Are you certain about your faith? This was a question that came up recently in conversation with a group of second year RE students. To their surprise I found myself answering: ‘No!’Why was that my response?
The first, and more obvious, reason is because the claim to any form of certainty is the claim to finished and completed knowledge. The one who is certain has nothing more to learn and is in full possession of the truth. Not only is this in tension with the eschatological orientation of Christianity – “For now we see in a mirror dimly…then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood (1 Cor 13: 12) – it is also an extraordinarily dangerous attitude to life because it refuses to admit of the possibility of error. The last person one would want in charge of a nuclear bunker and its arsenal of weapons is one who claims the possession of certainty.
Secondly, and more deeply, I answered ‘no’ because the false and impossible demand for certainty leads ultimately to atheism and despair! It is this conviction that I shall attempt to lay out more fully.
Ian Markham (2010) ‘hits the nail on the head’ when he writes: “Modernity has connected knowledge with complete certainty and in so doing has found such knowledge unobtainable.” (p.135) In reaction to this difficulty, in the postmodern period it has become commonplace to understand claims to knowledge as just the human projection of meaning onto the world, and claims to faith as knowledge beyond that which reason can sustain (Ibid.) In effect, therefore, faith and knowledge collapse into each other: both are valiant but ultimately empty attempts at meaning-making. God cannot be known and hope is a form – perhaps even an admirable form – of wishful thinking. So what has gone awry?
The movement known as Radical Orthodoxy traces the problem, with some justification, right back to Duns Scotus (1265-1308) and Nominalism (which it is claimed cuts the temporal adrift from its participation in the eternal). But we might begin somewhat latter with René Descartes ( 1596-1650) and his quest for certainty.
Descartes was impressed by the operation of mathematics and especially with the precision and security of its results. This gave him cause to pause and wonder if the same approach could be applied to knowledge in general.
“The long chains of inferences, all of them simple and easy, that geometers normally use to construct their most difficult demonstrations had given me an opportunity to think that all the things that can fall within the scope of human knowledge follow from each other in a similar way, and that as long as one avoids accepting something as true which is not so, and as long as one always observes the order required to deduce them from each other, there cannot be anything so remote that it cannot eventually be reached nor anything so hidden that it cannot be uncovered.” (Discourse on Method and Related Writings, (London: Penguin, 1999), p.16)
During the winter of 1619-1620 Descartes took to a small room, warmed by a stove, in order to engage in his famous thought experiment in search of a rock-sure foundation from which he could then build up an edifice of certain knowledge. His method was one of ‘hyperbolical doubt’ in which he resolved, “…never to accept anything as true if I did not know clearly that it was so…that I had no opportunity to cast doubt on it” (Discourse, p.16). Descartes thus engages in a ‘pre-emptive scepticism’ (Brian Magee) on the basis that what, if anything, survives must be the foundational certainty he requires.
His method had three stages:
- He doubts on commonsensical grounds: a stick looks bent in water, but is actually straight – thus appearances in the world can deceive.
- He doubts that he is awake and perceiving anything at all – everything could all a dream, thus there is no certainty that the external world exists.
- Finally he imagines a malicious demon interfering with his thoughts– perhaps he his tricked every time he counts up the sides of a square. Thus even mathematical conceptions must go.
But, Descartes reasons, even if the entire contents of his mind are false, if he is doubting he must at least be thinking as he could not be deceived if he were not. This then leads on, questionably it has to be said – why not just conclude ‘there are thoughts’ – to his now notorious conclusion: Cogito ergo sum – I am thinking, therefore I exist!
This certainty, however, is won at a terrible price, for in the process Descartes has effectively split the world in two, into the extended realm of space and the non-extended realm of thought, yet without any clear means of connecting the two (his own attempt, on the basis that examining his own thoughts he finds the ontological argument that can put back a God who guarantees the external world, is dubious at best). It is this bifurcation of the world that leads to subsequent difficulties.
Descartes quest for certainty leads to an impasse which Kant attempts to circumvent by his distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. The phenomenal world is the world of experience as this is perceived and understood by sense data processed through the in-built concepts of the mind (such as time and space).But although the phenomenal world is dependent for its existence upon the noumenal world – that is on things as they are in themselves – there is no way of independently knowing what this world comprises. God as beyond space and time is thus consigned to the unknowable noumenal world, the object of faith, or, at best, the postulate of practical reason (God is required to guarantee moral logic).
But the ultimate consequences of Descartes failed search for certainty are taken to their ultimate logical conclusion by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900).
For Nietzsche the world is made up of a flux of fragments each totally unique and different from each other. This makes him the enemy of concepts. For example, every leaf is different from every other, so the concept ‘leaf’ only succeeds by crushing these differences. The invented concept ‘leaf’ is thus a falsification of actual leaves. Worse, such problematic, invented concepts get built into great structures of thought as we attempt to construct our picture of the world. The upshot: what we call truth is but a human creation. But it is a creation we are in danger of ceasing to treat as creation, so that it becomes hardened into a false account as if this truth actually corresponded to reality.
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which have worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” (Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”, cited in Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p.91)
‘Truth’ is an error we cannot live without, but it is individual and arbitrary. For Nietzsche, values only exist to the extent that we create them. There is no transcendent realm. Life is like a work of art: we create ourselves. This has profound consequences not only for theology, but also for any claim to an account of reality such as is made in the physical sciences. The dizzying disorientation this provokes is captured in the following remarkable passage from The Gay Science:
“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: ‘I am looking for God! I am looking for God!…The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lamps be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?” (Cited in the Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (London: Penguin, 1969), p.14)
Here we arrive at the ultimate dead-end of Descartes quest for certainty. To make headway, both science (reason) and faith have to modify Cartesian certainty. We have to turn back, give up on the notion of cold, isolatable certainty and understand the process of acquiring knowledge differently.
Alasdair MacInytre points out in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? that all knowledge is tradition-constituted. That is, only via the mediation of a tradition can one begin to apprehend the complexity of the world. And only by learning to live within more than one tradition can we test their results for explanatory power and coherence and so decide between traditions (Markham, 2010, pp.137f). When one thinks about it, it becomes obvious that even so-called ‘propositional language’ is dependent on the prior acquisition of language over a long period of time (Ibid., p.81).
Both science and theology are traditions through which we come to understand the world, both operating in their respective ways, but neither offering certainty. Despite the common assumption, science does not prove things to be true. It tests hypotheses by examining their predictive power, by means of repeatable experiment, and thereby searching for exceptions (evidence of falsification – proof that they are not true). Theology asks one to try on the spectacles of a tradition, informed by claimed revelation, and to see how well they bring the world into focus. Ultimately theology has to be compatible with (if not limited by) the truth of science if the unity of God as creator and revealer is to be maintained.
All knowledge is acquired by a slow, patient, complex, revisable and irreducibly relational process. It is a process though which we cultivate the virtues of community, humility and openness (Markham, 2010, p.138). There is no short cut via claimed certainty.
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