If held in the frame of Modernity that we’ve been attempting here to both expose and challenge as a basis for a coherent worldview through which to guide human life, the statement above poses a serious dilemma: the consideration of God does not lend itself into the structure of empirical analysis such as it is typically employed in officiated corners of society. When knowledge is defined as only that regarding the material world which can be verified through empirical analysis, God is eliminated as a subject of possible knowledge.
Consideration of God and associated conceptions of Truth have therefore been issued to the margins of modern academic and institutional life, away from the places where public policy and social innovations are shaped. Metaphysical considerations (such as those pertaining to spirit, ontological ethics, and moral knowledge—the very center of human relationship, ritual, custom, meaning and purpose; of Common Law and the very essence of beauty or any plausible conceptions thereof) remain cordoned away from the central thrust and primary foci in most institutions of learning. Instead, these are issued to the periphery, into schools of theology and philosophy, the work and findings of which will not come to influence culture in the manner that the preferred subjects of study and territories of interest in such institutions do. We are therefore left as a society in the yawning gap of a long-developed rift between contemporary interests and ancient wisdom, very wisdom.
In the vacuum created by this rift, influence and authority are granted in our culture to the judge, the tech engineer, the medical health scientist, the climate scientist, and the entertainer (now engaged across an increasing array of ‘influencer’ mantles). In our contemporary scenario, we are the recipients of the ideological motifs that accompany these stations, each of which jockeys to take hold in our minds and hearts as our only cultural or social concerns.
We routinely prove both what we trust and what we desire as a society in our continued obsession with these five. We no longer have knowledge universities—we have research universities. Until knowledge itself is returned to both a definition and host of corresponding pursuits that venture beyond the strictures of empirical analysis and technical innovation, our children will emerge in a culture of desperate naivete, bombarded by the confused and atomized claims of the institutions that currently vie for a stake in their becoming.
Shifting Focus:
It is a tall order to shift societal focus back into domains where knowledge of God and his essential nature can once again come to guide and serve as the basis for communal, cultural, and societal structures; those required for coherent progress in the territories of social, religious, academic, artistic, communal and political engagement. As we left behind the pursuit of knowledge of absolute truth, so too, did we leave behind corresponding ways of being that are intrinsically oriented to generative and harmonious growth; those that bring life to life.
The discovery of meaning and purpose is therefore made impossible by Authority’s determined claim that such matters are impossible to discern, are beyond the ken of human capacity, or are of no essential relevance to humanity. To relocate ourselves in relation to these matters, therefore, a shift in paradigm is needed; one that doesn’t require subscription to the narrow definitions on knowledge that empiricism, by its nature, demands. Such a shift is best attempted in terms that are more distinctly human—more personal and, therefore, intimate—than the host of methodologies or customs that culture has tended to permit in what has spuriously been referred to as The Age of The Enlightenment.
As we have noted above, God, as such, escapes the terms that the empiricist requires in the verification of truth claims. That is, one does not find a ‘proof’ regarding, either the nature or existence of God as a maxim rendered through empirical analysis of the properties of the physical universe. At best, only inference—often profound—can be drawn regarding the findings yielded through such experimentation or analysis. For, such considerations are the province of faith, not the sciences. “Faith,” as it is supremely stated, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” That such a premise can be simultaneously true without being submissible for empirical verification ought not to confound those in possession of frank reason. And, further, that such faith would not be opposed to knowledge will be equally apprehensible to those who have not succumbed to the narrow epistemological prescriptions of the empiricist. That we are no longer accustomed as a culture to acknowledging, honouring, or protecting such faith as the lived expression of our very lives does not render it, as the very essence of things, any less true. What our contemporary societal customs may otherwise prove, is how very far away from home we have run. Conclusions for or against such premises must be left to the careful exploration of the reader.
While it should be stated here that empirical experimentation and the inferences drawn in relation to it can carry remarkable benefit to the human quest to know and be able to engage the physical universe, it must also be noted that such methodologies get us no nearer a ‘proof’ of the existence of God, or of the absolute truth that such a God would constitute to the world.
The Vacuum of Absolute Truth and Moral Knowledge:
Further, each innovation in such domains constitutes a new moral burden to carry. The nature of such burdens is always dynamic and cannot be fully known until those burdens have taken hold in the cultures in which they become embedded and ingrained. Among the many dilemmas that we meet in this space is the fact that each new development of this kind involves the amputation of a prior human capacity and the knowledge that pertained to it. Therefore, there appears in our era a costly, inverse correlation between technological progress and the apprehension of moral knowledge by which to guide such innovations. Such is the burden of the Modern Self. We have severed ourselves from the very orders of value and of truth that once guided our collective aspirations.
Psychologist and social critic, Phillip Cushman, frames the matter well for us:
Instead of having vibrant, authoritative communities and moral traditions to guide us, we are faced with a multiplicity of scientific theories, a cacophony of voices, one more dogmatic and self-righteous than the next. Each promises a universal truth, a magical technology, and some type of certain deliverance from the vicissitudes and illnesses of twentieth-century living. A societywide consensus, a shared sense of right and good and true, simply does not exist in our time. It has been shattered by historical forces, military events, and intellectual trends.
While both the pioneers and the principals of our institutions hurry headlong into still more technological development and innovation, such problems abound. When the connection to that which transcends us is lost, we are left with only that which is left of us: our fearful, avaricious, lascivious, self-sabotaging impulses and the ideologies that these tend to promulgate. Failure to pursue and submit to absolute truth inevitably results in subjection to the tyranny of ideologies that exist in its stead.
On The Cost of The Loss of Absolute Truth:
Why is all of this worth spelling out in relation to the claim that there is a source of absolute knowledge that we can know and trust? Because of the great value that honest articulation of the effects of the plain disavowal of such knowledge currently enjoins upon us on individual and societal bases.
Professor and psychologist, Dr. Mattias Desmet, translates these matters well as they persistently take hold in society. He notes that, in the absence of knowledge—and its integrated application to life—of orders of transcendent value, society, as a mass of persons yielded only to their fears will plod invariably in the direction of totalitarian control. Drawing upon the legacy of brilliant survivors of such failed states, Desmet positions the imminent frame of Modernity as the very heart of the dilemma we currently carry as a society:
Just like that, society falls victim to a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism, which means to extreme government control, eventually resulting in the radical destruction of both the psychological and physical integrity of human beings.
We have to consider the current fear and psychological discomfort to be a problem in itself, a problem that cannot be reduced to a virus or any other ‘object of threat.” Our fear originates on a completely different level—that of the failure of the Grand Narrative of our society. This is the narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism. A narrative that ignores the psychological, symbolic, and ethical dimensions of human beings and thereby has a devastating effect at the level of human relationships. Something in this narrative causes man to become isolated from his fellow man, and from nature; something in it causes man to stop resonating with the world around him; something in it turns the human being into an atomized subject. It is precisely this atomized subject that, according to Arendt is the elementary building block of the totalitarian state.
Thus, the Modernist demands for ‘proof’ of absolute truth in the essential domains of human life, themselves, prove to be a categorical error; a mistaken and costly ceiling, draped over the patchwork of human needs that lay helplessly before us in the social arrangement that we refer to as “society”, and the precious persons that limp around in such environs as “selves”.
“Totalitarianism” continues, Desmet, “is not a historical coincidence. In the final analysis, it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality. As such, totalitarianism is the defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition. (Ibid. Italics added).
We have seen that we will not locate any proof about absolute truth as it applies to life—that honesty is superior to dishonesty, for example, or that generosity and kindness are of greater human benefit than that avarice or malice; that such premises contain a moral essence and that this moral essence confers to us a certain responsibility—in the empirical terms demanded under Modernity and its variegated societal aftermath. We can, however, evaluate the systems of thought and action that take the place of the worldviews that hold to such a notion (that of Absolute Truth), both, as they are arranged into societal mandates, and in their totalizing effects in culture.
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Do the constituents of the systems of thought that currently guide cultural and societal forms appear in their effects to bring more life to life? While such inquiry may evade the strictures of proof, we may set our sights on an alternative as a guide to our quest: knowledge. Knowledge is not proven in an exacting way, as in a math equation, but in a rational way, as in that which ‘proves’ to be true in our lived experience. Perhaps an unanticipated fruit of the academic and institutional thrusts that we have been noting above is that they would eventually be outdone by the discoveries they yielded—that empiricism itself would require something beyond it by which to interpret its findings. Such a dilemma has recently emerged in the field of physics, where the very pillars of academic theory have been shaken by the potential for a great inversion of the most basic of its tenets, namely, that consciousness is derivative from matter.
Instead, scholars in the field of physics have been invested in inquiries into ‘panpsychism’, or, the idea that consciousness itself—like mass and electrical charge for example—is an intrinsic aspect of the universe. Held in this query, therefore, is the budding observation that consciousness itself may be ‘substrate independent’, that is, not emergent from physical reality. Rather, this view holds that consciousness exists as the very basis for the physical universe. From here, notes neuroscientist, Christopher Koch, “it is a simple step to conclude that the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience.” So shot through with sentience may the universe be that photons themselves may possess “raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness. Further to this, Purdue University Philosopher, Paul Draper, speaks to the theory known as “psychological ether” theory—"essentially, that brains do not produce consciousness but rather make use of consciousness.” In this view, “…consciousness was already there before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether.” “If the idea is correct,” states Draper, “then (in all likelihood) God exists.”
We may observe the potential here for robust dialogue about the seamlessness between these revelations in physics and the knowledge claims that have pulsated in the heart of Western societies since the time of Christ: that there exists a Spirit that constitutes the ground, the order and the sustenance of creation; a Spirit that first conceived or ‘thought’ of the physical universe and then wrought its properties into dynamic harmonious existence.
The book of Colossians provides a deep treatment of this subject in its relation to the One that St. Paul posits as creation’s designer and sustainer. It is this Spirit which has commonly been held to be God in terms not bound by empirical demands. Instead, the means to understanding such a Spirit are, themselves, spiritual. St. Paul addressed the matter (and does throughout his corpus of writings) as one not at all opposed to spiritual or moral knowledge, as is evidenced by his statement to the Church in Colossi:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. 19For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. (Colossians 1: 15-20).
The passage just cited, which centers on Christ’s role in establishing and sustaining creation is preceded by St. Paul with a very clear encouragement to his readers regarding the forms of knowledge by which their own lives will be both benefited and sustained. Here we may note the distance between empiricism and the sorts of knowledge which it cannot directly inform—those that are moral and spiritual:
For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; 11strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously 12giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light. (Colossians 1: 9-12). (Italics added)
“The knowledge of God…” Such a sentence thrusts us into territories not hemmed in by the walls of empirical inquiry and invites us back into pre-modern territory that is distinctly more human—and on those grounds, more helpful. St. Paul and his readers knew that they lived inside of a bevy of ontological and not merely empirical considerations.
Regarding the existence and nature of God, another saint invited that we be guided in our thinking about God in a manner that would also position such a God as the very source of absolute truth and all value judgements. While his statement is a heavy lift for many, it will be a helpful guide to us in our structuring of considerations to follow. St. Anselm was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1033-1109, and he possessed a mind that was beautifully equipped in the territory of reason as it regards the existence of God. He stated:
[Even a] fool, when he hears of … a being than which nothing greater can be conceived … understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding.… And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.… Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.
The reader will note that Anselm is here engaging reason, that distinctly human faculty, in the service of thoughts about the nature of things. This (reason) was jointly associated as an explicit field of knowledge and as an indispensable guide to empirical inquiries in society’s pre-modern forms. Along the way, it was divorced from its role as the indispensable spouse to the sciences and was rejected as a means to knowledge in such domains. It is arguable that there has been no greater influence on the ills that shape contemporary society than this.
In 1944, C.S. Lewis portended such a societal unfolding in masterful detail; he forecast a world of “…post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.” (1974, p.75). He continues,
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or traditional Morality or the Frist Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements… The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess… The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves (p.p.43-44).
In Lewis’s treatment of these matters, therefore, the alternative to what he refers to as Natural Law or Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, will always be merely an ideology, a view of things adapted from First Principles and held in endless arbitration. The issue here is that while you can grow a society upon Natural Law, or adherence to First Principles (which are fixed in their very nature), you cannot build one upon ideologies (which are, by definition, fluid, and which make no coherent appeal as such, to a truth). The latter consideration, and this, by its very nature, proves too fickle a ground upon which to uphold, either the interests and needs of humankind or the those of the created order, as both prove to have nature-determined-needs in each respective case.
Lewis expounds upon the matter in his Letters to Calabria. Here, he invites that we hold in mind the very worldview of the ones with whom we are engaged in dialogue and/or inquiries into truth.
For my part, I believe that we ought to work not only at spreading the gospel (that certainly) but also at a certain preparation for the gospel. It is necessary to recall many to the Law of Nature before we talk about God. Christ promises forgiveness of sins, but what is that to those who since they do not know the Law of Nature do not know that they have sinned? Who will take the medicine unless he is in the grip of disease? Moral relativity is the enemy we have to overcome before we tackle atheism. (italics added).
Clues as to the truth of things therefore show themselves as we continue to ask questions about what and whom we are, about the nature of our journey into being, and about what sorts of things can’t help but to matter to such creatures. That is, the evidence as to our origins—as to whether we were created and for what purpose—show themselves in the matters that we can’t help but to return as a human race.
We endlessly churn over and around what actually matters—whatever the labels we put on these. We do not tend to churn in an arrangement of categorical differences of value. We argue over notions of which perspective is most just; we do not argue over whether justice ought to be pursued. We argue over what is fair; we do not argue about whether fairness ought to be regarded as a standard of measure. We argue over what ought to constitute human rights; we do not, in the main, argue over whether or not rights, as such, are themselves a category of value, a matter of knowledge and birthright.
These incessant interests and compulsions sound out as echoes about our most essential nature; that it is spiritual, moral and rooted in meaning. Not, that it is merely physical, nor that the sum of our human motivations are merely the result of innate, biological instinct. The Magnificat, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, the profound selflessness of Mother Teressa, the groundswell of resistance to Hitler and his henchmen, the glaring evil of Stalin’s pogroms and oppressions, the relief brought at the tearing down of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Stassi—each of these beggars empiricism and scientism in the face of such profundity on the one hand and human need on the other. Each of these require of us clarity of value and understanding of that which is true, that which constitutes moral knowledge.
Having distinguished empirical claims as but one—however de rigueur—form of knowledge, from others, we can now address the issue at the heart of the matter, in that there is a Source of absolute truth that one can both know and trust. One will simply not discover that Source in dogged demands that It be ‘proven’ inside the narrow intellectual and observational channels that empiricism requires. Firstly, the capacity to enjoin such a demand upon such a Source would prove one greater than the Source as the one setting the terms—would invoke the very capacity one would imagine the Source to possess in requiring certain conditions by which such a Source could make itself unequivocally known to you. Such would be an absurdity, as it would presume authority and capacity greater than that of the Source to somehow reside in the self. This, of course, would prove itself false to anyone engaging the thought experiment, and this, at the very moment one realized that one hadn’t created a single bit of new creation without prior Creation having been afforded them. One would, in the experiment, be brought quickly back to the awareness that one is derived in one’s entirety; that whatever knowledge one claims to have is somehow more perfectly held in a manner that is beyond merely human ken and which ultimately preceded the personal awareness that we have inherited as the very gift of our own consciousness. We come therefore to the sober awareness that none of us is the Source of absolute truth.
We come to knowledge of the Source of absolute truth in terms that are not restrictively empirical but are, rather, relational. As in the sort of knowledge one has of the love of one’s spouse, for example, or of the love that one feels for one’s children. As in the knowledge we can have of how to artfully resolve a conflict or to choose the good—the harder choice—for a friend caught in the throes of addiction. Such take hold in our understanding as true, even—perhaps, especially—while simultaneously not being restricted to empirical terms, nor in any way being opposed to knowledge. The way knowledge comes to us in the lived experience is always along these very practical lines, these lived, relational, pathways. When arranged into an integrated worldview which holds love as its primary concern, we observe that such knowledge becomes in some the more beautiful—it becomes in them, wisdom.
It is into such territories, those where we “live and move and have our being,” that we are invited by Jesus of Nazareth to ask about what knowledge is and how one might acquire it. And it is in these very domains where we are told by him that there are matters to know; those which are indispensable to our wellbeing; those upon which the very life in us depends. None of this is held by him as mere conjecture or speculation—the deadly cost he paid for the claims he stood by ought at least to challenge any allegations to the contrary. A plain reading of his life as told in the Gospels will simply affirm for the candid reader the simple truth of this claim.
Perhaps the clearest way to verify whether one properly knows something is whether one is, “… capable of representing it as it is on an adequate basis of thought and experience.” (pp.19-20) It is into this manner of knowing that we are invited when confronted with whether there is a Source of absolute truth that we can both know and trust. In such domains, we rely upon every sense we are given and every close tie we maintain. We ask what proves itself trustworthy—not, as it were, in the empirical sense—but in the relational sense. We ask about things like intent and will and choice. We ask whether some of these are factually better—as it regards the burden of our lives and the choices we must make in order to live well—than others.
If we’re honest, we discover some of these inquiries lead very clearly to certain conclusions. We discover that there really is supremacy—that, of a very real value, a very plain truth, and a profound corresponding beauty—in the virtues as they have been enumerated. We discover that we can have knowledge of these—that they are universally essential and beneficial to human life and that these stand at the very center of whatever Truth may otherwise find expression in. Further, we discover that these virtues are variously—that is, more and less—embodied by the individuals who have, by careful incorporation, taken these into their person. We discover, as we observe it, that there is a particular and superior kind of quality to human lives that are marked by virtue—who become virtuous. We find that these folks are granted a place in our shared memory as having lived lives—to a person—marked by sacrificial love. We may even find that we come to the conclusion—as we honestly and humbly seek to discover and then know such things—that there is One who has lived, loved, and sacrificed, perfectly. We may then conclude that doing so proved Him—in an ontological way—to be the very Truth. He is recorded as having plainly stated as much in reference to his very self, by identifying truth as one in a triumvirate of possessions which he alone has the power and authority to issue into the world. We are invited thus, to rightly order our thinking about truth; not after the wayward myopia demanded by the Modern Buffered Scientist, but after those who have proven their harmonious association with the truth through their careful rendering of beautiful, integral and loving personality. Truth is, in this regard, always personal. It was a myth that it could be anything but. We take Jesus to be the highwater mark on truth, on knowledge and of the embodiment thereof. We take him to be the source of absolute truth that we can both know and trust. We have found none greater. We humbly submit Him into the mix at this roundtable of ideas. We know it is His wish to engage there enthusiastically and lovingly with us all.