Arguing for God & the Experience of the Holy

Last night, the Fundamentals of Philosophy class I am teaching at Valdosta State University's Kings Bay Center spent one evening on Philosophy of Religion. The text we are using, Questions That Matter centers its teaching around four questions: The Question of Reality, The Question of Knowledge, The Question of God, and The Question of Morality.

We looked at The Question of God, particularly the arguments philosophers and theologians have made concerning proofs of God's existence. We considered the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument, and the Teleological Argument, as well as Thomas Aquinas Five Ways proof which overlaps the other arguments in some ways.

We also looked at the proof some use to deny God, The Problem of Evil, and showed how people of faith have long reconciled the fact that there is evil in the world with the knowledge that God is all powerful, all good and ever present. We also considered whether religious experiences qualify as evidence for God's existence. Most philosophers have said "No" as religious experience is personal and so may offer proof for the one having the experience, but is not helpful as evidence for others. In this regard, we consider Sigmund Freud, the pioneering psychiatrist who was a convinced atheist and saw religions as something of a communal neurosis, a shared delusion.

Then we looked at Rudolph Otto's 1917 work The Idea of the Holy in which he defends the use of religious experiences in talking about religions as he notes that religious experiences happen all around the world in varying cultures in a way that shares too much commonality to be dismissed. Otto (shown at left) used the Latin word numen which referred to "divine presence" or "divine power" to create the word numinous for the feeling of holiness. Otto challenges that everyone has felt this. He would say that Freud and other atheists have felt it too.

Just to get a feel for what he wrote, Otto said this numinous feeling is

The deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion.

And is to be found in

in strong, sudden ebullitions of personal piety,... in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches.

And may peaceful and:

come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.

or faster moving:

thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its 'profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience

He called this experience Mysterium Tremendum a Latin phrase in which the mysterium refers to something wholly other, truly amazing, outside our normal experience; and Tremendum is comprised of three elements—awfulness (inspiring awe, a sort of profound unease), overpoweringness (that which, among other things, inspires a feeling of humility), energy (creating an impression of immense vigour).

For Otto, if we want to examine religion, we must take this common human experience of the Other in to account, otherwise it is as if we have torn the heart out of faith before examining and then wondering why it seems a dead and lifeless thing. For the experience of the Holy, the Other—what I would refer to as the presence of the Holy Spirit—is really at the heart of how people come to faith. We don't find faith in logical arguments like the ones we studied last night. No matter how compelling those arguments are, without some experience of the divine, there would be nothing animating our desire to believe in God.

Rudolph Otto's idea was that everyone has had numinous experiences even if they dismiss them. I think that this common experience of God breaking into our daily (Otto would say profane) lives with a feeling of something holy and sacred beckoning us is an important part of what leads people to faith and to worship. I told my class that I agreed this feeling the numinous in cathedrals and out in nature and elsewhere is something all us humans share. Not that anyone feels it all the time or everyone feels it frequently, but that all humans at time have this experience.

Did I tell my class the truth, or did I overstate the case from too little evidence? Have you had experiences in worship, in your daily life, in which you felt the presence of God? Do you think this is universal?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Fallibilism

Fallibilism is the idea that our knowledge
is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision
in the face of new evidence.

Fallibilism says:
Here's what I know to a moral certainty,
know well enough to live by.
But I could be wrong.
—Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954- )
Appiah is a modern philosopher who gives as the short answer to the question "What's your philosophy?" the following:

Everything is much more complicated
than you first thought.
In a commencment address at Swarthmore College, he said,

...the expansion of human knowledge this planet has seen of late has been enormous and accelerating. When I was an undergraduate, my biochemistry tutor gave me a print of one of Carpaccio's great murals of St. Jerome. Years later, looking at the original in Venice, it struck me that the shelf of books behind the saint - his library - contained almost everything that he would have thought worth reading, and he would surely have read all of them. Now, a single web site may contain millions of times the number of pages that St. Jerome could have read in his lifetime. Once, to have heard the range of music that you can scan on your radio, you would have had to travel thousands of miles, hoping be on time for the right performances. Your DVD collections may well contain more hours of acting than Samuel Pepys - that devoted theatergoer - saw in his entire lifetime. There used to be a time when the proof of a new mathematical theorem was a rare and noteworthy event; and now? Something in the ballpark of seventy-five-thousand new mathematical theorems were proved just last year. (I have this on good authority, although, of course, I could be wrong.)

...So here's a conundrum for you. The past century has been an age of unprecedented scientific and scholarly mastery; it has also been an age of unprecedented bloodshed. Given everything our species has learned about historiography, literature, engineering, sociology, molecular biology, algebraic topology, and the rest, why haven't our ethical attainments kept pace? If we're so good at math, why haven't we become whizzes at morality?

You may take it as an extra-credit assignment, on which you'll be graded by posterity; I certainly can't pretend to have the answer....Across much of the planet, we honor, in words, anyway, ideals such as liberty and equality and, not least, tolerance.

Yet tolerance, too, is more complicated than it looks. We can't suppose that mindless tolerance of cruelty and repression is a virtue. Yet how much evil is done by fanatics who can't countenance the possibility that their beliefs, sanctioned by ideological or religious authority, might conceivably be mistaken! Here, then, is one of the uncompleted tasks of our era: to spread fallibilism - not skepticism about the truth or indifference to it, but just the glimmering recognition that one may not be in full possession of it - from the empyrean of scientific fact to the hardpan of moral conviction: to make it as common as Coca-Cola. People say that common sense is the ability to see what's in front of your eyes. But even madmen and extremists can see what's in front of their eyes; so, again, I think it's more complicated than that. Common sense, I'd prefer to say, involves the ability to see what's in front of the other fellow's eyes. That's what makes it something we might have in common.

I think this could be the middle path between the desire to express certainty about things we don't fully understand and the opposite desire to throw up our hands and say that we can't know anything. From a Christian perspective, we know that we don't have God's point of view on anything, even God's view of ourselves. All knowledge is then contingent on new revelations as God may not feel you are ready for everything at once. Given that, a little humility is not a bad thing, which I think is at the root of fallibilism. What do you think?

peace,
Frank+
the Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor