A Fork in the Road

Right now I feel like I'm caught in an endless sea of questions, being thrashed about by the waves. As far as storms go, this isn't a big one—in fact, I rather like the choppy water. But the problem is that the sky is cloudy and I've lost my bearing. I'm disoriented. Which direction am I supposed to be heading? But more fundamental than that is the question: in my search for God, what am I looking for?

In some ways it seems like God should be easy to find. If all I want to do is to locate God, then it seems like all I need to do is stop by one of those old buildings with steeples that are scattered around my neighborhood. But there's obviously more to it than that. I'm not trying to find God in a National Geographic Explorer sort of way. What I'm looking for is somehow deeper than that.

That big question (what am I looking for?) inevitably brings up a whole host of other related questions. What do I expect to find? How do I expect to find it? Do I really believe that I can find it through intellectual pursuit? To what extent does the pursuit have to be spiritual? If the journey is 100% spiritual (and, thus, subjective), can I trust what I find? What about if it's only 50% spiritual? Can these things be quantified? What good does it do for me, as a particular human being, to search, anyway?

And then arises the most troubling dilemma for me: what exactly am I willing to presuppose?

We all come from somewhere. We all have starting points and worldviews. And if we truly examine our thoughts and beliefs, we reach about point where we can offer no further explanations. As Wittgenstein puts it:

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

For me to continue my exploration of God in earnest, I have to address the problem of presuppositions. On the one hand, if I allow myself to question everything, ultimately I can go nowhere. On the other hand, if I just accept a number of presuppositions, much progress can be made. But does the progress outweigh what I give up?

Ultimately, what is to be gained? What is to be lost?

As you can see, I am at something of a crossroads. But chances are I'll end up punching it into four-wheel drive and going off-road....

Degrees of Uncertainty

In a recent conversation, my friend Nigel brought to my attention a problem with my discussion of the latency of God—I haven't been defining my terms well.  To a certain extent my ambiguity is on purpose because I'm still doing quite a bit of searching, but I suppose a little clarity would be helpful.  Although I'm not sure I can offer much of a definition of latency yet, here's some more explanation....

The basis for much of my thinking about God (and the rest of life, for that matter) is that I cannot know anything with complete certainty for the simple reason that I am not omniscient.  Because I am a limited, finite human being, there is always a chance that I am wrong about the things I think I know.  It is important to note, however, that this isn't a crippling realization for me.  It's something we all deal with everyday—it's a simple fact of life.  Not knowing for certain which apple will be crisp, juicy, and sweet doesn't stop me from picking out apples in the produce section.  Not knowing with absolute certainty whether my wife loves me didn't stop me from marrying her.  Every decision I make is based on either approximations or trust (or occasionally on blind guesses).

So, I guess that means that my uncertainty about God is not qualitatively different from my uncertainty about which apples are tastiest.  But there is certainly a quantitative difference.  If we limit our discussion to the notion of existence, I can't be absolutely certain that the table I'm sitting at or the computer I'm using actually exist.  There is some chance that I'm hallucinating or that I'm actually in some sort of interactive simulation (like in the Matrix).  However, my uncertainty about the existence of the table or computer are obviously quite different from my uncertainty about God.  I think what it comes down to is sensation....

In ordinary life, the way that we "know" something exists is that we can sense it.  That means we rely on sight or touch or some combination of our senses (or, in the case of scientists, they rely on their instruments to do the sensing for them) to suggest to our minds that there is something there.  For the most part it is pretty straight-forward—I can see a chair in front of me, I can touch its wooden back and padded seat, and I "know" that it exists.  In ordinary life, it doesn't matter that theoretically I could be wrong.  I base my day-to-day living on this type of "knowledge."

However, there are some things that aren't quite as straight-forward, some things that are kind of on the edges.  Usually they are things that we sense only briefly, infrequently or faintly, like hearing noises when we're home alone or like seeing faint, quick shooting stars.  We sense them but because we can't really hear or see them again, we're uncertain about their existence.  To some extent, it seems to me that God often falls into this category.  Experiences of God are often hard to grasp and hold onto, they are brief and often occur when we least expect it.  For some people, these brief experiences are enough to say that they "know" God exists.  However, for many of us, our experiences of God are similar to uncertain noises or faint shooting stars, leaving us unsure whether the experience was real.

So, when I talk about being uncertain about God's existence, I'm not talking in a purely theoretical sense—for me, the latency of God has as much to do with lived experience as it does with theory.  As much as I wish God's existence were as apparent to me as the physical objects I encounter in everyday life, that just isn't the case.  Even if the existence of physical objects is theoretically questionable, it seems to me that God is questionable in a much more real sense than that.

You can call God mysterious, unfathomable, unknowable, or infinite.

I'll call God uncertain.

The Elephant in the Room

I have to admit that in my descriptions of agnostic theology and a latent God there has been something that I've been avoiding—revelation.  For the most part, the avoidance has been accidental.  I just didn't happen to post on it.  However, I think there is a part of me that just isn't sure what to make of revelation, and so I just (unconsciously?) skipped over it.

I think the reason I struggle with revelation has to do with my understanding of human limitations/frailty/finitude/stupidity.  What I mean is that I'm not sure that how capable we, as humans, are of distinguishing the voice of God from voices in our heads.  We've all had the experience of hearing something and asking the person next to us,"What'd you say?" when really no one said anything at all.  If can't distinguish the voices of people physical present to us from noises in our heads, how can we possibly distinguish the voice of God from self-delusions?

Yes, I know that there are plenty of responses to that kind of skepticism (and at times I've been the one defending revelation), but I want to be clear about what I'm trying say:  The only claim I'm making is that revelation is hard for me to grapple with.

And don't worry, I haven't forgotten that revelation includes more than just God-spoke-to-me-in-a-dream kind of stuff.  There is, of course, the Bible (at this moment I'm imagining an ancient leather-bound book falling from the sky and landing with a staggering thud, throwing up an immense cloud of dust—as the dust clears, you can see that the ground beneath it is fractured, evidence of the book's great weight and power).  

The Bible has it's own set of issues.  To start, it didn't miraculously come down from heaven as a complete, bound book (like in the description above).  The Bible was written over a vast period of time by many different people.  The Bible was edited, reworked, added to, and subtracted from.  It was written from many different viewpoints and suggests many different (and sometimes competing) understandings of God.  It doesn't even make any claims about it's own authority (we can debate about 2 Timothy 3:16).  It is normative for Christian faith, not because God said so, but because Christians said so.

And to make it all more complicated, every book of the Bible began as the kind of revelatory claim I describe at the beginning—someone said God spoke to them (and other related claims).

Again, this all comes back to one big question for me—what do I do with revelation?  It's not that I necessarily discount or disbelieve revelation as a whole, but I think it is clear that sometimes "revelation" turns out to be wrong (David Koresh, for example).  How, then, are we to distinguish between true and false revelation?  

I started to list different possibilities and plenty  of examples and counterexamples, but I think it is better just to let the question stand because, honestly, I don't know.  Revelation is something that is hard for me to deal with because it doesn't fit neatly into the realm of my experience.  It is a troubling, up-ending, messy thing.  It turns my notions of what is and isn't upside-down.

And that is precisely what makes revelation an elephant in the room.  It is something that common sense says shouldn't be there, but it's there whether we like it or not.  So, I guess we have to talk about it....

The Problem of Perception

Recently, I've been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The stated purpose of the book is to turn every reader into an atheist, so it is certainly making for an interesting read. While I'm not particularly convinced by any of his arguments so far (they keep devolving into rhetoric), they have brought up an interesting dilemma for me to chew on--the problem of perception.

In the book, Dawkins suggests that religion should be held to the same high standards as science. Religion, he believes, should be investigated as thoroughly and critically as any other discipline, rather than being given a get-out-of-jail-free card as is often the case. Dawkins harps on religion's inferiority to science, often sloughing it off as "superstition." While I have no intention of engaging Dawkins on this issue, I will use it as a jumping-off point. That distinction between science and superstition, which may be very clear to him, does not seem clear at all to me. I'm not sure that separating the two as qualitatively different is possible.

I think the main difference between science and superstition is the data that support them. Science is based on objective facts, precise experimentation, and logical reasoning. In science, everything is tested, retested, interpreted, retested again, reinterpreted, and then retested a few more times. Scientific facts are experimentally proven and create an ever-more exact picture of our universe. Superstition, however, is based on subjective experience and patchwork attempts to explain our lives. Superstitious truths are believed without evidence and in spite of any contradictions. There is a clear-cut difference between science and superstition, right?

I'm not so sure. Science is not always as "hard" as it's made out to be. Just because something is called "scientific" that doesn't mean that it is true. By it's very nature, science is based on observations and estimates. In order to test something, it must be observable (or else we wouldn't see anything to test) and it must be measurable (or else it wouldn't be much of a test at all).

Observation itself creates problems--observing a phenomenon means that we are interacting with it and potentially interfering with it. By watching something, we run the risk of somehow influencing its outcome. This "observer effect" can be minimized, but as long as we are observing something we are basically getting in the way. Measurement is also a problem because it is impossible to be exact. For example, if I hold my hand at arms-length and measure my thumbnail with a ruler, I see that my thumbnail is 1/2 inch wide. If I take a closer look, it turns out that it is actually 5/8 inch wide. But if I were able to examine it under microscope with a more precise ruler, it may actually turn out to be 37/64 inch wide. The farther you zoom in, the more precisely you can measure (assuming you have a tool that is exact enough). But there are limits to how close we can get. At some point, every measurement becomes an approximation.

What all of that means is that we are limited by the fact that we cannot know anything perfectly, absolutely, and without interference. To some extent we are always guessing. We are perpetually bound by our perception. Granted, the degree of our uncertainty varies depending on the subject. We can be more precisely certain about the interactions of atoms in a combustion reaction than we can be about the nature of God--but we still cannot know everything about either one.

I guess what this all boils down to is subjectivity. Because we observe and interpret the world around us, everything is warped by the lens of our perception. Once something passes through that lens and into our minds, there is no way for us to verify with certainty what it is like on the outside. In our human experience, everything is tainted by our finitude. There really is no way to tell the difference between "empirical" science and "fairytale" superstition.

So even if there is a qualitative difference between science and superstition, as far as we are concerned, they are one in the same.