/ epistemology
Jason Peters on Owen Barfield
In his opposition to this assumption and the mental habit that follows from it, Barfield was at some pains to point out that the world we inhabit is not, that it cannot be, structurally different from what we think about it—that the world we perceive “is not something unshakably and unalterably given, but is largely the product of the way we collectively and subconsciously think. It is correlative to our mental habit” (HGH 71 — and not, by the way, “incompatible with deep religious conviction” [RM 190]).
This essay is not an epistemological treatise; nor do I have the space fully to trace what Barfield believed about the relationship of subject to object. This essay is a reminder from Barfield of the extent to which faith is implicit in our current view of the world. But it is necessary, I think, in the service of explaining the first feature of Barfield’s dissent from the scientific view, briefly to sketch part of Barfield’s strategy for showing how the world we perceive coheres structurally with what we think about it.
He began his book Saving the Appearances [3] with a favorite romantic image — a favorite because signal feature of the romantic dissent from the Enlightenment — viz., the image of the rainbow. A rainbow ‘exists’ because light, water, and eyesight combine to create it. Your eyes are every bit as important to the construction of the rainbow as water and light are, and you can test the extent to which you are implicated in the rainbow’s ‘existence’ by trying to find the pot of gold at the end of it. As you move, so does the rainbow. It comes to rest beyond that hill there, until you yourself climb that hill, whereupon the rainbow, together with its coveted pot of gold, has moved and now comes to rest beyond the next hill. Chase it however you may, the only thing you will have in the end is the certainty that eyesight is as important to the rainbow’s being wherever it is as light and water are… .
Barfield’s philological reflections led him to conclude that whereas we, after Descartes, perceive a world filled with things, our forbears—perhaps to include St. John the Evangelist—must certainly, at some point, have “perceived images.” Now “[t]he difference between an image and a thing lies in the fact that an image presents itself as an exterior expressing or implying an interior”—wind would be an example of this—“whereas a thing does not. When what begins by being an image becomes in course of time a mere thing, we are justified in describing it as an idol. And a collective state of mind, which perceives all things and no images, may thus fairly be characterized as idolatry” (HGH 70).
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Read the rest of this the first part of a two-part essay, in Front Porch Republic. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is “a stunner”, as C. S. Lewis put it in a letter to Barfield.
Secularist leaders [in the Victorian era] were usually raised religious. As clever youths, they would begin to handle the Bible critically. They prided themselves in being “rational” and would decide that Christian beliefs did not meet this standard. They would then go on to find intellectual satisfaction in picking apart the beliefs of others. Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason,” a book beloved by free-thinkers in the 19th century, systematically went through the Bible, gleefully mocking each book in turn.
Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of “mere negations.”
Rémi Brague interview excerpts
- Rémi Brague is professor of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. He is the author of *The Legend of the Middle Ages*. I've excerpted portions of an interview found at www.press.uchicago.edu
- Question: Can the wisdom of the world that the Greeks knew be opposed to the wisdom of God, given that the world and the revealed book—as claimed by medieval men (for example, the “Platonic” Alain de Lille or the Augustinian tradition that finds a cosmoclast representative in Bonaventure)—have one and the same author?
- Brague: The image of the two books that must be reconciled is an old one and a good one. The wisdom of the world that I try to get at, which is, in fact, Greek, shares only a name with the “wisdom of this world” that St. Paul declares God has “turned into folly” (I Corinthians 1:20). In the first case, we are speaking of the fine order of the physical universe; in the second, of human existence, when it wants to be cut off from God and claims to act according to its own logic.
- Question: What is your view of how the historian’s knowledge articulates with philosophical and theological discourse today?
- Brague: History is prominent among the good dozen major disciplines that I regret not having studied. Gaston Bachelard famously responded to someone who told him that all scholars had their philosophy that philosophers, too, have their own field of knowledge. One might say the same thing of history. It is too often taken for granted that all that is required in order to pursue the history of philosophy is to be a philosopher, and that historical method is something automatic that can be learned on the job. As for the average professor of philosophy’s vision of medieval history, it is almost as much of a caricature as that of the man in the street.
- Question: Can one believe in reason, when today, paradoxically, it is reason that seems to have been in crisis since the early twentieth century, whereas many religious faiths seem to be thriving? In this connection, you have spoken of “the anguish of reason.” What do you mean by that?
- Brague: I have indeed used the expression l’angoisse de la raison as the title of an article. People talk incessantly of the rise of irrationalism. Giving readers a fine case of goose bumps is the stock in trade of many a pen pusher. Such people, what is more, take pains not to ask themselves just why the “rationalism” they defend is so unattractive. In any event, supposing that irrationalism is indeed on the rise, it does not bother me overly much. Let me note that the connection between rationalism and irrationalism is extremely complex, and that the historical representation of a gradual ascension toward the light is simply the result of forgetting the shadows that such a light necessarily projects. Two examples: the high point of magic is not situated in the Middle Ages, but just before and just after. The first high point was late Neoplatonism: Proclus (d. 485) placed magic (or “theurgy”) higher than all human knowledge; the second came in Renaissance Florence of the fifteenth century. Nor should we forget the contents of Newton’s famous trunk. That great thinker was just as interested in an exegesis of the Book of Revelation as he was in celestial mechanics. Magic and science are twin sisters, but one prospered while the other declined.
- The real danger lies in the paradox of your formula “believe in reason.” For the ideology of the Enlightenment, which is still widespread among the intellectual proletariat, it is one thing or the other — either one believes, or one is rational. Reason is expected to destroy belief and replace it with knowledge. That reason itself is the object of a belief is a bit hard to swallow.
- Question: The “crisis” of reason, as we have said, goes along with the excellent health of certain religious movements. Yet we can see in Europe growing disbelief and the banalization of atheism. Can a connection be drawn between the de-divinization of the world and the “distancing” of the Christian God, given that, as you write in connection with John of the Cross, “the divine has not come closer, but grown more distant” with the New Alliance?
- Brague: That phrase referring to John of the Cross is part of a commentary on one of his strongest passages and should be taken in context. I started with a passage in which St. John explains that God has nothing more to give us, not because he wants to refuse us anything, but, precisely, because he has already given us everything, all at once, in giving his Son.
- Question: One last and perhaps more personal question: What place can someone who believes in one religion make for other religions?
- Brague: A place where? In his library: in his quality as a cultivated man, he will give their documents shelf space, and he will strive to know something about them in order to keep himself from saying really stupid things about religions that are not his own. He may eventually discover fine expressions of religious sentiment in authors who profess other religions than his own and piously make them his own.
- Can he respect those religions? Properly speaking, no. Not because he is or is not a believer, and not because he adheres to religion A rather than to religion B, but quite simply because he values the meaning of words. Religions are only things, and one can only respect persons. One can no more respect a thing than listen to a painting. I respect no religion, not even my own. I respect those who believe in all religions, not because they are believers, but inasmuch as they are human beings.
- More specifically, I have no esteem for belief in and of itself. I detest the recent habit of considering the act of belief as having a value in itself, independent of its content. And I mistrust those who attempt to discover connections between “believers,” even to lump them together, without asking themselves what they believe in. One can believe in flying saucers, after all! There were sincere Nazis and convinced Leninites. And the Carthaginian fathers who had their sons burned alive as a sacrifice to the god Moloch (the scene is narrated by Flaubert, but the facts are true) must have “believed in it” strongly. For me, a belief is as good as its object, neither more nor less.
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist John Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) explores the roots of his beliefs and finds them grounded in religious faith, the ideals of democracy and in the power of creative writing. [Thanks to my sister Cynthia Bader.]
me on the Risen Christ in Luke 24
The risen Christ is not a generic mysterium tremendum. He is the one who identifies with the God who spoke in Deuteronomy. God is not unknowable, but encountered in a language that Jesus subjects himself to and exalts by his obedience. “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.”
Even Jesus knows his will and the will of God are not automatically the same. He had to conform his will to that of the Father. And his judgment about that will is not mystically endowed by inner voice, but by knowing the God whose will has been revealed in Israel’s scriptures, where sacrifice and ransom and the will that all nations be blessed are passages that conspire to insist Jesus must die not on Groundhog Day or the Winter Solstice, but during the festival of death out of life and life out of death. It is the psalms that comprise Jesus’s last words from the cross, not universal expressions of anguish or hymns to a dying and rising God from the Ancient Near East or Greco-Roman milieu.
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from my sermon A Room Furnished with Grief and Resurrection based on Luke 24: 36 – 48
Epistemology, baseball, and my father
I was in Candlestick Park that night with my father and my cousin Chubby. Chub’s been skinny as a rail since he could walk, but he was chubby when he got the nickname and everyone calls him Chubby to this day. But this isn’t a story about him. I won’t tell you here why he was with us that summer in New Mexico where we lived; why he was with Dad and me in Candlestick Park on August 9, 1968. This is a story about epistemology, baseball, and why I do not disbelieve my father when he tells me something.
People remember 1968 for lots of reasons, but historians of baseball remember it as The Year of the Pitcher. The Tigers’ Denny McClain won 31 games that summer, still the modern-era record for most wins in a season, and had an ERA of 1.96. The Cards’ overpowering Bob Gibson had an ERA of 1.12. The Giants’ ace, Juan Marichal, led the National League in wins with 26.
Bob Stevens, the sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle who covered the Giants from ‘58 to ‘78, wrote, “If you placed all the pitchers in the history of the game behind a curtain, where only a silhouette was visible, Juan’s motion would be the easiest to identify. He brought to the mound beauty, individuality and class.” Marichal is warming up on the mound when Dad says, “The Mets are gonna win this game.”
The Mets are big-time underdogs. This is my Dad. He roots for underdogs. New York has two good young pitchers in Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver, and they have Jerry Koosman, but none of them are pitching tonight. Dick Selma is. Selma’s not bad, but the Mets hit like nuns; they don’t hit at all or, if they do, they don’t hit hard. New York’s best slugger is Cleon Jones from Plateau, Alabama. The Giants boast Willie McCovey, Willie Mays, Bobby Bonds, and Jesus Alou. Marichal, the Dominican Dandy, is 20 and 4 coming into this game.
Here’s the play-by-play:
Top 1st: Marichal pitches a 1-2-3 inning. Tommie Agee flies out to center; Larry Stahl strikes out; Cleon Jones strikes out looking. I raise my eyebrows at my father. He says, “The Mets are going to win this game.”
Bottom 1st: Bobby Bonds strikes out looking; Jim Davenport flies out to center; Willie Mays strikes out swinging.
Top 2nd: Ed Kranepool—who was 17 when he broke into the Big Leagues—leads off with a single; Ed Charles singles to left, advancing Kranepool to 2B; JC Martin singles to right; Kranepool to 3B, but Charles is thrown out at 2B trying to stretch his hit to a double; Phil Linz hits a sacrifice fly to left field. Martin on 2B; Kranepool scores. Buddy Harrelson is given an intentional walk; Dick Selma grounds out to end the inning. Mets 1, Giants 0. Dad smiles.
Bottom 2nd: Willie McCovey grounds out to 1B; Dick Dietz walks; Jesus Alou hits a ground ball double play.
Top 3rd: Tommie Agee singles to CF; on a wild throw pickoff attempt by Marichal, Agee takes 2B and 3B; Stahl grounds out; Cleon Jones grounds out, scoring Agee; Kranepool singles to center; Charles grounds out. Mets 2, Giants 0.
Bottom 3rd: Bob Schroder fouls out; Hal Lanier grounds out; Marichal strikes out. Mets 2, Giants 0.
Top 4th: Martin flies out to the shortstop; Linz grounds out to SS; Harrelson is hit by a pitch; Selma grounds out.
Bottom 4th: Bobby Bonds leads off with a home run; Davenport singles to LF; Mays grounds into a double play; McCovey strikes out. Mets 2, Giants 1.
Top 5th: Agee is hit by a pitch; Agee steals second; Stahl flies out to LF; Jones flies out to CF; Kranepool flies out to CF, stranding Agee. Mets 2, Giants 1.
Bottom 5th: Dietz walks; wild pitch, Dietz to 2B; Alou grounds out to 1B, Dietz to 3B; Schroder hits a sacrifice fly to LF, Dietz scores; Lanier grounds out to 1B. Mets 2, Giants 2.
Top 6th: Charles grounds out; Martin grounds out; Linz strikes out looking.
Bottom 6th: Marichal is hit by a pitch; Bonds singles, Marichal to 2B; Marichal is picked off 2B by Selma; Davenport walks, Bond to 2B; Mays flies out to RF; McCovey doubles to CF, Bonds scores, Davenport scores, McCovey to 3B/advancing on throw to home; Dietz walks; Alou strikes out looking. Mets 2, Giants 4. “The Mets are going to win this game,” Dad says.
Top 7th: Harrelson grounds out; Al Weis grounds out; Agee flies out to CF.
Bottom 7th: Cal Koonce pitching in relief of Selma; Schroder grounds out; Lanier grounds out; Marichal doubles to LF; Bonds strikes out.
Top 8th: Stahl grounds out; Jones single; Kranepool flies out to 3B; Charles single to CF, Jones to 3B; Martin strikes out looking.
Bottom 8th: Davenport grounds out; Mays flies out to C; McCovey walks; Barton walks, McCovey to 2B; Alou grounds out. Mets 2, Giants 4.
Top 9th: Ron Swoboda, pinch hitting for Cal Koonce, singles to CF; Harrelson singles to CF, Swoboda to 2B; Art Shamsky, pinch hitting for Weis, strikes out; Agee singles to CF, Harrelson to 2B, Swoboda scores; Stahl hits a grounder forcing Agee out at 2B, Harrelson to 3B.
There are two outs. Cleon Jones hits a towering pop up to third base. “I told you, Dad! The Giants win!” Harrelson, on third, running on contact with two outs, crosses home plate. A formality. It won’t count. Stahl, running from first, rounds second.
“The Mets are gonna win this game!” Dad insists. This is the willing suspension of disbelief. This is Coleridge at Candlestick Park. My father has accepted as true the premises of his work of fiction that the Mets will win this game, all in exchange for the promise of entertainment. “It’s not over,” he says.
Cleon thinks it’s over. His bat thrown to the ground, he’s walking to first base. Because he’s trained to do so, Stahl runs to third and passes in front of Jim “Peanut” Davenport. The Giants’ third baseman peers into the dark above a city named for Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of my church. He’s looking up into the sky as Francis did when he was nine (i.e., in 1190), the age I am in this story. The boy bought some birds from the market and let them go. They flew low over his head like parakeets, as if to thank him.
Davenport is waiting for the sky to tilt or something, and return what the kid from Plateau put up there. It does. The ball descends on Peanut and glances off his glove before falling, finally, to the ground. E-5. Harrelson scores/unER; Stahl scores/unER. Cleon Jones to 1B. Jones is caught stealing. Mets 5, Giants 4. It’s unbelievable, if not to my father.
Bottom 9th: Ron Taylor, pitching in relief of Koonce, gets Schroder to groundout; Ty Cline flies out to center; and Jim Ray Hart fouls out to 1B. Mets 5, Giants 4.
“I told you the Mets would win this game,” Dad says, gloating. The Mets won the game. I have it on good authority, mystified. And that is where it began, in San Francisco, on August 9th, 1968, my inability to disbelieve my Dad.
Coleridge was on opium when he wrote, “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake—Aye, what then?” As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale. I remember it the way I remember a dream. But in my hand I hold a flower. The box score.
Postscript: My father and I are faithful Detroit Tigers fans, and ‘68 was a vintage season. The Tigers faced the mighty St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Bob Gibson struck out 17 Tigers in the opener, setting a World Series record that still stands. The Cards took three of the first four games, but the Tigers battled back to win the next two. In the decisive seventh game of the series, Detroit’s Mickey Lolich out pitched Gibson, and the Tigers triumphed by a 4 – 1 score. It was Lolich’s third victory of the series. But that’s another story.
Religion as accidental byproduct
“What I’m interested in is the other story — what all religions have in common,” he said. “These universals of religion come from aspects of peoples’ brains that everybody shared and that emerged early in development.”
From documenting our propensity to believe in teleological (purpose-based) explanations for natural phenomena to the widely held belief that humans possess a soul, a myriad of psychological studies — conducted both here at Yale and at peer universities — now suggest that our brains may be hard-wired to believe in religion.
“The universal themes of religion are not learned,” Bloom said. “They emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems.”
Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos explained that speculations about the evolutionary origins of religion as a byproduct of other processes are plausible but still remain very uncertain. “All human cultures have religious belief,” she said. “Religions often involve costly commitments and public displays of one beliefs. It’s clear that these capacities are adaptive, so it makes sense to consider the possibility that religion emerged as a byproduct.”
Some researchers see religion as the byproduct of the evolution of other cognitive processes, such as the ability to reason about the actions of agents. Others consider religious beliefs to be an exaptation — a trait that may have begun as an accidental byproduct — but became useful in its own right, she said.
Bloom himself falls into this latter camp of theorists. “My own work suggests that [religion] is a byproduct of how we naturally think about people — and to a large extent, an accidental byproduct,” Bloom said.
See today’s YDN.
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Aetiology of this sort makes the impression made by the man who hands you a helmet as he pushes you down the stairs. If he does so because he thinks brutality amusing, that makes him a masochist; but here he puts down the religious, even if inadvertently, not because he thinks the reduction amusing but because he thinks God is. The Most High is now an ‘accidental byproduct’, the neurological equivalent of Aaron’s golden calf but without the necklaces.
This is not your father’s Ivy League condescension. Today’s sociobiologists have a Procrustean way of so reducing the range of human experience they can tuck it into a rather narrow Freudian bed. C. S. Lewis, writing of his conversion, said that “amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.” W. H. Auden said of his conviction that Jesus is Lord: “I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because he is in every respect the opposite of what he would be if I could have made him in my own image.” One wonders if the sociobiologist has ever actually listened to a believer speak honestly of what it’s like to live the faith moment by moment. Who in the Sam Hill could possibly read George Herbert’s poems as exercises in self-absorption? If prayer is just talking to ourselves, I’m not interested. And God knows there are lots of Christians even in California who would just as soon watch the Green Bay Packers on Sunday mornings. — PCE
Billions and Billions of Demons
Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn’t even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity “in deep trouble.” Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin in the NYTBR
Jerry Fodor on Michael Frayn
There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That’s no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn’t the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn’t. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.
For example, nobody is really a solipsist about other minds; everybody knows that everybody else has beliefs and desires out of which they act, just as one does oneself. But it’s a serious question how one knows that other people have minds; and it’s not a question that psychologists are able to answer to anybody’s satisfaction. Is it an inference from, as one says, one’s own case? Or is it a kind of belief that one is simply born with? Or did one learn it at granny’s knee? (If so, where did granny learn it?) The fact is, we don’t know. But that we don’t doesn’t matter if the question is, say, whether people drink because they are thirsty. In particular, your being thirsty doesn’t depend on whether I have a story that says that you are. Of course it doesn’t: your being thirsty is about you, not about me. It wasn’t me who ate the salted peanuts; you did. People say: ‘Is there anything to drink? I’m thirsty.’ Why would they say that they were if they weren’t?
So one thing that’s wrong with Frayn’s arguments is his partiality for inferences from epistemic premises to metaphysical conclusions. Frayn isn’t alone in this of course; quite a lot of 20th-century anglophone philosophy made it a matter of principle to make this mistake. It turns out, at the limit of this sort of philosophical nuttiness, that it takes two to see a tree; you can’t see one unless there’s somebody around (actually or counterfactually) to interpret you as seeing one. But surely this is back to front? Surely it’s the seeing that warrants the interpretation, not the other way around? Stories are made to conform to the world, not vice versa.
Another thing Frayn gets wrong (and here too he doesn’t lack for company) is his persistence in what I’ll call ‘all or nothing’ arguments. So, for example:
What, for example, could have more gratifyingly distinct spatial frontiers than a car? . . . But now follow it through time, from its beginnings in vague discussions between designers and sales directors [to when it] undergoes compression, meltdown, absorption into the fabric of other cars, into tin cans and bicycles. When did it start being a car . . . ? Somewhere this side of the preliminary discussions, certainly. When did it cease? Somewhere before its transmutation into cans of baked beans.
The implication is that, since there’s no fact of the matter about when a thing starts to be a car (or ceases to be one), there is likewise no fact of the matter about whether a thing is a car; it may be a car according to your story but not according to mine and, in principle, there’s nothing to choose between the stories. So, it’s all or nothing: if there’s no matter of fact at the margins, there’s none in the middle either.
I look out of the window . . . I tell you that the sun is setting . . . But, even here, in this simple factual report of what is before my eyes . . . there is also a performative element . . . I am deciding that the sun is setting . . . even though we have no agreement on what precise relationship between sun and horizon constitutes the sun’s setting . . . All narration and description . . . is indissolubly subjective because it involves selection.
I’m not saying the bridge is open because it is; it’s open because I say it is.
And finally, with a flourish: ‘The story is the paradigm. Factual statements are specialised derivatives of fictitious ones.’
Piffle. Much of what we know is organised around clear cases, so what’s indeterminate about the marginal Xs can be a plain matter of fact about the paradigms. How many legs can Bossie have before she becomes not a funny kind of cow but a funny kind of centipede? How small can Bossie be before she’s too small to be a cow? (As small as a bread box? As small as an atom?) How big can she be before she’s too big to be a cow? (As big as Australia? As big as the universe?) And what if she walks upright and serves tea to friends? And what if she speaks Latin? What if she turns on and off on Tuesdays? Search me. Or search a biologist; if he doesn’t know, nobody does. But that Bossie as she stands, in full sunlight with four legs and flies, is a cow: that isn’t up to me, or to you, or to anybody else. Bossie is a cow without caveats, a cow sans phrase, a cow tout court. Nor is her being such merely the asymptote that the indeterminate cases converge towards; that gets things backwards: cows grade off from Bossie, not the other way around. That Bossie is a cow is story-independent.
Frayn is the kind of philosopher who can’t quite believe that what he believes is mostly true; that, by and large, things are much as we all suppose them to be, and that we suppose them to be that way mostly because that’s the way they are. And yet, on the face of it, that’s surely the view that has much the most to recommend it. As a matter of fact, there’s no competition; it’s the only story that anybody has a glimmer of how to tell. It’s one thing to remark that there could be other stories; it’s something quite else actually to tell one that is remotely plausible. No doubt, there’s plenty to worry about at the fringes of what we believe; quantum entanglement really is hard to swallow, and I, for one, can’t get my head around black holes. But Bossie? And the car in the garage? What’s the likelihood that we’ve got it all wrong about them? How could we have? What on earth would conceivably explain Bossie being in my story if not Bossie being in the world?
I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’
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Jerry Fodor, Reviewing Michael Frayn’s book The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe, in the LRB
The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne FRS KBE, formerly a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, is an Anglican priest.
View from the Catacombs
“I wouldn’t want to pose as a religious thinker,” he [Updike] says. “I’m more or less a shady type improvising his way from book to book and trying to get up in the morning without a toothache. At one time I held very strongly the opinion that Paul Tillich and religious liberals like him were traitors in the theological camp because they were trying to humanize something that is essentially nonhuman. They were trying to make Christianity less than a scandal, as Kierkegaard called it. Well, it is a scandal; it’s obviously a scandal because our life is a scandal.”
Though he was raised a Unitarian amid the Lutherans and Amish of southeastern Pennsylvania, Updike joined the more middle-road Congregationalist Church in 1959. Then, a year later, as he was writing Rabbit, Run, the awareness of time passing pressed so closely on him that he felt a constant “sense of horror that beneath this skin of bright and exquisitely sculpted phenomena, death waits.” It was a full-dress religious crisis lasting several months, and Updike says now that he got through it only by clinging to the stern, neo-orthodox theology of Switzerland’s Karl Barth. In Barth’s uncompromising view, reason can prove only that the nonexistence of God is absurd; the positive assertion, that God does exist, can come only by means of revelation.
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Time Magazine, April 26, 1968. When I posted the Tillich and Barth quotes this morning, I had no clue that Updike was dying today. The one Updike novel that has stayed with me the most? Easy. The Centaur.
