Recognizing the God Who Is There, Despite our Best Efforts
by Andy Ball
The Critical Posture
How ironic is the contemporary mood: despite how technologically advanced and developed our society is, we are so untrustworthy about many beliefs. Even though we can be more certain than ever before about numerous things, we are cynics. Just consider the plethora of conspiracies that are so popular. If you’re not familiar with any, go check your Facebook wall. Someone will surely have posted in the last few hours some snarky comment about how that the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook School didn’t really happen, or about how that vaccines are a way that the government controls people, or how that NASCAR is rigged. There are no reasons for believing these things. All they do is create doubt. But for whatever reason, we love the creation of doubt.
Why is this? Why are we so apt to be critical just for the sake of being critical? Maybe there are two related reasons. First, we are children of the Enlightenment, and that heritage comes with lots of baggage. The hubris of modernity is hereditary. We regularly look in our mind’s mirror, observe our noetic (i.e., intellectual) competences, and drool over our intellectual gorgeousness. We think we’re hot. We think we can figure out anything and everything.
On one hand, a small dose of this confidence is good when it motivates us to build better cars, computers, and cures. On the other hand, its more sinister form tempts us to put way too much stock in our own cognitive abilities and lose sight of the fact that all of our being has been corrupted by the fall. For Christians, this temptation can be especially dangerous because it leads us to forget that our carnal minds are hostile to God and His truth (Rom. 8:7). Sin has marred us to such an extent that our only hope for truly right thinking is that our minds undergo renewal (Rom. 12:1). We need God’s grace, plain and simple.
A second reason for our critical tendencies concerns the virtues we value. Out of the various intellectual virtues we exercise, the ones we seem to value the most in the current intellectual environment are the unduly critical ones. The heroes of ideas nowadays are the rogue cowboys who buck the system, taking long-standing orthodoxy and poking it with suspicion. Most often these rascals don’t offer anything of real substance themselves, but that’s okay so long as they poke enough death holes to get the job done and leave the corpse behind for history to deal with (if that corpse is lucky, it’ll get a Wikipedia page someday). As such, the thoroughly modern intellectual exemplar is the critic – the cynic – the skeptic. But what does the skeptic actually do? He just says why we can’t believe anything, never helping us actually believe something.
Rusty Reno has discussed the intellectual god of ‘critical thinking’ that dominates so much of the academy and even popular discourse:
‘Critical thinking’ has taken on a new meaning in recent decades, one more associated with critique than constructive criticism, and it has become an end-in-itself for many educators. We put a great deal of emphasis on learning how to interrogate, challenge, and criticize. But, while these are all useful skills, and in many cases necessary to help us avoid falsehood, first and foremost we need to be trained in assent. Unless we learn how to affirm beliefs as true we can never arrive at the truth. To do this in a reliable, responsible way requires a pedagogy of piety, for we can only hold as true those things we believe to be true.[1]
This is insightful. A ‘posture of a piety’ (e.g., humility, faithfulness, devoutness) is crucial for achieving and affirming truths beyond those which we are already preprogrammed with (Rom. 1-2). More specifically, in building upon our innate beliefs about God and ourselves that comes with the imago Dei, to also then exercise the cynicism that’s part and parcel of the intellectual spirit of the age is counterproductive. What is this cynicism? The modernist suspicion that tempts us to bifurcate the world of ideas into two incommensurable categories of ‘beliefs that require faith’ and ‘beliefs that require logic, not faith.’ Intellectually operating under this culturally arranged intellectual divorce implies that God is not God over all truth. But quite frankly, faith is a necessary foundational component for getting all of God’s truth, holistically. One of the best and most respected examples of this is St. Anselm’s argument for God’s existence.
Anselm’s Ontological Argument
In the late 11th century in the second chapter of his Proslogion, St. Anselm offered an ontological argument (ontology is a fancy word that refers to being or existence) that offered a proof for God’s existence by relying on our shared definition of what the concept of God is. Anselm thinks that even if you don’t affirm God’s existence, that’s fine, but at the very least there’s a definition of ‘God’ we must all agree to because we all share the same language: ‘God’ is “something which nothing greater can be thought.” We agree to this definition, then, because that’s just how our language (i.e., ‘God’) captures and expresses this shared concept.
So, at the very least, ‘God’ is the concept that you have in your mind of the greatest possible being. So far, so good. But what Anselm does next is the crucial move of the argument. He notes that the definition of ‘God’ we just affirmed doesn’t allow God to be a mere idea in our mind. Limiting a ‘greatest possible being’ to just an idea or a concept actually fails to meet the definition stipulated above because, if that’s all that ‘God’ really refers to, just a mere idea, we could then think of a being greater than a mere God-idea – namely, a God that actually exists in reality. If God existed in the mind alone as a mere concept or idea, then, as Anselm himself puts it, “this same that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is that-than-which-a-greater-can-be-thought. But this is obviously impossible.” Hence, our actual idea of what and who God is must include, as part of His greatness, His existence.
The Necessity of Faith
Why is Anselm’s argument so powerful? For me, it’s not his clever move near the end of that gives it its muscle, but where he starts–with our basic belief about who or what ‘God’ must be. Many other kinds of arguments don’t do this. For instance, cosmological arguments,[2] such as those given by Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, and even William Lane Craig, consider the world as mere contingencies that didn’t have to be, and thus there must be some necessary first/ultimate/absolute being that brings those contingencies into existence. Teleological arguments,[3] such as William Paley’s famous watchmaker analogy, considers the world as inherent with intentional purpose, hence designed – and if designed, then there must be a designer.
Such arguments have a place and purpose. But they often operate on an overly optimistic assumption about the powers of the human mind and what it can achieve apart from the beliefs we have because of our faith. They have an apologetic purpose: they attempt to prove God apart from faith in God in order to persuade the atheist or, at least, to make faith intellectually respectable. But they often do this with the ambition of getting the logic correct first. When successful, then faith is finally reasonable. So, Enlightenment rules rule, and God is gotten without God. Of course, you might interject – ‘doesn’t Anselm do this too? After all, he thinks that the logic of argument will sway the atheist, right?’ Not exactly. Anselm thinks that everyone who understands ‘God’ to refer to the definition we already assent to will have to affirm God’s ‘existence’ as part of that definition. And this is really the extent of Anselm’s purposes in the argument.
So why does Anselm offer it in the first place? Why isn’t he crusading to win the atheist over by means of pure logic? Because his purpose is to know more about the God Whom he already believes. In the first chapter of the Proslogion, he begins his study by writing, “Come then, Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to find you.” You see, Anselm’s entire work here is an act of worship – it’s a prayer. Anselm’s intellectual posture is that if God does not come to him and teach him, he cannot know anything. His faith doesn’t follow logical proof. It’s the other way around. Following in his Augustinian heritage, he believes first so that he then may understand more about the God of his faith and of all truth. To require logical evidence first before submitting in faith would be to have God on Anselm’s terms, and that’s idolatry.[4]
So, there’s no cynicism or skepticism with Anselm. No bowing down to the intellectual gods of the age. No hubris. No intellectual cowboy ethos. No intellectual divorce between faith and reason, which would be a disordering of reason. Rather, he affirms that faith is ultimately necessary, not suspicion, not ‘criticalness,’ for right reasoning.
____________________
Dr. Andrew Ball teaches philosophy at University of Alabama at Birmingham and also serves as an adjunct instructor in the new M.A. in Theology and Ministry program at Welch College. He has degrees in philosophy from University of Detroit Mercy (B.A.), University of Windsor (M.A.), University of Alberta (Ph.D.), and is currently completing seminary studies at Beeson Divinity School. He has previously held teaching positions at the University of Alberta, the King’s University College, and Samford University.
____________________
[1] R.R. Reno, ‘Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking,” First Things Online. May 6, 2015. <https://www.firstthings.com/media/thinking-critically-about-critical-thinking>
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/
[3] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/
[4] Professor Carl Beckwith made this point to me in a recent conversation and I appreciated it greatly.
December 29, 2015
This is excellent. Thank you, I needed to be reminded.
December 31, 2015
You’re welcome, Javen. Blessings to you.