[Proof of Concept]: Understanding the Proofs of God as Stories

[The following is a proof of concept of a larger work in production where I am examining the "classical" proofs of God in terms of the biographies and sociological conditions of those doing the proofs]

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It has long been the habit of philosophers to ask in abstract, non-specific fashion whether it is rational to believe that God exists, whether it is rational to believe that there is an external world, whether it is rational to believe that there are other persons, and so on.  Mountains of confusion have resulted.  The proper question is always and only whether it is rational for this or that particular person in this or that situation, or for a person of this or that particular type in this or that situation, to believe so-and-so.  Rationality is always situated rationality.

—Nicholas Wolterstorff[1]

February 10^th, 1970. Every window hung open, lungs breathing a glittering air; that New Jersey cold. Papers rustled like song-sparked tongues under the mouth of each sill. The breezes announced their delight to be let inside.  Paying no mind to that Pentecost of winter hanging about the room, a gaunt Kurt Gödel sat unperturbed in the house he and his wife bought after they fled Vienna from the shadow of Nazi Europe. It was Einstein himself who had been his sponsor for citizenship. On the day of the test Einstein teased the utterly meticulous Gödel: “Now Kurt,” he said, “are you really ready for this test?” Einstein, it is recorded, laughed mischievously when Gödel’s face twisted in a sort of worried defiance at the question. Einstein’s face then fell when Kurt’s became mischievous in turn.

“You know, I found a loophole in the process.”

Einstein shook his head, and waved both his hands back and forth wildly.

“No, no. Kurt you mustn’t mention anything of the sort at all. Not at all.”

Einstein had passed away some time ago, and Gödel missed him now, and their walks.

He wrote feverishly while bundled under cap and sweater, gloves and socks (two pairs). He had been refusing to eat anything not prepared by his wife, Adele. They were trying to poison him. And the windows? Open for ventilation, in the case of poison gas. You couldn’t be too careful, you know. A few years on, his obituary in the London Times would read that he was one of the most influential mathematicians and logicians of the century.[2] But now, something had touched his mind. Rumors were spreading. But not of his paranoia—rather of something that was perhaps more damning still to his fellow mathematicians:[3] Gödel, they said, was devoting himself to a proof of God’s existence. Four days after Christmas, 1977, he was checked-in to the Princeton hospital. Fourteen days after the New Year, with the weight of God no doubt upon him, he died weighing only sixty-five pounds. Afterward, his notebooks were found swimming with mathematics, and several pages with the remark floating above: “ontological argument [for God’s existence].”

 A.D. 1257. St. Thomas Aquinas did not die a skeleton, like Gödel. He was “a huge, heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet.”[4] At one point, a fellow student took pity upon him because he was always so quiet, pulling him aside one day to tutor this poor boy in the ways of God. Patiently, Aquinas sat through this unexpected lecture. His erstwhile tutor stood stunned as Aquinas began bright-eyed to debate and enthusiastically correct many of the points just spoken. His mind would eventually give him a reputation spilling into the whole world. It was a mind that leapt between worlds both physical and unseen, between Christian and Muslim and Jew, and like some great wheel never stopped turning, talking.

Once, King Louis the XIV invited him to a banquet as an honored guest. Thomas was very unsure whether he would like to attend. His family had always been incredibly well connected, politically. But he would have been very happy to have spent a life surrounded by the quiet babble of books, instead of hobnobbing at parties. This originally shocked his family to no small measure. At one point his own brothers kidnapped him when they heard he was becoming a Dominican monk. Locking him in an ornamented room within one of the family castles, thinking as brothers think, they locked-in as well a beautiful maiden to keep him company, and perhaps to nudge him away from the ascetical life. He chased her out of the room with a red-hot poker pulled from the bedside fire. Bemused and somewhat defeated, his family relented to his wishes. But now, at the urging of his fellow monks (who may have heard of such a story, and realized the political disaster if he similarly refused Louis XIV, not to mention chase him with a poker), Aquinas attended the banquet.

In the din and clamor of that great hall, under the furor of many colored tabards hanging from the walls; amid the fragrant tresses of all the beautiful women and the hearty conversation, the ale and wine, St. Thomas sat, thinking silently. Until suddenly, he exploded. Plates and cups and mutton flew as his great open fist fell upon the table. “Like the man in the grip of a dream” says Chesterton, Thomas cried out. “And that will settle the Manichees!”[5]  The room after that opened suddenly into silence. The courtiers broke from their gossip toward that thundering giant, in a trill of shock. Nonplussed, Louis XIV barely lagged in conversational stride as he whispered to a servant to “go and write Thomas’ ideas down,” for the argument “must be a very good one, and it would be a shame if he forgot it.” Aquinas, delighted to find himself a scribe, happily began dictating. Louis XIV turned back to whatever he was talking about before.  The party continued, but in the corner there were whispers of a God.

While the mystery of God was always a part of Thomas’ labor[6]—contrary to some popular opinions that paint Aquinas as a rationalist—during a Christmas mass (it is said), something happened that stopped him totally short, and stalled all his words. One can imagine that silent space swell where writing once was; and we can ask in hushed tones what great dreams await in that space of which one like St. Thomas cannot speak? “I can write no more,” he said to his friend Reginald, who with great worry urged him to continue his work. Aquinas stressed that to continue was utterly beyond him: “I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.”

What was it he saw? What had happened? Unlike Gödel’s conspiracies, some experts speculate Thomas’ ecstasy was actually a result of poisoning by political rivals.[7] Or, was it, perhaps, simply physical and mental exhaustion?[8]

In any event, Chesterton paints his death with the grandeur it deserves. Fallen ill, Thomas was taken to a monastery at Fossanova. Far from the rationalist of lore, he asked to have the Song of Solomon read to him as he passed. The words of the book—in the tradition of the great allegorists, a story of lovers read as the relation between Christ and His Bride, the Church—filled the room like fragrance. As the monks read to him, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, passed:

Those men must have known that a great mind was still laboring like a great mill in the midst of them [as they read the Song of Solomon].  … [Like] some mighty modern engine, shaking the ramshackle building in which it is for the moment enclosed. For truly that machine was made of the wheels of all the worlds; and revolved like that cosmos of concentric spheres … In the world of that mind there was a wheel of angels, and a wheel of planets, of plants [and] of animals; there was also a just and intelligible order of all earthly things [turning] … But there must have been a moment, when those men [the monks reading] knew the thunderous mill of thought had stopped suddenly; and that after the shock of stillness that wheel would shake the world no more; that there was nothing now within that hollow house but a great hill of clay; and the confessor, who had been with [Thomas] in the inner chamber, ran forth as if in fear, and whispered that his confessions had been like [the wonder] of a child of five.[9]

A.D. 1662: The theologian and chemist, Blaise Paschal, lay lifeless now, consumed by that “Emperor of All Maladies”[10]—cancer. In this instance, cancer of the stomach. He had not rung his bell for a while, not for bread or water or anything else. When a servant peeked in she let out a shout, and many more servants clambered into the room of their master, saddened by that corporeal thing left behind. They found a note concealed in his jacket pocket as they began to lift him out of the room. It was folded and frayed. The ancient weight of its threadbare edges told a tale of how Pascal transferred it from one dress coat to another. Within it is inscribed a religious experience from when he was 31 years old.

In the year of grace 1654, on Monday, 23^rd of November, Feast of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr, and others in the Martyrology. Vigil of St. Chysogonus, Martyr, and others, it begins.

And before a short poem describing “The God of Abraham/God of Isaac/ God of Jacob/ and not of the philosophers,” reads a short line evocative in its staccato:

From half past ten in the evening, until half past twelve. FIRE.[11]

Pascal never spoke publicly of this experience, yet in some sense it fits well, not just in his pocket, but among the the opinions he carried through his life. In his unfinished Penseés, he wrote: “If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.”[12]

The 6^th of January, 1945. Five years after he watched his hometown burn in the fires of British air raids, and one year after he lost yet another home to bombings, Wolfhart Pannenberg skipped the train after school and went upon a somewhat lengthy walk through a “quiet winter”[13] in Germany. Here, paradoxically, the man who would become the greatest champion of the Twentieth-century of the “public character”[14] of theology, had a private religious experience which set the course of his life: “absorbed into the light of the setting sun, for one eternal moment [I] dissolved into the light surrounding me.”[15] His own light, however, had to be the same one that lit the world. And so, a life-long quest for proof:

In my experience, the most difficult subject to deal with was the doctrine of God. I soon became persuaded that one first has to acquire a systematic account of every other field, not only theology, but also philosophy, and the dialogue with the natural and the social sciences before with sufficient confidence one can dare to develop the doctrine of God.[16]

A systematic account of the Christian God’s existence.

A systematic account of God. Doesn’t this then involve that scandal, that stumbling block, the cross? Even through the 20^th century, though incredible volumes have been written to prove its validity by the ever-evolving standards of the age’s rationality—the cross remains at some level a surd.[17] Even when one accepts that the crucifixion and resurrection happened, its interpretation has no doubt been a thing of conflict.[18] A figure, a “graffito on the Palatine,”[19] a hieroglyph on the rock of history with a donkey head; spread upon a cross-like scratch in the rock unearthed by archaeologists.  “Alexamenos worships his God.” Balaam’s Ass is now killed like a criminal outside the city, and called a God.  This is the original scandal of Christianity.[20]

The gods, killed by an ass.

[…]

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[1] Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1991)

[2] For his biography, see: H. Wang and J.W. Dawson Jr. Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (Massachusetts: A.K. Peters, 1997). For a succinct summary of his mathematical theorem, see: A. W. Moore, The Infinite (London: Routledge, 19990), 172-186.

[3] It is said that Gödel didn’t publish his proofs in fear that many would simply think him too religious (and so, he thought, spoil his proofs through prejudice). The topic of God was, for the most part, forbidden. See: Yujin Nagasawa, The Existence of God: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2011), 2-3.

[4] G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 3.

[5] Ibid., 78.

[6] Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas (Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 1999); Denys Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26-75; Karen Kilby, “Is Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?”  International Journal of Systematic Theology vo.12 no.1 (2010); Karen Kilby, “Aquinas, the Trinity, and the Limits of Understanding,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 4, no. 7 (October, 2005).

[7] Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work (New York: Catholic University Press, 2005), 294.

[8] It is said, for example, that David Hume three years after graduating from college “read so voraciously as to suffer a nervous breakdown.” Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways of God (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 96-97. Given the sheer volume and intensity of Aquinas’ work, it is not unreasonable to assume he suffered a similar fate.

[9] Ibid., 117.

[10] Siddharta Murkherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2011).

[11] Blaise Pascal, Great Shorter Works of Pascal trans. E. Caillet and Blackenagel (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948), 117.

[12] Blaise Pascal, Penseés (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), par. 174 (p.53)

[13] Carl E. Braaten and Philip Clayton, eds., The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), 12.

[14] Stanley Grenz, The Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing House, 2005); J. Wetzel van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justification of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1988), 71-101.

[15] Braaten and Clayton, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, 12.

[16] Ibid., 16.

[17] See as examples: N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2010).

[18] As on example: Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eermdan’s Publishing, 2016).

[19] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 41.

[20] Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale, 2003), esp. 31-48.; Larry H. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Texas: Baylor University, 2017).