and Demopheles just assume that such things didn’t really happen, or rather, there was no conceptual space in their worldviews for such things to be possible.

   Most Christians – like C. S. Lewis – agree with Philalethes: if those supernatural events did not happen, the religion is worthless. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, he is not the savior, not the son of God, and his teaching at best is human wisdom that cannot save. To see the Christian narrative as myth or allegory would be to empty the religion – the connection to God – meaningless. The moral teaching only matters within the supernatural framework. (Or if a Muslim came to believe that the archangel Gabriel didn’t really speak to Mohammad, that Mohammad made the thing up based on his readings in Judaism and Christianity, and adapted those religions to his own culture, then the ground would disappear out from under the teachings (also the moral teachings). The teachings that both Philalethes and Demopheles find true – the moral teachings – depend (as Philalethes points out) on the belief in facts of history that modern people who care about truth cannot really believe in.

    Consider this thought of Wittgenstein:

What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. — If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, — what I need is certainty — not wisdom, dreams of speculation — and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. – Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Or this:

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, – but: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, – don’t take the same attitude to it as you do to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.

Philalethes would have nothing but contempt for these thoughts. They seem irrational, choosing ignorance for the sake of metaphysical comfort (being “saved” and “certainty”) over truth. As the young Nietzsche – under the influence of Schopenhauer – wrote to his sister:

Does it really matter whether one attains the true vision of God, the world, and reconciliation that provides the greatest comfort? Isn't the result of one's research rather indifferent to the true investigator? Do we seek tranquility, peace, and happiness in our pursuit? No, only the truth, even if it were most revolting and ugly.

    One last question: If from our youth we had believed that the salvation of the soul emanates from someone other than Jesus, say, from Muhammad, wouldn't we have partaken in the same blessings? Indeed, faith alone blesses, not the objective reality that stands behind faith. I write this to you, dear Lisbeth, to counter the most common proof that people of faith rely on, those who appeal to their inner experiences and derive from them the infallibility of their faith. Every true faith is thus infallible; it accomplishes what the believing person hopes to find within it, but it offers no basis whatsoever for establishing an objective truth.

    Here the paths of humanity diverge; if you desire peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire. 

. . .

    Well, is it irrational to believe things like Jesus rose from the dead? Such things have no place within the scientific understanding of the universe, to be sure. But perhaps there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamed of in our science – I for one hope so. Whether there is a Creator is that Being and Goodness, whether the Creator reaches out to us and reveals something of “his” nature – that is not a possible scientific question. The belief that what science studies is the limit of reality is just that: a belief. No experiment could prove it. No observations or logical proofs either. If there is a Creator, it is possible that “he” has reached out, has intervened in the normal course of things. We have the testimony that he has: the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To believe such testimony is not irrational in the sense that violates science. (This is the argument of C. S. Lewis.)

    Perhaps the picture of God that informs this belief makes no sense. If God can intervene, why does he allow all the suffering to which we are fated, more horror, more evil than we can even imagine? Why isn’t Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov right to reject such a God, not because science leaves no space for a God but because such a God is incompatible with goodness. Unable to reconcile the horror of unjust human suffering—particularly the suffering of children—with the idea of a loving God, Ivan is consumed with doubt and argues that even if God does exist, he is malicious and hostile: i.e. not God. Indeed, he would not even save his “son” from horrendous torture and death.

    If God is absolute – as by definition he must be – then we cannot know his mind. His wisdom is beyond ours. We can only hope and believe on faith that all is justified and will be made right in the end. Such is the classic response. Lewis – following G. K. Chesterton – also argues that the very craziness of the image of God as revealed by orthodox Christianity:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

You can’t make this stuff up as an argument for the truth of Christianity: interesting.

   Plato also believed in an absolute, in transcendence, and sometimes referred to it as God but usually as “the Good.” We experience the Good, for example, in remorse over evil done; in the absolute feeling that ‘I cannot do this, it is evil’; in the joy of love, the conviction that it is absolutely good that the beloved exists; or in the conviction that others are an absolute limit to my will as is nothing else in nature. It is better to suffer than do injustice, Socrates believed. These experiences are like a leak from another realm, something that human reason alone cannot really comprehend. Here we have a conception of the Absolute without a personal God – without the need to believe in supernatural facts.

   Something like this influenced Tolstoy’s conception of Christianity. Tolstoy did not subscribe to Christ’s teachings because he thought Jesus was a supernatural being. Similarly, Tolstoy did not believe Jesus performed miracles like walking on water. Rather, Tolstoy admired Christianity because — as he explained in a letter to Gandhi, “The difference between the Christian nations and all other nations is only that in Christianity the law of love has been more clearly and definitely given than in any other religion…” Tolstoy thought that the teachings of Christ reflected the moral law, which he often referred to as God’s will. Similarly, in his book The Gospel in Brief, he wrote that “I regard Christianity neither as an inclusive divine revelation nor as a historical phenomenon, but as a teaching which gives us the meaning of life.”

   Masks of the Good? Masks of God? I have already given my suspicion that the ransom theory, on which the need for salvation and thus the need for supernatural events rests, might have been connected to church building. But it can also rest on a deep feeling or mood: I am a wretched sinner in need of salvation (Wittgenstein passage above). The truth is not enough. Do we need to believe in the factual reality of the immaculate conception, the walking on water, and the resurrection from the dead? Or is the leak from another realm that we experience in the absoluteness of the Good (and evil) enough? It is enough to follow Socrates in his search for wisdom and goodness? It is enough to follow Tolstoy in seeing Jesus teaching as a divinely inspired key to reality and the meaning of life? Does the stress of the supernatural intervention just get in the way of a pure faith?

 

I will try to express my take on this later.