The Outsideness of God
I am a child of thinkers. Born in the post-Enlightenment West to scientist parents who wrote and solved logic puzzles for fun, I inherited a reverence for logic. Logic undergirded science, science explained things and I wanted explanations for everything. “What is evil?” “How many stars are there—if there is an infinite number and the universe is infinitely old, shouldn’t the night sky be bright?” “Why do we experience time?” My Catholic teachers told me to stop asking questions and to concentrate on loving God. Love—I thought—was a feeling. Feelings couldn’t be summoned at will and I couldn’t stop asking questions. So I turned away from my teachers, and from the devout Christianity of my grandparents, to a science which promised “theories of everything.”
But ‘everything’ was showing itself increasingly irreducible to logical explanation.
Irreducibility
Logic is a powerful tool. Science, built on a scaffold of logical reason, works so well it gave us smart phones and life-saving medicine. But it gets weird close up. I remember performing Young’s Double Slit experiment in high school, that seminal nineteenth-century physics set-up that demonstrates light behaves as both a particle and a wave. Which one was it, actually? No one knew. Quantum mechanical theory predicted the uncanny result and said it was both. At the same time. The act of looking gave a specific answer, but that answer depended on how you looked.
The same experiment could be done with matter—seemingly solid particles of that lumpen stuff we deal with every day. This matter could not be pinpointed as in a certain spot at a certain time, so was it still “matter”?
As esoteric and epistemologically frustrating as quantum mechanics was, it made predictions that were accurate, and led to technology that worked. Dismissing it whole-cloth was not a solution.
My rationalist ancestry told me resolving this apparent contradiction of wave-particle duality just required more information and better theories. That was, after all, the call of a scientist. To discover and explain.
This elusiveness, however, sprang into view elsewhere. In linguistics, defining a word’s meaning required appealing to other words—to people's experience—always approaching but never reaching a precise global definition, what Glenn Miller called the “linguistic wall” or Wittgenstein the language-game. Similarly, in neuroscience consciousness seemed irreducible to a sum of myriad neuronic connections. Instead an emergent theory was proposed necessary, where “the of facts about consciousness [were] not deducible from any number of physical facts”. That we were conscious, and believed we were real continuous selves that mattered, could not be explained. Neuroscience’s mechanistic forays into such areas offered weak explanations that suffered from chicken-or-egg syndrome—that my ventral tegmental area lights up when I am feeling love does not tell me why that happens or how it leads to the feeling of love. Is it cause or effect?
I was disturbed by the tendency of modern science towards irreducibility—perhaps things were not just difficult to understand because we didn’t have all the information to understand them but because they were inherently not understandable by our systematic, logical methods. Some questions may just not have clear answers. Which would make my earlier dismissal of Christianity because it couldn’t answer my questions pretty hypocritical.
Bell’s theorem was the final undoing of my rationalist worldview. This elegant theorem assumed the existence of that extra information that would resolve all the apparent contradictions, like wave-particle duality, and make quantum mechanics a better theory. A complete theory. The extra information, or ‘hidden-variable’ would definitively characterise matter as a particle, as always thought, with properties independent of measurement. The assumption of such a hidden-variable changes quantum mechanics such that it contradicts what we see. Hence, the assumption is wrong. No such hidden-variable exists that allows us to preserve the notion of matter as a particle or ‘local’ entity having particular properties independent of measurement. The universe was fundamentally non-local.
Logic built a grand framework of science that predicted planetary movement and molecular interactions and then, under high focus, predicted its own collapse. The mind and its logic had hit its limits.
God’ Solution—Multi-Faceted Ways of Knowing
Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. (Mar 12:30) Implicit in this statement is that we are not just feelers (with the heart) or thinkers (with the mind). We are both, and more.
Being multi-faceted beings—heart, mind, and soul—neatly explains why a method of knowing based on just one of these measures—like the mind—is incomplete. The biblical world view shows itself as more aligned with our experience of the world than either rational logic or feeling spiritualism on their own.
I had made the common post-Enlightenment mistake of elevating reason and logic too highly.
Both ways of knowing—thinking and feeling—are valid. Thinking’s logical science revealed a wonderful order to our world and allowed us to use that order to construct technology to help human flourishing. Feeling, in turn, reveals knowledge that we cannot obtain using logic. I know my mother loves me not because I can logically prove it, but because a body of evidence I have collected over half a lifetime, made up of experience, coupled with my conscious processing of that experience as feelings, tells me that she does.
But feeling, like thinking, does not have all the answers. Feelings can be fickle. The Bible itself teaches that “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer 17:9) and we should always be careful not to over-rely on our feelings. God told you to do it? Is what you did in accordance with the teaching of the scriptures? If it wasn’t, then he probably didn’t.
I have often been surrounded by “feelers,” whose well-meaning exhortations to stop thinking and start feeling my way to faith—“pray and you’ll just feel it”—evoked not encouragement but terror. To believe certain feelings were necessary for faith and to not have those feelings, or even if I did have inklings of such feelings to doubt their ‘reality’, left me terrified. Was I was lost and rejected by God? Theologian Charles Spurgeon’s words that “to require subjective experience before Christ is trusted is bound to lead to confusion… Such teaching makes men look to themselves instead of the Saviour” were an unutterable relief.
To love and have faith (trust) in someone requires looking to them, focusing on their qualities, not our own, and is an act of the mind as well as the heart. Throughout the Bible, God’s love is frequently spoken of as steadfast (eg, Gen 24:27, Exo 15:13, Num 14:18, Deu 5:10), a term that is at least as well-associated with an act of the will as that of the heart. Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemene, was completely faithful to his Father but still desperately wanted to avoid his painful death. His feelings did not align with the ultimate act of his loving faith.
So we can act in faith and love even we are not feeling faithful or loving. C. S. Lewis put it well when he said “Faith,… is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” Holding onto my faith is helped by knowing more, always having an answer to “make a defense to anyone who asks [me] for a reason for the hope that is in [me]” (1 Pet 3:15), even if it is not a complete answer, for no one has those. Martin Luther wrote that it is a “real strength, to trust in God when to all our senses and reason He appears to be angry; and to have greater confidence than we feel.” In the depths of my despair, I remember Jeremiah praying: “My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” (Lam 3:19-21, my emphasis).
Navigating the Join
One of the greatest barriers to embracing faith, even after accepting that logic had failed on its own, was how to navigate the join between the different ways of knowing. If reason and logic did not always give answers, how would I know when to use them and when to rely on something else, like feeling; how would we collectively ever agree on which case was which, a kind of communal serenity prayer gone mad? Wasn’t this relativism?
Remember God’s Outsideness
The fallacy here was still holding onto the notion that I could know the picture of the whole—whether by thinking alone, feeling alone, or some combination. If we are within a system we are incapable of examining the whole from the outside, like being in the wrong dimension. We cannot see the whole when we are part of the whole—an experience of which the circle, trying to comprehend the nature of the sphere, was familiar with in E.A. Abbott's Flatland.
Only God, who is outside creation as the Creator, has that power of overseeing. Greater than nature, he cannot be fully comprehended from within nature. No human in the Bible is sufficiently supreme to comprehend God in his true form, thus he appears to Moses as a ‘burning bush’, to Israel as a “pillar of fire.” God declares his ‘outsideness’ when he rhetorically asks Job “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?” (Job 38:1); and replies to Abraham’s question as to who he is that, “I AM who I AM” (Exo 3:14), the self-referential declaration denying that any other appeal to worldly explanation is required or would be understood. Along with Spurgeon, “I worship a God I never expect to comprehend”.
Accepting some things are beyond our comprehension does not mean we totter on the slope of relativism. There is still right. There is still wrong. We just don’t have a commandment rulebook to encompass and neatly categorize every situation arising in our lives. God calls us to love him and love our neighbor, and through this we grow in knowledge and discernment. (Phil. 1:9) We are not automatons, following a list of commandments for every situation we encounter, and we are not slaves to feeling, doing only what satisfies. We are loved creations made in the image of the Creator and we love in response.
Loving God includes accepting him as above us and listening to what he says in the scriptures so our feelings and actions incline towards him. Loving our neighbor includes accepting them as equal to us, listening to them, and serving them. By doing this we will naturally tend to what is “right,” a process of sanctification that will not be completed on this earth.
Embracing our small creatureliness, means seemingly paradoxical dichotomies of faith versus science, or difficult doctrines like divine sovereignty versus human responsibility, are not pitched against each other on the single scale of reason or of experience. Rather, they are considered via all measures using our bodies, minds, and souls with a humility that accepts complete understanding is beyond us. It is a disturbing tendency of the West to try and reduce complex truths—including Christian doctrine—into overly-simplified categories or false dichotomies. Though easier to understand, these lose some truth in the process and create unnecessary divisiveness. Not everything can be systemized. Science has shown us that. We would do well to heed Spurgeon: “O that the time were come when seeming opposites would be received, because faith knows that they are portions of one harmonious whole.”
These days, I cultivate a habit of trust and faith, reading the scriptures, reading theologians to better understand the scriptures, praying and engaging in practical acts of love towards the people in my life—even when I don’t feel like it. I embrace logic because it uses my mind with which I was gifted, along with heart and soul, at creation. I also embrace feeling. Always I remember neither gives complete understanding. To assume so would be to deny my ancestry as a created being of a greater God.
References:
1. Miller, Glenn, Looking At The Wall christianthinktank.com/phil0615g.html, Accessed November 2018
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wittgenstein https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein, Acc Mar 2020.
3. David Chalmers, Strong and Weak Emergence, In Davies, P. & Clayton, P. (eds.) The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis From Science to Religion. Oxford, Oxford University Press, INC, USA, 2006, DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199544318.003.0011
4. Murray, Iain H., Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism. The Battle for Gospel Preaching. 1995, pg. 68 The Banner of Truth Trust. ISBN 978 1 84871 097 9
5. Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity, HarpersCollins, 1952, p. 198 & 140
6. Luther, Martin. Treatise on Good Works. 1520. Published by Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/good_works.html, Section VII. Accessed 13/3/2020
7. Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland, Dover Publications, 1952
8. Murray, Iain H., Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1995, p. 76
9. cited by Iain A. Murray in Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, p. 76
All biblical quotes are from the ESV
You can also read this article in The Unmooring, Issue 2.