The Banned said:
ETA to make sure it really addresses OP:I don't know if "easier" or "harder" is the right distinction. Maybe it is. I definitely believe they are very different processes though.
Man, great post. I think a naturally critical thinker can often default to a mathematical approach. 1 + 1=2, and we have doubt about that. Or maybe approach it like a science experiment. When you drop an object, it falls. We have no doubt about that. We can often think that is the only way to get rid of doubt.
The problem with that approach is we don't do that with the vast majority of things we believe. For example, a man can say he "knows" his wife is faithful, but you can never really know until she passes away with a clean record. Does that mean the man isn't justified in believing his wife is faithful? I don't think so. He probably has very good reason, and acts accordingly.
Another: I will never abandon my kids. I can't really know that I won't abandon my kids until I die without abandoning them. Yet I have really good reason to believe I would never do that. So much so that I would say I know I would never do it, and act accordingly
Both of these are things I personally believe in, without concrete proof, and they effect every single decision I make. There are many other things like this that every human "knows" that are really just things they believe very firmly, with really good reason.
I could be wrong. Maybe my wife cheats, or maybe I turn into a grumpy ******* in old age and write my kids out of the will. But I believe the probability to be so low, that I act anyway. If we wanted verifiable proof on issues like this, we would all be paralyzed, never doing these things because we can't know.
The struggle most people have when applying this to God is that, if God is real, there are some moral obligations one must fulfill. It really affects how one needs to live their life. I'm not saying that you are struggling with this, but it's where I started and I think it's most people's biggest, unspoken hang up. "If I come to a reasonable belief that God is real, and if that means I have to make some serious moral changes in my life, and if I am going to be required to submit... am I willing to do that?" If my answer to that was no, I never would have bothered going forward.
I've never had an emotional commitment moment like you might think most believers have. I think that God is the most likely answer of all the answers out there for why there is anything "there" at all (which in and of itself is a large topic). Next step was what is that God like? I think that philosophy and history lends itself to the church I belong to being the most likely to be true. It has answers for the problems of evil, divine hiddeness, etc. And I believe it with an ongoing openness to someone proving me wrong. Maybe one day someone will, but no one has given me a better answer so far. So I can have faith because the skeptical part of my brain is sufficiently satisfied, even if it can't ever be 100% sure. 99% works for me
I was thinking along these lines as well. This is not limited to the OP, so please understand I am not trying to be cute with OP's very deep and sincere questions, but I immediately thought "prove to me you love your wife or kids." Is it possible to not be able to prove something you know is true? Of the things OP hints at being able to know rationally, how can he actually know they are true. What does it mean to know something? Can you ever actually know anything absolutely? All of this implicates our ability to objectively prove and actually know anything. Post-modernism here we come.
Perhaps we are making a category error? The heavy Cartesian influence in our world tody and its influence on how we instinctively think about ontology and epistemology leads us to start from a place of assuming that if it fails the "scientific method" or our idiosyncratic application of the "scientific method" to whatever question we are wrestling with then it is false or suspect. That approach is rife with scientism which fails its own test because you can't prove that only conclusions reached through the scientific method are valid by using the scientific method.
Descartes' (cogito ergo sum "I think, therefore I am") made the thinking subject (us) the starting point of all knowledge. This was a radical departure: instead of beginning with reality and moving toward the mind, Descartes began with the mind and tried to work outward. This inward turn to the subjective tends to divorce reason from being or reality, making truth ultimately a construct of the subject rather than a correspondence with reality.
So is there a path to truth and knowledge separate from the overwhelmingly dominant Cartesian system?
I don't know if all Christians share this view, but as a Catholic I think the Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology of nihil est in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses", is the answer.
The human mind as it comes into this world is a tabula rasa awaiting sense impressions in order to gain knowledge, not the other way around. Crucially, this is not materialism. Aristotle rejected the materialists' denial of spiritual reality, arguing that natural science based on sense experience demonstrates the existence of a First Cause that is spiritual. Having regard for both sense knowledge and spiritual realities, Aristotle developed the science of metaphysics, which studies the relationship between the two.
The key concepts in Aristotelianism are substance, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, and cause. Thomism synthesizes the philosophy and metaphysics of Aristotelianism with Catholic theology and has had significant influence over Catholic philosophy and political thought throughout history.
Truth, in this system, is the correspondence of the intellect to reality, the mind conforms to the thing, not the thing to the mind. This is the antidote to Cartesianism.
But even a system that says the mind conforms to the thing and not the thing to the mind is not the final word on the question of can we absolutely know anything. This is where I think it might be worth considering the apophatic approach to answering the question of is God real?
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a religious approach that describes the divine by stating what it is not, rather than what it is. The word itself comes from the Greek apophanai meaning "to speak out" or "to deny." This method arises from the belief that ultimate reality transcends human comprehension and language, and it contrasts with positive theology (cataphatic theology), which affirms what God has revealed.
In practical terms, negative theology approaches God through a series of negations: God is not this, God is not that, in order to chip away at the mystery of God. Apophaticism and cataphaticism are not in opposition to each other as much as they are two ways of approaching the same question. One doesn't necessarily negate the other.
The apophatic or negative way, however, stresses God's absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the divine essence because God is so totally beyond being.
I realize that the apophatic way is not a panacea for the fundamental question OP is asking, but perhaps it's a way to begin eating the elephant? I wonder if this approach might not be helpful for someone who is possessed of a rationalistic instinct to belief?
In anticipation of a criticism of all that, let me go ahead and say that yes, apophaticism and rationalism are reconcilable, but only when each is properly ordered and neither claims totalizing authority.
The danger of each in isolation is that apophaticism left unchecked risks collapsing into silence that evacuates revelation of meaning. Modern apophaticism, when systematic and total, risks emptying speech about God of any intelligible content and endangers the very possibility of revelation and Christology. If taken to an extreme, apophaticism swallows itself, because even the claim that "God cannot be known" is a positive knowledge claim about God (the heart of the criticism). Rationalism left unchecked, on the other hand, exaggerates the ability of human beings to form rational concepts, as though they exhausted the reality of God. This is the error of those who flatten the divine mystery into a system, reducing the living God to a conclusion in a syllogism.
It's "both and" not "either or." For Aquinas, reason is not abandoned. Reason is put in its proper place. It is humbled. The via negativa does not replace positive theology; it maintains its integrity. The theological interplay between cataphatic and apophatic theology is a delicate balancing act of saying too much and admitting too little. A strong apophaticism serves as a corrective to the human tendency to limit the limitless, to define the indefinable, and to comprehend the incomprehensible. This is exactly what Aquinas does: reason reaches God analogically, not univocally (as if God were just a bigger version of a human being) and not equivocally (as if our words meant nothing when applied to God). Analogy is the middle path where reason and mystery coexist.
