To scorn religious belief is less human than to believe
Philosophers have attempted in vain to prove God’s existence. Saint Thomas went as far as to accumulate five different arguments. If one is not enough, the Saint seemed to have thought, five of them might “do” it, as if arguments relied on the muscle of other “lime -backing arguments” to reach the touchdown of apodictic conclusions. Descartes tried some thing similar with equally unconvincing results.
Modern philosophy, that in many ways began with British empiricism (Bacon, Locke and Hume), discarded the rational knowledge of God, based on the premise that all our knowledge begins and ends with our sensing of what is given in experience. We have no sensations of a God, therefore we have no theology. Recent analytic philosophers (Ayer, for example) have imported empiricist views into a philosophy of language: to say anything that cannot be verified by any actual or possible experince, is neither false nor true, it is simply nonsense. To say that “God exists” is as pure nonsense as to claim that “God does not exist.”
A quick reading of philosophers like Hume, Sartre or Nietzsche has yielded today an abundant crop of professionally aggressive atheists (Stenger, Dawkins, ec).) and stand-up comedians who simply make jokes at the Vatican Swiss guards or at the very idea of priestly celibacy (Bill Maher). It is my contention that both tribes impoverish our own humanity and deserve not much attention .
But one of the greatest philosophers of all times came also to the conclusion that a science of whatever is not given to us in space and time (he called it “metaphysics”) is just impossible: we can only understand what we can sense. But the empiricist Kant was intelligent enough to be puzzled by the fact that human beings seem irresistibly inclined to seek a knowledge they cannot attain: the failure of metaphysics becomes in his hands the metaphysics of failure, as it previously happened to Aristotle and later to Wittgenstein. Kant, as the metaphysician of failure, is by far my favorite philosopher: The sober end of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) leads us to the soaring vistas of the Critique of Practical Reason CPrR).
If CPR is all abut the limitations of knowledge, CPrR is all about the implications of unlimited desire and the moral order. Desire, like memory, points to realities that knowledge cannot grab. Unlike knowledge, desire has no definite bondaries: the satisfaction of a given desire becomes immediately the launching base of another desire. Practical reason (the will as it commands behavior), like desire itself, feels however bound by the demands of duty, the only good that is always an end in itself and never a means to something else. Health or even knowledge are not always good: there is nothing worse than a healthy or a knowledgeable criminal. We keep our promises not to look good to others or to preserve our self- esteem, but just and only because it is our duty to do so. To act for other motives, even for the fear of hell, is to act immorally. (Jesuits disagree with Kant on this one!). In a rational world, morality and happiness, must sooner or later, coincide. So Kant says, but others have serious doubts about it. Happiness and morality certainly do not coincide in this life (criminals can be happy!), therefore there must be another life in which moral goodness and happiness coincide. The guarantor of a happy immortality for the moral beings is God, the unreachable target of our metaphysical longings and the foundation of all our beliefs. Where science ends, belief begins, even reigious belief.
The interaction between a knowledge we seek in vain and a belief we hold explains all the inner struggles, all the nagging doubts that mark inexorably the life of all human beings. Simple-minded people seem to think that humanity is neatly divided into atheists who never believe in God’s existence, and pious souls who never doubt about it. But we human beings are more complex than that; faith wavers at times and doubt surges in the most unexpected moments. Saint Catherine of Siena had the ugliest imaginations when she attended Mass., When I taught philosophy at UCSC, a student called me at 3 am (!) to ask me whether I believed in God. “At this time of the night—I told him– I do not believe in my own existence.
Thee are times in life when the only way to preserve the essentials of some moral behavior backed by a wavering faith in God as the guarantor of a moral order is to take Pascal’s gamble:to behave as if God existed. If He does, you are in; if He does not, you have lost nothing, except perhaps some ephemeral pleasures. Death will tell you the final outcome. Unfortunately, dead people seem deprived of the tools to text back the answer to us. In the meantime, you and everybody else will struggle through existence as little bubbles of anxious doubts and unfinished projects, ready to burst into the nothingness of some cosmic black hole or into the loving embrace of a God we cannot even speak about.
Bubbles with religious doubts deserve human respect. The only religious people who do not deserve any respect are the intolerant, the holier-than-thou, and the fanatics: three plagues that, as Hume reminds us, threaten those who use religious belief as a weapon of their personal pretended superiority.