5 — In doubt, we trust

From faith in doubt to faith in God.

We are action oriented creatures. That forces us to prioritize goals. In the final analysis, everyone ends up with some ultimate goal or goals, for which they do every thing else. As much as we can call this devotion of attention and effort “worship”, everyone worships. Hence, we are religious creatures. Out thrownness into the world, our need for action, makes us that way.

Our aquisition of knowledge is always mediated through rituals — as is every action we do. The fact that we live in stories also means that our actions are enacted. A ritual is a devotion or recentering of one’s attention towards a certain object, manifested through codified behaviour. It is the same as language in that way: if it was not codified, it would be meaningless. It is very important to do everything the same way and in the same order every time.

There is a correct way to talk to someone: you look them in the eye — to show you’re paying attention to them. There is a correct way to shake someone’s hand: not too hard (you’re not a bully), not too soft (you’re not weak), but firmly, to show you’re being fair. There is a correct way to do science. There is a correct way to show your disagreements, to propose your theories, and so on. There are correct ways to display knowledge and to acquire it. It all boils down to attention: what are you focusing on?

To a great degree, geniuses are not the best at computing. Geniuses are the best at selecting what to attend to. Wisdom is paying attention to the right things. Attention is always manifested physically, through behaviour, and it can be encapsulated in rituals (habits of attention, if you will).

The wisest person is the person with the best rituals — the ones that recenter their attention to the greatest degree. This way, they remain vigilant to what is important and don’t get distracted by foolish and trivial things. They don’t waste time, words, efforts. Everything is done just so. They say just the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. They live in the best way. They always make the best decisions because they can see what really matters and what is not important — and never lose track of it.

This is why wisdom literature will always take a religious turn. To a great extent, the search for wisdom and religion are the same thing. This is what Jordan Peterson means when he argues that we are religious creatures: that we can’t help but search for wisdom.

But are these really the same?

Despite it being true that wisdom literature is often religious, I surely is not always the case. Is Hamlet not wisdom literature? What about Dostoyevsky? Are Plato’s dialogues not just that? This is a problem Jordan Peterson has a hard time answering. One the one hand, of course they are. On the other, they are not sacred — they are purely secular.

One thing he says when confronted with this, and with some merit, is that people don’t try to live out Plato’s dialogues in community anymore. As much as there is wisdom there, they fail to give us community and tradition, they fail to produce rituals that direct our lives and guide our paths.

There were philosophical schools that attempted to live out philosophy as a way of life, but all of them eventually “lost the culture war” to christianity, which was by far the strongest way of life the western culture ever encountered.

In fact, western philosophy only became what we know today (modern philosophy is composed of treatises trying to answer problems with arguments, but in antiquity this was not exactly right: arguing was only part of it — the big thing was living it) because it had to restructure itself around the area christianity came to occupy. And then around the area natural science came to occupy.

This is why, when we teach in school about what philosophy is, the first thing we say is not “the love of wisdom”, which is its original meaning in Ancient Greece. We tell our students about why philosophy is not a science, how philosophical questions differ from scientific ones, and so on. Science is the paradigm, as theology once was.

Even now, the myth of science is much more important than the actual truths we derive from it. This is why Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, wrote much more about utopian visions of a brighter future than about the nitty gritty other men (less famous men, less influential men) focused on. Science only thrived as a cultural institution because of the humanist culture it was based around, inherited from the Renaissance.

It is inevitably in favour of a humanist religion that most people convert away from christianity (or islam, or judaism, or whatever). I would venture to say, in fact, that a great part of those who claim to not know exactly what they are, but know they are not “religious”, are actually humanists. They subscribe, essentially, to the values and sacred tenets of humanism.

My claim here is that, as christianity was to medieval monks simply “the air they breathed”, being almost invisible in its pervasiveness, nowadays humanism is to the western world. Humanism is the rule — every other claim to the sacred stands in contrast to it, including christianity.

Humanism is the secular religion that emerged from the Renaissance, partly from christianity, partly from a turning towards pre-christian sources, mainly greco-roman. It can be called a religion since it has deeply held values, a sense of belonging to a certain group and shared reverence to the same ideals. It has produced institutions, communities and traditions. It has its own rituals and rules of conduct. People try to spread its reach in a quasi-religious fervour, as if it were a mission to spread the gospel.

Humanism is the attempt to put man in God’s place. To worship man’s autonomy, dignity and rationality, and use them to replace the role previously attributed to the gods. It holds as sacred the idea that humanity can overcome any obstacle by itself and through its own means. Instead of divine self-sufficiency, there is individual self-reliance.

Instead of worshipping unknown entities and pleading for their help, humanism dares to worship human achievement. More than the mystery of God, the mystery of genius is the object of worship and veneration— be it in art or science.

Instead of lingering in self-limiting dogma, humanism refuses to accept absolutes, be it in politics, science, art or anything else. In trying to take the place of the gods, humanism defies all limits to what humanity is capable. What those before saw as intractable mystery, humanism chose to see as a temporary opaque, a mere “not yet”.

The underlying assumption is that reason will eventually illuminate every mysterious darkness, answer every question. Man will unravel the world by himself. Every boundary is surmountable through rational inquiry. Uncertainty is nothing but a challenge — a veil to be lifted by rational inquiry.

This is the real source of the “God of the gaps” argument so often hailed against christianity. More than mere science, we see behind it a spirit of defiance and pride. Nothing is sacred, nothing is absolute, nothing is off limits.

Doubt and skepticism are raised as the paradigmatic intelectual virtues. Without doubt, there is no rational inquiry (which always begins with questions), no progress (the whole point of humanism), no goal to aspire to, no utopia in the horizon.

Humanism’s “faith in doubt” holds within it the tension between the will of Prometheus to steal fire from the gods, on the one hand, and the risk of becoming Icarus, getting burned from flying too close to the sun, on the other. It is as they say: steal fire and you might get burned. More than that: the incomplete nature of doubt as a process condemns the humanist to keep doubting and doubting over and over again, with no end in sight — it has also the tragedy of Sysyphus in its mythology. So much for greek influence.

The elevation of doubt as a sacred process of deification has in it both the heroic recognition of human falibility and the self-sacrificial eternal plight against ourselves. Everything we do comes from us — this means that all of it is fallible. It must be subject to scrutiny. This threatens to swallow everything into the human sphere: nothing is transcendent.

But we must not confuse ourselves. Despite being an attempt to worship humanity (and not God), like any other religion, secular or not, humanism does hold sacred tenets. It does contain propositions that are not questioned, but assumed.

Anyone who tries to question everything will quickly see that it is not possible. Absolute skepticism and universal doubt are literally self-defeating. Being universal, doubt begins to eat away at meaning — the very meaning that makes the process of doubt possible to begin with. Nihilism, skepticism and solipsism are the inevitable results when a negative process is made universal and limitless, but still self-contained.

Modern philosophy is characterized by schisms for precisely this reason. Mystery is reduced to puzzles. This means that when man attempts to reach for the limits of understanding and finds paradox, he cannot escape. He inevitably reaches contradiction. The foundations of his world crumble under his feet. If doubt is universal, it must doubt everything, including itself — but it can’t. That would be dogmatic.
“The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.” — But is that absolutely true?

The thing is: although we might not like to admit this, our understanding has limits. The proverbial “view from nowhere” is not accesible to us. Our process of understanding is, by nature, a process of distinction, differentiation. We separate to analyze and classify. But to understand “from nowhere”, what we want is undifferentiated knowledge.

This is why science cannot reach a view from nowhere either. It cannot be impartial, because it needs to separate between things to be able to understand anything. And separation, as argued before, is always made out of some concern — it is partial. Analysis is always purpose-driven, value-laden. And purposes and values are always very much ours — not universal.

The mechanism of doubt, in fact, depends on this partiality: to doubt is to entertain the possibility of falsehood of some proposition. This depends on a difference between true and false — that is, it depends on the Principle of Non-Contradiction. But if we seek to analyze things from the point of view of no difference, then true and false are actually one. But from our point of view, of course, this is paradoxical and absurd.

We can only make sense of this idea of true non-duality if we concede that there are things unknowable by us, as a matter of metaphysical condition of our determined existence. Only a being completely One could grasp those things. This would be the ideal perspective, the true rationality, the measure from which we understand ours. Of course, this means admitting it is not man that resides in the throne of God. It is God.

With our own powers of reasoning, should we choose to try to doubt doubt, analyze our analysis, truly exceed the limits of our understanding; we will find a barrier of paradox staring us in the face at the end. This is because doubt depends on the possibility of meaning, but if we erode the foundations of meaning, the concept of doubt ceases to make sense. So too when we attempt to think about God as wholly One: the convergence of all truths in one makes contradiction impossible (there is no difference, hence no contradiction), imploding the concept of doubt.

This is why it doesn’t really make sense to “doubt” the existence of God. It is not a “hypothesis” in the same way other empirical claims are. It cannot be reasonably conceived to be false, because even if we attempt to think about the subject, we can’t.

Belief in God might be seen as certain in this way: it cannot be questioned, it transcends the possibility of doubt. It is not a certainty of factual or empirical kind, but one rooted in the structure of reality. Instead of being below our rationality, as I once thought, it is above it, I later found out. Not unintelligible, but ineffable.

It is beyond reason and not subject to proof. It is simply assumed as the basis for any knowledge and reasonable discourse to even take place. The Principle of Non-Contradiction does not apply to Logos because Logos is the foundation upon which the Principle of Non-Contradiction supports itself. It has to be assumed for it, along with logic as a whole, to work.

More than a propositionalized process cointained within our minds and nothing else, we must see rationality as part and parcel of the structure of the world. Otherwise, our own rationality has no basis at all. It has to participate (that is, take part — not be whole) in some greater rationality, that encompasses all contradiction into one.

On the other hand, belief in God requires faith, despite being certain. The whole-hearted acceptance of this mystery requires a certain disposition of the will, a true humility and openness to it. Being certain of mystery does not extinguish its mysteriousness.

This awareness of not being capable of knowing everything at once, of recognizing that divine knowledge is out of reach, this humble embrace of mystery, is the only real foundation for any fruitful project. Reaching paradox is a necessary component of approaching truth. This, Socrates had realized long ago, fisnishing every discussion in aporia, as he did. Knowing only that he did not know, as he did. This is why he was the wisest man in Greece.

This is what Nicholas of Cusa called the learned ignorance: the docta ignorantia of those self-aware enough to fly and still know they can’t reach the Sun (and shouldn’t try to). Self-aware enough to steal the fire from the gods and still not think they became one, like those idiotas de mente, the idiots of the mind, do.

Without this transcendence, the modern schisms will inevitably prevail. Self-referential values, self-referential knowledge and self-referential mythology completely collapses under doubt. You can’t put some thing in the category of “untouchable”. You can’t put something secular in the category of the sacred. If you do, you will fail. True mystery and the convergence of opposites is the only adequate foundation, the only fit this sacred place. God’s throne belongs to God.

But this is not as big of a switch as we would think. In many ways, humanist culture is based on christian values. The veneration of human achievement is justified under imago Dei: we were made in God’s image — as He created, so can we. The ethics of self-sacrifice, the universalism, the inner life and aspirational self-transformation, all of this comes from christianity.

The widespread belief in our autonomy, dignity and rationality is best explained by the christian world-view. What other reason can we give for anyone to see those things as sacred? We tried for about 500 years now, with no success.

Even the greek influence is a deeply christian thing. As we know, the first centuries of the Church’s history were mainly a process of adaptation and development of the christian faith to and through greek culture (mainly philosophy).

The difference lies in our relationship to ourselves and to the divine. Not pride and hubris, but humility. Not brash arrogance, but awe and respect. Not manipulation or imposition of our own purposes, but openness to the world and acceptance of it — in the most profound sense. We have to go from “faith in doubt” to “faith in Logos”, faith in God.