by Kolbitar » November 6th, 2005, 1:17 pm
Hello Air. I’m not sure if you are still posting here, but hopefully you are still reading posts – if not. I have been meaning to reply to a query you had a while back, and I finally was able to tackle it. I’m going to post it, and if you feel it compromising to respond here then please by all means contact me through e-mail. I would very much like to hear your comments.
::Let's assume for the sake of argument that the supernatural exists. Is there any way in which I could discover this empirically?
::The supernatural cannot be counted on to manifest in any experiments that I attempt; and, while there is no shortage of testimony to its existence, much of that testimony seems to come from rather credulous sources, so that it isn't clear to me how one would pick the signal out from the noise.
::Is there any objective evidence for the supernatural particularly worthy of examination? Are the only paths to belief philosophical, personal experience, or pure faith?
The answer, I think, depends largely on the various definitions of a number of words you use. For instance, by “philosophical” do you mean objects of which we can never really have, in principle, a direct empirical experience? For that would include theoretical constructs like quarks and black holes, which are not traditionally objects of philosophy. It would also include, as Josh points out, scientific constructs like gravity. But these hypothesis are testable (assuming enough faith that the existence of things which act according to laws will continue to exist and so act lawfully); anyone who is capable can test them anytime. In that sense they’re quite useful as well, so that whether or not we believe in their actual existence, they non the less serve the utilitarian. But let us clarify a number of things before proceeding.
First, we do not consider the theoretical constructs of science, such as a black hole, to fall within the field of philosophy. It is the function of the theoretical construct which determines it’s field of study – with this I think you’d agree. We may therefore arrive in the same way (a way which is equally valid no matter what the field) at things which fall under two or more separate fields. B.) All theoretical constructs derive empirically, that is, both the laws of thought and the theoretical construct employed to explain observable phenomena originate from the existences which reach us through our senses. Three.) along with descriptive truth there is also prescriptive truth, which modern philosophers completely fail to notice.
Now let me try to tie some of this together before I get into what I find to be the most beautifully testable evidence for the existence of God.
You ask “Is there any objective evidence for the supernatural particularly worthy of examination? Are the only paths to belief philosophical, personal experience, or pure faith?” Let us look at these paths in reverse order, for they are not clearly distinguishable from the path upon which you set out. After doing so, I think we’ll find a broader path which offers clarity, saves your point, and helps answer your question.
Pure faith: The naturalist has pure faith in laws and sustained patterns of existence. There is no possible way to find necessity to these things which come to our senses. No amount of observations made of the sun’s ascent in the East, morning after morning, can provide one an “ought” for the sun’s continuing to do so. If all we have to go on are descriptive criteria, we must admit our faith in the intelligibility of the universe is purely irrational faith (not, I say, connecting the phenomena of past experience, but of using that experience to predict future experience). Here the third point I made can rescue us. How? By finding prescriptive truth, an “ought.” But I already said it is impossible to find an “ought” in what is, when what is has no rational necessity to it. The only other way is to predicate our “ought,” our prescriptive statements, on a self evident criteria. This criteria does not exist “outside,” therefore the only other possible place can be from within. Indeed, among the very few self evident propositions, like a finite whole is greater than it’s parts, and a thing cannot both be and not be in the same way at the same time, is the self evident proposition that we must seek the good. It is from the very force behind our will, that which forces us to “seek the good,” that we find a sort of sense of second nature which causes us to naturally accept the uniformity of nature (both in it’s parts we do not experience in it’s vastness, and it’s predictability). In this way it’s a rational expectation which the existential order (the realm of the descriptive) just so happens to obey.
Personal experience: At first glance perhaps you could mean by this objects which are in principle not public objects, or public objects not knowable through the senses, and though in principle knowable by all, in practicality known but by few. It seems the latter is not a valid option because you said “objective evidence,” and if there were another mode of perception potentially available to us all through which public objects not knowable through the senses could be known, then this would be objective, so you probably did not have this in mind. However, not all religious experience belongs to the first category, it is to the second that I will later appeal.
Philosophical: The way we (the traditional “we”) rationally come to the theoretical construct “God,” is a posteriori. It’s method is no different than that by which we arrive at scientific “constructs,” the only difference is the particular explanation of observable phenomena for which it is used to account. We start with the empirical world, and see a necessity to explain it’s various aspects. Science deals with becoming, with what philosophers term secondary causes. Philosophy deals with existence, with ontology and metaphysics. It’s either bias or misunderstanding which would discount the one, arrived at by the same method as the other, for the mere fact that it is used to explain a different aspect of observable phenomena. Therefore if you ask for empirically discoverable evidence for God’s existence in favor of the scientific method to the exclusion of the philosophical, you are simply asking to affirm and deny the same method at the same time.
Now, whereas before we could, considering the scientific theoretical constructs, simply regard their utility without questioning their ontology, as it regards the philosophical theoretical construct “God,” we are now forced to ask whether it does indeed exist because of the aspect of observable phenomena the theoretical construct accounts for: it’s very (dependent) existence.
I’m not here attempting to make the argument, but merely trying to show it’s philosophical nature is no less legitimate or less empirical than the scientific one you seek. Less immediate than some objects of science? Certainly -- at least, on a general level.
Now, I’ve located this sense for the reliability of objective reality in our will, thus attaching it to self-evidence. This expectation is a certain desire for such reliability, an inborn, natural desire. Only in this way is it rational. Here all questions die away, they simply have no place. Facts are facts, and desires are created by facts. We have no desire for something that has not made it. Reality itself -- in it’s deepest core, has made us for itself. It is here we can locate something else as well. This same sense tells us that the theoretical concept “God,” in order to be effective as affective -- apart from the necessity of the logic proof -- must be believed. That is, in order to be a motive power for the will it must be believed. I’m not here arguing an Ontological slight of hand (i.e., the so called ontological proof), only saying that from the point of view of the will, the intellectual construct “God” is not like the scientific theoretical construct which doesn’t have to be necessarily believed. I AM going somewhere with this… Another fact about human nature is that we desire something which promises to fulfill us in every way, and applying our intellects we easily find that there’s no finite object, in principle, capable of doing this. Reality, in it’s deepest core, has thus made us for itself in this way as well. This seems to be fastened just as securely as our rational expectation that reality is not a dark, disorderly, nightmarish fairytale – to a deep seated imprint from the signet of objectivity. That in itself -- though perhaps insufficiently argued in it’s present form -- serves as another proof. But aside from any convenient and less obvious implications, there’s a further destination to where the more obvious facts do lead. It’s here that I am somewhat relieved of my burden of arguing proofs as if I’m a mind detached from a will, as I feel I so often do here arguing for “logical proofs.” It is here I can journey along the existential, the relational, the too beautiful for logic -- though logic can and hopefully will be employed beautifully.
In his updated preface to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley gives a quick review of an aspect about his work which he sees as a flaw. The more advanced in years, mature Huxley writes: The savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village…(t)oday I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain that in the past sanity is a rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it…having said so in several recent books and, above all…having compiled an anthology of what the sane have said about sanity and the means whereby it can be achieved.
How does this relate to the point I would like to make? Huxley has in mind a class of people found in all times and places, people whom he calls mystics and elsewhere calls saints. I prefer the term Saint, because, like Lewis said, not all saints are mystics, and not all mystics are saints. None the less, whether directly aware of some contact with God, or more implicitly aware of a power and quality of life from subliminal depths attributed to God, the Saints are people who seem to differ from us almost -- in their maturity -- in kind – not merely degree. In them we have a type of unexpected mutation, something at which humanity never could have guessed, but which now makes perfect sense. The greatest and most perfect “specimen,” so believe we Christians, walked the Earth around two thousand years ago, and still walks in a variety of ways to this day.
In reply to a friend of mine here a while back, who was noting the lack of proof for the Catholic claim that she bears the fullness of truth, I wrote the following...
“(But) (w)ho is it that adorns Her walls, like the hallway of a highschool, with a flowery pictorial history of Saints and Mystics who seem to echo, each in their own individual yet unmistakably Christlike way, the aberrant though ideal Life which broke through and alighted upon this world two thousand years ago? Unsacramental Protestant halls, notably bare, have a few annals at the end of them with some truly great names scribbled within; names of those whose lives by far eclipse the morally meager lives most of us live. But evidently those records don't contain the frequency or even degree of divine strangeness and eccentric holiness: for certain, they do not evoke the sentiment which sends Catholics to revere and pray to them -- the contagious atmosphere showering down that magnitude of intense devotion is found only in the Sacramental tradition.”
I do include within my purview saints from other religions, but I find the most Christ-like, the most “strange,” “eccentric,” “unexpected,” “sane,” and ideal lives to dwell mostly in the Catholic tradition, and mostly within the atmosphere which it preserves. But please do not let what may be perceived as my bias cloud over the fact that there are experiences of something transcending the world of the senses and discursive reason which are not “foreign to our true nature as men.” The type of which I have in mind unify and “sublimate” human faculties, giving the subject a one-pointed-ness, a fortified will, a peace, and a docility, an acceptance to whatever may come his/her way. These are the types of people our wills are determined to emulate, as they are the only ones truly “seeking the good.” So, again, logic is involved here, but the adventure is one of the will, is one which must “act before we know,” in the words of William James. The hypothesis therefore is one of the historical method, based on human experience; backed by the philosophical method; potentially testable -- akin in this way to the scientific method; and which carries with it an obligatory act of faith, rationally founded in the same way as is the naturalist’s faith that “the book of nature is really a book and not a magazine, a coherent work of art and not a hodge-podge of mutually irrelevant snippets.” I think these facts (though perhaps needed explication) place the hypothesis that God exists in the realm of knowledge, so that to reject it is a matter of will, not reason.
Sincerely,
Jesse
