Euclid meets God (or doesn't)

In a letter to my Protestant friend (MPF) (cc'd to my atheist friend (MAF)) concerning MAF I said,

it would be fruitful, if possible, more precisely to spline the curve of that twisted notion of the Divine from the roots of disbelief to the point where its tangent becomes true, that is to say orthodox.

Some discussion ensued in which MAF opined,

Believers are asymptotic to God (growing ever closer but never actually meeting). Non-believers are parallel to God (in the Euclidian sense).

He seems to have been implying nobody ever meets God. With this, MPF disagreed, saying,

The un-believer is obviously not parallel to God, since his distance from God is increasing... The believer is parallel to God, as the two lines meet in infinity.

(which Euclid might have found surprising, but never mind). After some discussion in which I did not join about the meanings of the word parallel, I replied at length,

As you all know, I love to beat dead metaphors as much as the next cretin. So, preposterously hoping this nag'll gallop a little further let me try this.

I like the notion that believers travel an asymptotic path toward God, never (in this life) meeting. What's more, we always view God around our own individual curve, so when we look toward God we don't see Him. Those greatly advanced in holiness travel through life so close to God they might almost turn and touch. Yet they're in the same position as anyone, seeing God around a curve, though they can more profoundly experience in this way that dark night ably described by the mystics: They run or are carried and so they look not at but in the same direction (nearly) as God; thus suddenly they can find Him absent as a child does when his father runs along beside and just behind his first two-wheeler.

At our deaths we must all hop the gap between our own curves and the True at which point our own paths will be trued. This, of course, is the function of Purgatory, and, the farther we are from the asymptote at our deaths the more jarring this correction will be--as through fire, for some. One of the frightening things about death is that it seems we will be losing a dimension of our existence, as the happy little locus free to range across the fruited cartesian plain views eternal imprisonment on the y-axis as a limitation. But those on the increasingly straight and narrow path so close to the asymptote will begin dimly to perceive the truth in the promise of an unfolding of vast and manifold dimensions of which the dreaded axis death is only the visible edge.

Where we go wrong is in assuming that it's different for unbelievers. No, the unbeliever is on the same species of asymptotic curve (this has the happy consequence of obviating debate on the meaning of parallel), he's just looking in the other direction. When he does look over his shoulder checking for God, he doesn't see Him, He's around the curve, same as for the rest of us. Unlike believers he is unpracticed in following the curve round in his heart and mind where his eye does not reach. {The preceding sentence, of course, refers to prayer} If the angle of his curve is very steep he won't even recognize a hint of God. I used the verb "spline" to describe sounding out another's curve (without, naturally, knowing its parameters) as perhaps a "fruitful" step in helping to bend it toward the limit (this itself a spiritual work of mercy). But it is the wicked not the unbeliever, pace {MPF}, who is actually traveling in the other direction; who is willingly steepening his curve and further obscuring God and goodness, making unbelief ever easier, ever more plausible; who, when he hops the gap, will crash and burn, unable to be trued. This is why wickedness will foster unbelief and why unbelief can also lead to wickedness. It is also why metanoia is so often characterized simply as a turning around.

What {MAF} in his heart of hearts recognizes, if I may be quite bold, is that the plane, or space if you will, in which we are all swimming these paths is at least a moral space; that reality has an intrinsic (non-constructed, non-culturally programmed, non-arbitrary, but real) moral character, giving the path itself, real meaning. {MAF}'s problem is not so much that he doesn't believe--for he does and by that I mean he doesn't think it is "superstitious" to love his neighbor as himself--but that he erroneously thinks it is of any consequence that when he looks for God he doesn't see anyone, and what he does see--others' conceptions of God--he (rightly) sees as fairly ridiculous. He knows, or has a fair idea when he is traveling in the Good direction, though he despairs of seeing God--for the moment anyway. Of course our mortal span is a mere moment, but I see no reason not to hope that some beauteous (if distant) day he will ask in wonder, "when did I see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink?"

My letter to the Free Press on this Dawkins' book review...

...if you'll forgive a little self-repetition:

Dawkins and his apologists, in this case Ted St. Godard, tilt at straw windmills in their attacks on young earth creationists. Earth may well be billions of years old; evolutionary theory may well correctly describe the paths of the speciation of life just as Dawkins elicits. However, it remains that to hold that godless chance accounts for not only the existence both of life itself and of ends and purpose manifest in life’s rich garden, but indeed the origins of true intelligibility in the universe right from the tiniest quark, requires a steadfast faith every bit as irrational as that of any Bible-thumping fundamentalist. It remains that all creation animate and inanimate veritably sings its Creator for any with ears. Atheists Dawkins and St. Godard must insist implausibly that theists—the vast majority of humankind—are all stupid or insane. We need only maintain that they the atheists are tone deaf.

Update. It was pointed out that the "they" in the last sentence is ambiguous.

Another letter to an atheist

Commenting on the outcry from Christians over some recent end-of-life cases in which the question of euthanasia arose, my atheist friend puzzles at:

...this fervor com[ing] from one who professes to believe in life-after-death. If there really is life after death (eternal life, in fact), why is it important to prolong the suffering career of the cancer-ridden body in this fallen world? To put it another way: atheists, who believe that this earthly life is the only life there is, might be forgiven for clinging to it at all costs. Yet, oddly enough, atheists are generally OK with euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, while it's the supposedly religious people who are the clingers.

I think he asks a good question. At its most stark it is for Catholics (and any who believes in sacramental Baptism): why don't you just douse the forehead then slit the throat avoiding for him so fortunate a vale of tears in favor of immediate beatific bliss and everlasting. But this is to take the atheist's barren world view as our own—albeit with a little heaven tacked on the end—discounting, among many other blandishments of a life of grace, the uplifting dynamic of an ongoing community of man whence rises a Communion of Saints—the reason why any man's death diminished, say, Donne (as he seems to have thought).

To shed the light of a mere burning match on the Christian's strange position we look first at the atheist's, his perfectly reasonable attitude based on two conceits on his part. The first is the idea that he can at a moment in time effectively plot the arc of his future existence and determine whether its integral is positive or negative. It is highly questionable a notion at each step, not the least insoluble term being how to calibrate existential nothingness at our worldly zero. The second, implicit in the first, is the tenet that suffering is always of negative value and this second notion is simply—certainly in terms of the person whose God came to earth to suffer, but also empirically, if we are honest—an error.

Of course I'm talking about an idealized atheist, and when we turn back to the Christians in these news stories the problem of explaining their behavior when facing death is made many times more difficult by the fact that they (and we) are none of them (or us) ideal Christians but are by and large as infected as anyone by the spirit of the post-Christian age in which we are immersed; an age in which peculiarly the ontological if not the eschatological assumptions of the atheist hold sway, but animated by a spirit not at all unlike that which in all ages gains its purchase in original sin. In short, our motives are mixed and when any one does cling to life at all costs (especially at the cost of others’ lives), he does evil. But anyone may fear death as your less-than-ideal atheist also does along with the imperfect Christian, and it is only in folly that the pure and shining, the fearless atheist specimen looks down on such a ragged and craven Christian, scoffing that for the Christian death is—or need be—but a play-acting scene (say, I’ll just lie down here and close my eyes till the end of Act II, then we’ll all go to the wrap party and have a real good time).

This is false. Death, we know well, is the radical disintegration of the body and from it its form the soul. It entails real and utter surrender of oneself to a blackness, perhaps to forgetfulness, and no one knows, beyond an obscure and remote promise, what for himself lies beyond it—even more: what strange and fiery form the self itself may take—and that is a fearful thing. Indeed, the Christian must acknowledge that, again for him, it might be much worse than oblivion. But it must be just so else the Christian concede all love and sacrifice and all hope and thanksgiving are but play-acting exercises as well (say, I’ll just {wink} deposit my pocket change here with this beggar assured that later on I can withdraw it in golden flag—with interest).

Further, it must be remembered that for us death is the novelty, the unnatural thing we were not designed for but rather a punishment for our sins, itself symbolizing, even aping the end of our self willed separation from God. In that, but for Christ's sweet promise, death is an enemy forsooth to be hated and feared. But to unite ourselves truly to that promise and extract all its sweetness requires from us the real love that lies in self-sacrifice so profound that it is to our fallen natures like death before death, and so again, poor Christians, we poor Christians are afraid.

But Christian is the word not so much for what we are but for what we aspire to be, so while one may well fairly judge Christians harshly as lacking the courage of their convictions (though he must grant they are not easy convictions to live up to), better judge Christianity on its own terms. The true Christian view of death begins with Christ. The saints recall His seven last words with great reverence and close attention and are moved to face their own death with the equanimity of St Stephen who begged for the lives only of his executioners. In a modern hospital setting our example is St Gianna Molla. She was no clinger. If the difference between them and us is the Hope born of a plenitude of Grace—which Grace engenders also a more perfect Love—then surely these saints both of unconquerable courage and of a Love most potently expressed in mercy will be in favor of assisted suicide?

Of course the answer, finally, is no, for the saint rejects not only the first two assumptions of the suicide enthusiast, but also even more profoundly the third error of the atheist—the presumption that one can own a life (either ones own in the case of suicide or that of another in the case of euthanasia). To frame it thus is to recognize the hollowness of the question, If there really is life after death, why is it important to prolong the suffering career of the cancer-ridden body in this fallen world? for to equate on one hand doing all we can to alleviate the physical and psychological suffering of the dying—short of stealing something literally of inestimable value and disposing of it as literally worth less than nothing—with, on the other, purposely prolonging (what we arrogantly suppose to be: needless) suffering, is to embrace wholesale all three of the atheist’s errors—that he knows what life and death are (and they are reductive), that he understands suffering (and it is uniformly negative) and that it’s his choice to make (with or without good data). The first two are manifestly false to anyone on a moment’s reflection. While the error in the third may only be grasped by a certain type of theist, the ends of its implications in all facets of life will be dire. But that is a whole other discussion.

I've said this before

... but I wanted to write it here for the record.

For the materialist atheist, the most honorable life is the career of a religious huckster and the most sublime death is suicide

If I had readers I would invite their critiques of this formulation.

An Excerpt from a letter to an atheist.

As to the argument over whether the God of Hebrew and Christian scriptures is anthropomorphic, of course I would argue that the converse is true: we are a theomorphic people (Gen 1:26) in a certain sense. As such, the direction of who is representing whom is reversed. For example, I say that we do we not represent our relationship with God as familial in imitation of the human family, but rather that the human relationship of a father to his children is but a pale imitation of the relationship of God the Father to ourselves. I would like that to settle the matter, but, as our experience of family is apt (outside private revelation) to be entirely human, it's really a more difficult argument than that--or rather two: one, a theological argument, whether an unknowable act of pure existence is also a personal God (we ourselves being persons in that mode); and the other, a philosophical, whether it is possible to communicate any real truth about something of which we can have no experience using equivocal language--i.e. whether analogy has meaning in theology.

About the second argument a couple of things can be said. First, very simply, that we treat as metaphorical all scriptural passages that treat the Divine Nature as human. That said, the second Person of the Godhead became true Man, and so we may treat His human nature in literal language. The upshot: God's right hand (Acts 7:55, 1 Pet 3:22) entirely metaphorical; Jesus' sweat and tears (Lk 22:44, Jn 11:35) absolutely literal. The second point is that to the extent that Scripture is able to communicate any truth about God whatsoever, it must be inspired. So if the atheist is correct (there is no God), the question is moot; but if God exists, we can ask to what extent the Bible is true when talking about God. That truth, then, can only have flowed in one direction (discounting blind lucky guessing). If I've shown what's at stake in the metaphor argument, unfortunately I'm no nearer to answering the argument whether equivocal language about God is not always utterly equivocal, but can be analogical. Needless to say I must answer this in the affirmative or abandon my Faith, and I believe Aquinas does treat it somewhere (this I have only from a faint recollection of a book about St. Thomas I read a while back), but I can't reproduce his argument here. I can only defend my position to this point: that it is not unreasonable absent other assumptions about God, and that it is entirely plausible should God prove to be a personal God.

On that first argument, I'm in even greater difficulty. Not only is it more difficult conceptually, but if I lose the second argument, the first cannot be put at all since we then have no language for it. Once more I can't prove my position but would hope to show it credible. The problem is this. We see the world around us as ordered and purposeful and we want to see what's behind that. We look for causes and causes of causes and we arrive at a first cause. At the same time, we perceive our own imperfection (as meaningful or meaningless a concept as perfection is) and weakness and we want to reach up to someone (not something): our father, and thence the Father to whom our father reaches--for comfort and aid. The myths of our traditions tell us of our ancestors who reached up and were met, and so we hope. But then we attempt to intellectualize our searching and our longing and we find that what we were looking at was an uncaused cause, and a big daddy in the sky. The first is impossible, the second fairly ridiculous and together they're irreconcilable. If we're smart, we reject God and we're left with man, an island of intelligibility--and that just by fluke--in a vast cold universe of nonsense.

Alas, that doesn't square with reality either, for it is not only man who is intelligible, but the universe itself--indeed, with God on the lam and the soul in abeyance, the question of where man leaves off and the universe begins has become problematic. But every strange green quark here or ten thousand trillion miles away is intelligible--a fact, a knowable bundle of information with a course and a history. She spins; she dances with her spouse and her distant cousins, too, perhaps. It’s nuts, it’s so wonderful. Forget about Intelligent Designists' and Creation Scientists' probabilities that there should be life in the universe absent a creator; simply, it is immensely more meet that there should be nothing than something. And that every particle of that something should be intelligible and communicative is just as ridiculous as our big daddy in the sky. But by now we've lost hope--the myths must be false--so we let it sit.

But if Moses heard correctly and God says "I AM", if St. Thomas figured rightly and God is the Act of pure existence, then both sides do meet. As pure existence he can beget existence--He can be the First Cause and there needn't be a cause for Him because He is not an essential thing but an eternal act. As pure existence He contains all knowledge, and the procession of the self-knowledge of all knowledge is the eternal begetting of the Word. But now the begetter and the begotten both become Knower and Known and that is, at base, what a person is: a known knower. The relationship between Father and Son is one of knowledge but of more than knowledge, because it must be one of complete giving of Self--sacrifice, but a fecund not a painful sacrifice. Once more, this Act is the Spirit. We have now a triune, personal, creative God, to Whom (intellectually) we can't get from here. Still, He verifies our sense of order and our search for cause and He confirms that our myths are true (in import if not detail). And isn't that even more fitting than a god perceivable by the intellect? If I may: If religion were a thing that schoolin' could supply; then the smart would live, and the dumb would die. But even the very intelligent can recognize that knowledge doesn't save; that is to say smart and dumb alike can know that God is unknowable, only the proud need insist on maintaining the false dichotomy: knowable or false.