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ARE there subjects science, metrics, Big Data, and rational thought can’t entirely address? I sometimes thinks that these issues are the ones arts and culture are about, but I’m coming to realize that there’s another lineage that engages with them as well: Religion.
To many, this will sound obvious, but the relationship between religion and culture is hardly simple. (It’s also one that as as lifetime agnostic, I wish I had a firmer and more complete sense of.)
In any case, I was brought to brood on some of these unfathomables by a new interview with the religion scholar and writer Jack Miles, the editor of the new Norton Anthology of World Religions. The piece (by my wife, Sara Scribner), includes this line:
There are questions that remain in the human mind even when science doesn’t address them.
This may be the best description I’ve heard lately about the role of the arts and culture. It’s certainly one that sticks with me as I celebrate an agnostic’s Christmas.
This site will be up and running more fully in a few days. Wishing everyone a happy holiday season and new year.
Science cannot explain itself. David Hume showed that empiricism cannot be counted on to lead to truth. He showed that it might lead to truth, but that we would never know for sure. The mathematician Kurt Godel showed that rational axiomatic thought, specifically in the area of mathematics, cannot explain itself. The ultimate foundation for truth in mathematics must, of necessity, lie outside of the system of mathematics. Where does that leave the atheist and the agnostic? They must borrow, by faith, from somewhere if they want to have a metaphysics, an epistemology, and a moral system. They rarely acknowledge this, or they are not even aware of it.
Bertram Russell, a famous atheist, concluded as much. “Mathematics is the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor what we are saying is true.” And…” I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere…after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.
There was a Christian apologist who said that the argument for God is this: the impossibility of the contrary – without God we cannot know anything. The Chrisitan goes further to state that God is a person, not an impersonal force, and that He is knowable. You might like the book, “Mathematics, Is God Silent” by James Nickel. He does an excellent job in explaining how those unexplained connections that you mention above, can be explained by religion, specifically, Christianity.
God is a person? Just as I long long suspected, “He” is suspiciously similar to a primate.
You came to a conclusion, but the problem for human primates is to point to the periodic table of the elements or the electromagnetic spectrum and tell us where conclusions are located. The dilemmas pointed out by Hume and Godel remain: the conclusion is faith based.
I don’t think you need to believe in an anthropomorphic god — I don’t — to be interested in these questions
If you start with man as the measure of things then you will make God in man’s image, complete with a primate form. If you say the opposite, that God is not made in man’s image but man is made in God’s image, you go in a very different direction. Instead of God being anthropomorphic, the point is that man’s spirit is theomorphic.