The Limits to Ignoring Reality: God and the Cosmos

You can go a long time and go very far believing falsehoods and ignoring reality, something I assume my philosophical critics think is true of me. And if only for that reason, they should hear this truth: you should never ignore reality, but you can for a bit. If a man is very unlucky, he can even ignore it for his entire life.

You can even make scientific progress based on a falsehood. When best theorizing shifted from an Earth-centered to a Sun-centered cosmos science was advanced. Of course, it was false that our Sun is the center of the cosmos, but false ideas can be helpful. In theology, for example, the Sun-centered cosmos forced Christians to consider the status of the Earth. In the old view,the Earth was unimportant, to be in the center meant being in the garbage pit, and the theologians were offended at the pride of moving us “up.” But the truth was the truth and so the philosophers and theologians had to deal with Earth’s exalted status only to have their descendants forget the truth and pretend that geocentrism had elevated humanity and Earth’s status and this mistake too has continued for a long time.

If a man believes that nature is all there is, was, or ever will be, it does little immediate harm in his study of nature. It does not even slow down (for a time) his study of humankind since we are (in great part) a product of chemicals and our bodies obey the laws of physics. The trouble begins when you confuse nature with ethics and pretend that you can get the ethical ought from is. For a time, the inherited morality of the older cultures can sustain a people, but this does not last.

The loss is very great and it does not end at right and wrong. The bleeding continues into beauty. There is no good reason to think beauty is objective and so the idea that there are standards to beauty vanishes. At first this is liberating, no supposed expert can tell me my taste is bad, but in the end it leaves the powerful and the exploiters one more area to exploit. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the eye of the marketeer counts more than any other. There is money to be made in fashion (or “cool”) which can always change and less profit in beauty which endures. A beautiful well-made garment might last for generations, but if it is “uncool” it can be tossed in weeks and money made.

But even if beauty were subjective (and it could be and there still be more to life than nature), then the poverty of wonder and meaning soon consumes us. It is true, absolutely true, that nature has a deep wonder and grandeur. There is no surprise here because the good God put it there. You can worship nature for an entire lifetime. Better still, humans are wonderful, even more wonderful than the rest of nature, and this too is not shocking since they are created in God’s image. No naturalist need run short of beauty and wonder if he looks around him.

The trouble comes if he thinks too much. The kind of wonder and beauty one sees in nature and in humankind is not quite what one always desires. We have “eternity in our hearts” and long for something greater, deeper, and more meaningful. Take away the common sense of revealed religion and this desire works itself in discontent, depression, and strange phobias. The land of materialism is less religious, but it is not less superstitious. Icons are replaced by lucky t-shirts. The icons were at least great art.

We are told to forget this desire or to tough it out. There just isn’t any relief, so we have to accept the pain, but this is entirely false. I kneel tonight at the altar rail and I get relief that is as real as the wonder I feel when I see the stars. Miracles do happen and I need not explain them all away. “But what of all those contradictory religions,” I am told as if a surfeit of experience makes the experience less real. It is true that our explanations of what is happening to us when we encounter the Divine are often contradictory,but there is a commonality in the experience.

I do not reject a phenomenon over diverse interpretations to the meaning.

And then there is reason. The dialectic demands that I follow the argument where it leads and it keeps leading me (as it led Plato) to the Known Unknown. There is a love in me that is of something and that something is a Good so great that it can satisfy that greatest desire. When you have felt it, you know it, the difference between it and all other desires. Reason demands you explain this and not just explain it away to fit a safe and narrow materialism. It is comfortable to think there is an exit at death from life, but this comfort as Hamlet saw is a false one.

We know there is or very well may be an undiscovered country. Thinkers as deep as Richard Swinburne make the case for the divine reality and I will not repeat such arguments here. They exist. Counter-arguments also exist and as is the nature of philosophy, the discussion continues, but nobody can claim that religious faith is irrational or opposed to philosophy. To accept the arguments does not answer every question or end philosophy, but it does mean no longer ignoring the common experience of humanity.

The world is as we know it to be: matter and spirit. The world is as we know it to be: lawful from a lawgiver.

Decent people can ignore questions about why mathematics, the most ideal of arts, works in physical reality or pretend it does not matter. We can explain away our desire. We can plug our ears to the beauty of sacred music or just enjoy music at one level…missing the depth Bach or Handel put there.

Particularly for the wealthy in the West, it is possible to put off dealing with death and blame any suffering on a god in whom we do not believe. It can be done,but it saps us. We ignore reality and so moral decadence creeps into our lives. Every man fails the divine law. How much greater the evil grows when every man does what seems right in his own eyes.

Liberty cannot continue long for the libertine. Materialist regimes wax greater and greater as they take over jobs religion once did in the individual. State power replaces private conscience.

This too can continue for a time, but even an all powerful soviet fails. Reality will be served. God exists, the supernatural is, the cosmos is.

After death at least we all must live in the full reality based community. Thank God He is love and His mercy endures forever.