Sound thinking
From a-rational faith to meaningless world
by Ken Myers
“Descartes famously sought to prove the existence of God through the strict application of logic in order to provide a foundation for the objectivity of the world, the reality of things beyond the phantasms of the imagination. There are many fundamental criticisms to make regarding the Cartesian project: it turns God into an instrument serving a philosophical purpose, or indeed primarily psychological purpose of providing certainty; it operates with a radically impoverished sense of reason, which is defined in strict opposition to faith; and it takes for granted a radicalized subjectivity, an isolated consciousness set off from the physical things of the world, as the problematic starting point, which inevitably sets the terms for the resolution. In another context, we could show that these problems are all related. But, here, I want instead to highlight something positive in Descartes’s reflections, namely, the insight that the objectivity of the world stands or falls with the objectivity of God. The claim I want to make, here, is not exactly Descartes’s — namely, that we have to prove the existence of God first in order to be able to affirm the existence of the world— but rather a somewhat more modest contrapositive of his claim: if we deny the possibility of a rational proof for the existence of God, or that reason has any business occupying itself with such things, or that God would represent a truth demanding the consideration of reason — in other words, if we insist that the God-question is exclusively a matter of private, personal faith, which does not concern anyone else but me — then we undermine the objective reality of things in general. The world gets emptied of its ontological density at a single stroke, even if the outward shell remains intact for centuries thereafter.
“Nietzsche famously observed that the death of God — the disappearance of God’s significance — is a ‘tremendous event’ that ‘has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time.’ It may be that only the appearance of a broad moral controversy brings to light what had in fact been true already for generations: all of a sudden, we come to realize that we do not in fact believe that there is such a thing as ‘nature,’ that the physical world, paradigmatically the human body, is meaningful in itself, that truth and goodness and beauty have objective weight. Charles Péguy defined the spirit of modernity as not believing what one believes (‘ne pas croire ce qui l’on croit’); perhaps postmodernity arrives when we finally see through this falsehood and shed the pretense. In any event, I wish to suggest that at the root of the subjectivism and relativism that we regularly encounter in contemporary culture lies the conviction that faith in God is ultimately a personal, private affair alone, a matter sealed off from the realm of truth. If the Creator of the world is not in some basic sense an other, to which I must conform, any real otherness that the world may have grows thin, and fails to put up any ontological resistance to human projects — at the moment of crisis, initially, but eventually in any moment of need, however trivial.”
— from D. C. Schindler, “‘Unless You Become a Philosopher . . . ’: On God, Being, and Reason’s Role in Faith” Communio (Spring, 2016)
