I’d like to save you some time. Here’s a list of perpetual arguments, the ones that have been going on long enough that everyone should have figured out the debate is not actually progressing. Neither of the two antagonistic parties ever wins.
This is a shortened list, you probably have heard other versions of these:
- Whether God exists, or not
- Whether the cosmos appears intended, or not
- Whether physical objects are connected to supra-physical entities, or not
- Whether immaterial objects even exist, or not
- Whether disinterested love exists, or not
- Whether freewill is an illusion, or not.
- And so on.
When these perpetual questions are adopted for debaters in bars or by college sophomores, you should admire their naive optimism. It is youth that thinks “soon, just around the next corner, there will be the final definitive fact or argument that will finally clinch my side of the argument. One more book, one more essay, one more seminar.” But, no.
So, the bulleted list are all the arguments I’ve silenced, both in the internal monologue and in physical conversations. They are of no use, as arguments, and cease having any interest at some point, after decades of spinning around the logical circle.
This is not so say we do not need to answer them. I have, for myself. Since I’m a Christian you might easily guess my answers. Just that nobody ever answers logical circles by thinking harder, or reading one more book, or listening to one more lecture. (Though books and lectures are helpful.). We need to face up to what lies beneath: what kind of a universe do you WANT to live in?
It’s hard to read words accurately, so forgive the constant disclaimers…wanting a particular
When we encounter such repetitive logical circles we know there are invisible hands that started the circle spinning. Call the hands axioms. Axioms, by definition, come from outside the particular circle we are trying to finish. We didn’t build them by thinking. They are not built up by a linear process of any kind. Their roots are underground and invisible. And repeating the logical circle with more energy will never dig them up. Where are these catalytic axioms coming from?
Real people — as opposed to arguments on paper — get their axioms from their heart, not their minds. By “heart”, I don’t mean what the Hallmark Channel means. I mean what the Hebrew bible means: the heart is the organ of wanting. And people form their wanting organ in early childhood. So, some distasteful modern precepts are in fact, true, like this one: our pre-cognitive layer is formed in early childhood and dominates our later cognitive life more than we know (the hated Freud) and the heart wants what it wants (the hated romantics). I’m not defending Freudianism or romanticism, just pointing out that they’re partially true. Occasionally.
So, we want. And we build a rational superstructure to give meaning and legitimacy to our acts, as we act out our wants. And there’s nothing wrong with that; the mind has an equal right to be satisfied with logic, while the wanter has a right to want what it wants. It’s just that the logical superstructure, useful as it is, won’t hold the building up. It’s just a superstructure.
The perpetual circles that are peculiar to you, as different from me, (we’re. all different) is probably because you see facts in the objective world that don’t match what your wanter is wanting the world to be. This is no less true of theists, by the way, than it is of atheists. Nobody gets to walk around in a world whose every datum makes sense to him.
So, the heart. “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” In other words, it is axiomatic for him. No arguments can touch it. This man, this fool in the Psalmists’ world, is the man who wants God not to exist. He decided, usually early in childhood, that he does not like God, or the god-figure.
Notice how this comports with the overall Biblical approach to moral responsibility, which locates good and bad in the heart — not the affections and feelings, which is what “heart” came to be in the romantic movement — but in the wanting, in the volition. Moral significance is centered neither in the feelings or the cognition. God does not dislike you for dirty feelings or for thinking incorrectly. In this age we get the first but not the second. But they’re equally true; anytime we locate primary spiritual status in the cognitive, we have repeated the gnostic error.
The biblical God likes you, or is angry at you, based on what you want. Now, He loves you because He is love and He made you. But He does have feelings from time time about you, like any good parent, and so He dislikes you because you don’t want anything to do with Him.
So the fool is one with a disordered want-er, not one who has made a logical error. It has nothing to do with his reasoning faculty. He’s reasoning from his premise, and his premise is that a presiding intelligence is unnecessary or would be a tyrant. Remember that, the next time you are tempted to step back on that eternal logical wheel with someone who just doesn’t see the world like you. Don’t think that this time, unlike all those other times, your argument is so clear your opponent WILL finally see it.
No, he won’t. It is not a cognitive problem. It is a broken wanter.
The book to read is C.S. Lewis’ version of what I’ m saying here, “The Silver Chair”, one of the Narnia books. It is unjustly ignored, relative to the other Narnia volumes. See also his “Surprised By Joy”.