Is it rational to believe in God?

Whether you agree or totally reject my views censorship should worry you.

If censorship succeeds against one person or set of beliefs, then you can be sure that censorship will be applied to the controversial arguments and opinions of others.

Censorship is usually a weapon used against atheists and all opponents of religion. I am just as much against censorship when atheists are the intended victims as when censorship is used against defenders of religious views. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

The most accurate technical term for my position on this issue of whether God exists is that I am an AGNOSTIC. I also have no problems with being described as an atheist. I believe that human ignorance on the question of whether God "exists" means that belief and non-belief are equally rational.

My argument for this conclusion and for the rationality of deism as well as the opposite of deism is offered below.

Introduction.

For a long time I was hostile to religion. I was the person you did not want to meet in a darkened seminar room to debate the subject of God. Richard Dawkins is a devout religious believer compared to the person that I was only a few years ago. I destroyed members of the various faiths in debates on this issue. Religious persons were known to cross the street when they saw me coming.

I am still hostile to fundamentalism and irrationalism, to intolerance and literalism, to all forms of zealous dogmatism or attempts to impose any set of beliefs by rhetorical force.

Intellectual bullies get from me exactly what they put out to me.

I have come to appreciate, however, that persons may be "fundamentalists" concerning any set of beliefs as opposed to rationally-held principles -- including trendy forms of atheism, scientism, relativism and fashionable liberal ideologies, and not just religions -- so that (to paraphrase Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath") wherever there is someone dressed in black with a graduate degree and a poodle -- in matching designer outfits, naturally -- "beating up a guy," philosophically speaking, "I am there." ("Skinny People Dressed in Black.")

I am a democratic socialist and agnostic or atheist. I am not a religious fundamentalist. I am not an apologist for any institution or religion. I am also not the person that you want to try to brow-beat on these subjects of belief (or politics) because you have earned a degree from Smith College -- after majoring in Women's Studies and cultural rebellion, perhaps, while eating asparagus and listening to alternative music. I am "for" saving whales.

Do not patronize or presume to instruct me on these matters unless you support what you say with some substantial arguments and scholarship.

Vandalizing and/or plagiarizing my writings is not "substantial arguments or scholarship."

If you do patronize (or condescend to me) then you may expect a response in kind. Hackers and others directing viruses at Christian or religious sites on-line, or seeking to censor others, are not offering "viable responses" to these arguments. Fascists angered by my pro-choice and gay rights views are equally irrational when they try to suppress anyone's speech, including mine. Finally, organized crime figures in New Jersey government only act in character when trying to suppress criticisms with thuggery. No one will prevent me from expressing my opinions. This independence is my most American characteristic.

At this point my adversaries are complaining: "You're stereotyping me!"

How does it feel? Imagine that sort of treatment over a period of years or decades. What would it do to you? What kind of a person do you become in order to respond to that sort of insulting and ignorant trivialization and disdain for your mind and thoughts? How do you react to censorship and dismissals of your ideas by persons who have committed crimes against you and who are incapable of understanding what you say? How do you retain your humanity in a torture chamber?

It is a difficult enough burden living with rage at injustice and hatred for those injuring us with impunity and labeling us with insults better assigned to them. The fight against hatred within the self gets harder every day. If you are subjected to insults, threats, or torture in an effort to "control" you, you will either be destroyed, quickly, or become a little defiant. I know that I would be -- and I am -- more than a little defiant and angry. My writing is not to be tampered with by anyone.

Do you believe that my views will be altered or that I will be intimidated from expressing them by hiring computer geeks to direct viruses and other obstacles at my besieged web sites in order to prevent me from posting essays on-line?

If so, then I am sure that you will be disappointed. I will find some way to say what I want to say, on-line regardless of who is pleased or annoyed by what I say.

Why is a defense of the rationality of religious belief such a source of hostility and hatred? Why is a defense of the United States Constitution controversial despite also being accompanied by powerful criticisms of the American legal and political system today?

Any form of patriotism is seemingly anathematized by "fashionistas" of all genders. You do not refute what I say by destroying or suppressing my writings. In fact, censorship is an admission of defeat. It is to admit your inability to respond effectively to an argument.

If I am unable to post this essay at my MSN group or blog, I will find an alternative site where I will make it available to those who are interested. Under no circumstances will I legitimate the crimes that have been committed against me (and persons I love) by New Jersey officials or their hirelings.

From the time I was fifteen years-old (or even earlier) I have been a steady, determined, usually secret reader. During the past ten years or so, my course of reading and study has intensified, well beyond anything I did in law school or for the bar exam. And I did well in both, usually against Ivy league competition.

I am now more aware of my own ignorance and flawed thinking, also of the flawed thinking of others. As my friend James says when it comes to religion -- "Nobody knows nothing ..."

James is wiser than Richard Dawkins on this issue.

The experience of torture and oppression has deepened my respect for persons of faith and has made me as indestructible (in some ways) as a person can be while (in other ways) leaving me permanently damaged. (See "What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

No matter who you are, whether you have been to Harvard or can barely read (or both?), you have every right to your religious beliefs, especially concerning the "much-vexed" question of whether God exists.

"Much-vexed" is a way professors manage to say that they do not know what they're talking about. They often don't know what they're talking about even as they talk for hours on subjects that they can not understand very well since they are richly rewarded for it. For example, this unusual talent for saying little at great length is often rewarded with tenure at our best universities. This is to say nothing of politics.

O.K., we're relaxed. No one has "the" answer on this question. No contemporary scientific finding has resolved or ever will resolve this issue of whether there is a God. Belief is a choice that each of us has to make in his or her own heart and mind. Not choosing is also choosing. It is called "agnosticism."

Any word that I use that you don't know, look it up. If you do that, then you will get much more out of reading this essay (or any other). It's O.K. not to know things. My greatest hope is that college students will read this essay. Just remember, you have to give respect to get respect; if you give the opposite, then you will receive exactly the same in return.

A human "choice" concerning religion is not more intelligent, as I will argue, when made by Richard Dawkins (who rejects all traditional religious beliefs) as opposed to John Polkinghorne (who is a religious believer). Both of these men are distinguished scientists. Neither of these gentlemen is or claims to be a philosopher. We are entitled and invited to disagree with their philosophical opinions. Neither of them would seek to suppress or silence critics.

Scientists are "god-like" figures in the contemporary world -- especially when they happen to be white men. Disagreement on the part of scientists, if they resemble Robert Young in the old "Marcus Welby, M.D." t.v. show, makes it O.K. for the rest of us to disagree: "If scientists don't know whether there is a God or if they disagree about it," people say, "then anything I believe on the subject is not prohibited by contemporary knowledge and I am permitted to have an opinion."

Yes, you are.

No scientist nor anyone else can tell you that you are wrong. Belief in God does not mean that you are a candidate for "therapy." To suggest that it is irrational to believe in a divinity or that anyone "knows" that there is no God is far greater proof of delusion, from a philosophical point of view, than anyone's humble faith in God.

Epistemological humility is compulsory whether one chooses to believe in God or the opposite. This question of God's existence is a matter as to which scientific knowledge -- much less absolute certainty -- is (and always will be) unavailable to anyone, scientists very much included.

Science will NEVER be able to answer our questions concerning meanings or values given what is meant by the scientific method as demonstrated by Richard Swinburne and many others.

During recent years there has been an arrogant and unscientific effort to discredit religious beliefs. A so-called "crusade" against religion has been called for by many scientists. Some of these scientists are anything but sophisticated students of religion or philosophy.

Scientists are still accorded a level of respect not given to any philosopher or theologian, priest, rabbi, or Islamic cleric and this includes devout persons who have studied religious issues for a lifetime. This fawning attitude by the media concerning scientists is absurd. Nevertheless, media bowing to scientists will not change any time soon.

Let's discuss the concept of God, as equals, and decide for ourselves what we believe and why. No one gets special status on this question as a scientist or anything else. Whether belief in God is rational is a theological and philosophical question. It is available to all. I will argue that it is just as rational and intellectually respectable to believe in God (if not MORE SO) as it is to reject belief in God.

I do not know whether there is a God. I cannot demonstrate, philosophically, that there is a God. For this reason, philosophically, I am forced to regard myself as an agnostic. However, I do believe that there is a truth to this matter. Whether I come to know that truth -- or exactly how one should do so -- are separate issues. If I could establish by argument, definitively, God's existence or the absence of God -- or if anyone could -- then there would be no reason for belief.

If you accept the proposition contained in the foregoing statement then it follows, logically, that belief or non-belief are each equally rational positions in the face of this unanswerable question of whether God exists.

The only God in whom it is worthwhile to believe, or even to bother discussing, would not resolve the question of belief or choice for you. Neither would such a God decide moral matters or tell you what tie goes with your suit today. "Deciding for you" would make you a wind-up toy, not a person, something less than human like a robot. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review" and "Ex Machina: A Movie Review.")

No God would make a universe that is entirely determined and predictable for the same reason. A God who is and desires freedom creates or generates both Being and Becoming, in mystical traditions, since the dialectic between those principles (Being and Becoming) is "freedom-as-love." "God," in gnosticism and other such traditions "bleeds creation."

I am aware that these are metaphors. They have to be. The same is true in science which is filled with metaphors -- "particle pairs," "currents of electricity," "flow of energy."

There are highly suggestive arguments that may establish grounds for "warranted belief." There are good reasons to believe in God, that is, in a God concerned or associated with the moral capacity of persons.

The crucial issue in this God debate is: "What do you mean by God?" A related issue is how we understand the concept of the "person." ("Robert Brandon's Reason in Philosophy.")

As for metaphor, the figurative capacity of the human mind is pervasive and irremovable from all human languages, including the language(s) of science. Scientific language is just as filled with with metaphors as every other kind of language. This will always be true. ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")

The idea of God -- certainly religion -- is connected to the concept of a person. Both concepts -- "God" and "person" -- are much more subtle, rich, powerful and pervasive in Western thought, including science, than most people realize.

You do not simply discard the idea of God or eliminate religion or symbolic reasoning by a majority vote at a gathering of scientists in, say, California.

Let's start with some careful thinking about what we mean by "God." I suspect that we will discover a profound paradox in a concept that designates both a divine Being and its attributes. "God" is a word that both names and "defines." The concept of God will be identified, first, in mythological traditions that are still very much alive throughout the world which are not to be denigrated as non-cognitive; also in metaphysical traditions associated with the great monotheistic religions and other religions in the world; then in scientific premises -- that are religiously-based.

Science originates in religious practices and traditions, not only in reaction against them, in our "premises" of thought -- premises used and developed today, often unknowingly, by scientists. Finally, I suggest a return to philosophically sophisticated discussions of the concept of God, which find new favor among "students" of the God idea. Added to the paradox is the realization that God is also much more than an idea. Ultimately, God is (or is not) an experience.

The best philosophers and theologians examining these questions are far more sophisticated in their analyses than someone like Richard Dawkins will ever be. Just as Mr. Dawkins is much more sophisticated when discussing biological science than any philosopher displaying only an amateur interest in his subject can be.

I have admitted that no one can claim certainty concerning the concept of God. However, someone who is familiar with the vast tradition of reflection on this subject and the theoretical sophistication found in the literature of deistic apologetics is bound to have more interesting things to say about the "God question" than those who see "no point" in religious beliefs -- or in a God still receiving the devotion of intellectuals and ordinary people after "flourishing" for thousands of years.

Beliefs thriving among members of every social class, in most societies in the world, are unlikely to be "nonsense."

Is everyone who believes in God a fool? I do not think so.

It is said that God has a sense of humor. Perhaps Richard Dawkins is one proof of this divine laughter.

I. What do you mean by "God"?

My International Webster's Dictionary (New York: Lexicon, 1991), at page 409, offers this definition of "God":

"... (in polytheistic religions) a being to whom worship is ascribed; an image of such a deity; an idolized person or thing, money is his God. God (in monotheistic religions) the supreme being, seen as the omnipotent, [omniscient,] creator and ruler of the universe ..."

Martin Buber says in "The Eclipse of God":

"Yes, [God] is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men [and women] have laid the burden of their lives upon this word. ... it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their fingerprints and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest." (pp. 17-18.)

Buber's comment is discussed by Iris Murdoch in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, pp. 420-421 because it gives rise to a problem:

"The classic problem of conceiving of an appropriate object of religious belief is that of understanding whether any term can be predicated of it [that is, God, or the object of belief]: does it make sense to talk of it creating things, willing events, knowing things, or being good, or caring, or being one thing or many?"

Simon Blackburn, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 328.

Blackburn elsewhere raises doubts about the meaningfulness of the concept of God, or the word -- "God." This is a word which the philosophical atheist finds troublesome. He or she must step away from it quickly and absolutely. The word has "sense" but no "reference" some analytical philosophers tell us. The trouble is that God is not a word or entity that is easily eliminated from human languages, as Buber, Derrida, and others have recognized.

God's shadow haunts every communicative gesture. My recent study of several essays by Donald Davidson suggests a compatibility between the insights of that important American philosopher and several prominent theologians, including the Catholic thinker Gustavo Gutierrez: "... there was mention of the presence in human nature of an innate desire to 'see' God." See A Theology of Liberation (New York: Maryknoll, 1988), pp. 43-44. (Notice that this "innate desire" is associated with the impulse towards "linguistic connections and shared meanings" in humanity.)

Scientist Amit Goswami's recent book is marred by occasional philosophical lapses and theological assumptions that should be eliminated from future editions. Goswami provides a version of the ontological argument compatible with what I say here, being unaware of the full theological implications of his fascinating scientific insights:

"An omnipresent God collapsing the wave function does not resolve the measurement paradox, however, because we can ask, At what point is the measurement complete if God is always looking?"

The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 96-97.

Goswami assumes in this sentence a definition of God as distinct and separable from what is observed when the bulk of his important book argues that consciousness and observational quanta are mutually essential or indistinguishable. Goswami answers his own question:

"... The measurement is not complete without the inclusion of the IMMINENT awareness. ..." Ibid.

A consciousness that resolves the quantum paradoxes at the foundations of the cosmos is -- and must be -- both "transcendent and imminent in creation." (p. 97.)

Keep this point in mind as you read my argument:

"One of the things we mean by God," John D. Caputo writes, "is that power or principle or person that opens up the secret or private chambers of the 'self.' It was in this moment of the clear/obscure, in the deepest moments of self-meditation that was also at the same time a meditation upon and before God, that Augustine was led to write, Quaesio mihi factus sum ... ["I have been made a question to myself.]"

Philosophy and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), p. 73.

"Man is the animal whose proper life unfolds in the form of a question," Martin Heidegger says.

For Plato and his followers, the idea of perfection is one with reality. The Good is the "sun" seen by the philosopher who emerges from the cave whose task is to explain his journey to those remaining in the shadows. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

"God's" presence is found in the scope of language's power to signify, in meaning and reference, in all speech. Few recent atheists appreciate all that is involved in the rejection of God, as a concept -- which is much more than a concept -- in human history.

God may be the first word that does have a reference for most of us.

"Language," Heidegger says, "is the house of Being." This is a powerful phrase to which I will return. This linguistic wager on transcendence --

" -- it is that of Descartes, of Kant and of every poet, artist, composer of whom we have explicit record -- predicates the presence of a realness, of a 'substantiation' (the theological reach of the word is obvious) within language and form. It supposes a passage, beyond the fictive or the purely pragmatic, from meaning to meaningfulness. The conjecture is that 'God' is, not because our grammar is outworn; but that grammar lives and generates words because there is the wager on God."

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 4.

Please weigh very carefully the following words:

"Erwin Schrodinger was right when he said: 'Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural.' Etymology and orthography have preserved the singularity of consciousness. The existence in language of such terms as 'I' and 'my,' however, leads us into a dualistic trap. We think of ourselves as separate because we speak of ourselves that way."

The Self-Aware Universe, p. 86.

We speak of ourselves that way because of a legacy of Cartesian dualism necessary during the early years of the scientific and rationalist revolutions -- along with materialistic realism -- both of which are now hindering progress in the sciences and humanities.

The presence of such words also reveals the crucial insight that language is a social entity that "locates" us within a community and history at the instant when we seek to think about anything, including science. ("A Review of the Television Series 'Alice.'")

Language tells us that we are not singular and cannot be "monads," that is, if we are to be persons at all. Let us reverse the key words in Schrodinger's quote. We may have captured Goswami's book-length argument in a single sentence: "Consciousness is a plural for which there is no singular." ("'Self/Less': A Movie Review.")

What is that plural entity instantiated in us and in every cognitive synthesis? God? See my quote from George Steiner at the conclusion of this essay.

The celebrated authors described by Mark Taylor as "undergraduate atheists" are, in fact, proponents of an outdated scientific view concerning these matters.

We no longer live in Newton's clockwork universe. The animation in nature as well as the meanings that constitute our identities, allowing for our scientific concepts, is partly supplied by and also discovered by us. How is this possible? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

"Since all knowledge must be based in bodily awareness, there is necessarily a sense in which 'explanations' which embrace the peculiarities of human emotion and of the human spirit must be more profound than explanations -- such as natural scientific ones -- which do not. Beneath our objective or scientific awareness, a mythic awareness may need to persist if we are to have any sense of meaning in the world at all: the configurations within which human life can most fundamentally be understood as falling -- the patterns in terms of which it can most satisfyingly be SEEN -- may in the end need to be understood as a matter not of scientific order but of a poetic order which is inherently mythic."

Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, literature: Towards a True Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 119.

The one thing that a fish swimming in the ocean would realize, if it possessed consciousness and intelligence, is that he/she/it (this fish) did not invent or create the ocean.

To be a person is to find ourselves swimming in an ocean of languages and meanings leading to moral life and culminating with, or as, love. The one thing that we may safely infer, being persons, is that we did not invent the "language" of love and morals (sociability) that makes our status as CONSCIOUS persons possible.

Compare Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 259-337 ("Jacques Derrida") with Arkady Plotinsky, Complementarity (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 37-65, pp. 121-149. (The chapter on Derrida is crucial.)

The next step in Goswami's analysis and in twenty-first century science is the turn from classical idealistic foundations to a scientific form of idealistic-phenomenological-hermeneutics seeking not "magic bullets" but "field-approaches" or solutions to scientific as well as medical challenges that shape-shift in our new pluralistic cognitive environment. Experts suggest that the answers (plural) to the AIDS virus and plague, for example, will come from such a protean approach. Let's call it "Model-Dependent Realism." (Hawking/Mlodinov.)

Languages and human civilizations have histories that alone make them understandable. The word and concept of God awaits us as the source of those histories, haunting and making possible all efforts at time-bound understandings of our conceptual systems and modes of discourse. This includes, I insist, science and (most especially) mathematics. See Bernard Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind it All (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006), pp. 147-155. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

You cannot understand the intellectual or aesthetic project of humanity without addressing the concept of God, whether you use the word "God" or some other term. See Simon Blackburn's Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 149-193.

As you reject the idea of God you will very likely continue to seek to hold on to ideas of truth, meaning and value, which are historically and otherwise associated with the concept of God.

Guess who is waiting for you at the end of all your scholarly explorations? And yes, it does make sense to speak of God's "attributes" -- analogically.

"... a term which is predicated of God and of finite things must, when it is predicated of God, be used in a sense which is neither precisely the same as nor completely different from the sense in which it is predicated of finite things. And this means that it must be used in a sense which is similar and dissimilar at the same time to the sense in which it is used when predicated of finite things." (dual description theory)

Frederick Copleston, S.J., Contemporary Philosophy (London: Burns & Oates, 1963), p. 94.

The word and concept "God" seeks to encompass a bottomless paradox or mystery. This word describes a subjective and objective entity. What else in the universe is subjective and objective? Wait, how about persons? Are persons not both of those things? Maybe this is an important point.

For both Kant and Hegel philosophy was a prelude to God. Accordingly, Hegel explained that "the elevation of the finite [man] to the infinite [God] could take place only in the life of love, and he then drew the conclusion that philosophy must, in the long run, yield to religion." Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy: Fitche to Hegel, Volume 7 (New York: Image Books, 1965), p. 26.

Albert Einstein felt the same about science leading to religion. "Out of My Later Years" (New York: Castle Books, 2005), p. 19 ("Science and Religion").

For me, what is involved in this process of what the musical group U-2 calls "elevation" is recognition (seeing again) where and what we are as "freedoms-in-the-world-with-others." (Heidegger, Sartre, Ricoeur, West.)

The clever atheist, who has taken a course in psychology, will suggest that this makes God a mere projection of human wishes. However, the crucial point is subjectivity -- how we can have wishes at all? -- and whether it is possible (which I doubt) that subjectivity might arise in a vacuum. Subjects seek other subjects. This seeking alone indicates that subjects only arise in a universe that contains their counterparts, other subjectivities.

Subjectivities are made meaningful and must emergence from some source or basis. I wonder who or what that source of subjectivity might be? Where does consciousness or mind come from? Why does mind exist in an amount or capacity well-beyond anything necessary for human evolutionary advantage? ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

These questions are important to understanding the revival of German idealism. Specifically, concepts of divinity lead to new scholarly interest in Hegel and post-Kantian philosophy as well as British idealism. Andrew Bowie, "Freedom, Ontology and Language," in Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 91-126 and Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 41-59. ("A scientific explanation of language will always need to employ pre-understandings that it is supposed to be explaining.")

No scientific answer alone will satisfy the epistemological, ontological, and moral issues involved in this inquiry as to meaning.

My "techie" adversaries or so-called "science-worshipers" will suggest that machines may someday become conscious. I doubt this. However, if machines become conscious it will prove my point because machines have been created by conscious entities -- namely, us.

We are embarking upon unknown waters, touching on the limits of what can be known by humans in speaking of "God." Use of this word "God" is, or should be, a counsel to humility. The word is always dual or ambiguous -- especially by serving as a "name" for a Supreme Being -- while also (most inadequately) serving as the "definition" of an entity that is always beyond linguistic definition as an irresolvable Mystery.

We will have to use the word "God" only because there is no other word in the English language to do the job of pointing at this concept/Being that is so fundamental to persons. Not surprisingly, many thinkers have associated divinity with the feminine principle -- notably, Ernst Cassirer -- since women seem (to men) to embody these contradictions and enigmas. ("Pieta.")

Do not mistake the symbol (which we need) for what is symbolized (which we need even more). The same caution applies to a crucifix or any work of religious art: What are you being directed towards when contemplating such symbols? What is the word that comes into your mind?

A mistake is to remain fixated on the symbol rather than what is symbolized, to read religious texts literally, as opposed to metaphorically or symbolically, is to diminish those texts. To read the Scriptures as possessing only one literal meaning is to attempt to reduce or limit religion's importance. You cannot put God in a bottle with a scientific label on it. However, you also cannot trap God in a single text, much less in one interpretation of a text. Colin Wilson, "Whitehead as Existentialist," in Philosophy Now, November/December, 2007, at pp. 28-31.

We cannot avoid thinking of God for historical and biological reasons -- Richard Dawkins acknowledges this! -- and to do this "thinking," we must make use of this word and the concept designated by it. By making use of this word and concept, however, we are necessarily already involved in a number of linguistic and logical commitments.

Donald Davidson suggests, "Error can be found only in a setting of largely true beliefs. Massive error about the world is simply unintelligible." But then, what is this true world and/or world of truth that is the deep structure of language? See K. Baynes, J. Bohman, T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 162-163. (If you use the word "evil" about historical events then you are already committed to a universe of absolute moral categories.)

This duality in the very word "God" is significant for reasons not usually appreciated. The word alone is an important clue to where key insights may be found to this great Mystery that I seek not to answer or resolve, but only to approach in these comments. The duality in the word "God" reveals its conceptual divisions that are "mirrored" in human nature. We are paradoxical creatures, subjects and objects, animals with consciousness or mind, beings with spiritual lives in a material world. I do not believe that this duality in human nature is coincidental or unimportant, philosophically, to the God question, as you will see in the final sections of this essay.

The philosophical dialectic on the God question is an encounter between mysteries -- human and divine. There is no way to approach the truths at the center of the God question without making use of indirect communication, symbols and metaphors. "The symbol gives rise to thought." (Paul Ricoeur) But then, we discover (again) that symbolizing features in all human cognitive efforts, including science and -- especially -- mathematics. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")

Why is symbolizing important to subjects? A symbol always transcends or means more than its vessel. Is this not true also of bodies with minds? I think so. Your identity is never defined by your physical self at any one moment. You are always a project in time. What is that project in its totality? Does it have something to do with others and God? Is it merely "contained" or "reducible" to your body at this moment? I doubt it. We can only gesture in the direction of these ultimate boundaries of human knowledge. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")

"It is in some city of God, in some eternal church," F.H. Bradley writes, "that we find the real goodness that owns and satisfies our most inward desire."

Essays On Truth and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), p. 9.

It is absurd to argue that Muslims worship "Allah." "Allah" is the Arabic word for "God." One would not say that Spanish speakers worship "Dios" whereas English speakers worship "God." All of us -- billions of people throughout the world -- are trying to approach this awesome mystery with the blunt instrument of imperfect human languages. Caution is crucial, as is a respectful attitude to this master phenomenon or "world-puzzle" that -- I have to repeat this -- I only hope to understand a little better at the conclusion of this essay.

All of the world's great religions have shared intuitions about this entity or experience -- "God." This universality is not coincidental in my opinion. It is worthy of further study. This insight may be traced to the writings of Jung and Cassirer, Zimmer and Campbell, also many others, including Ricoeur and Eliade, Martin Buber and George Steiner, or John D. Caputo and Jean-Luc Marion (eros).

I am a universalist on the God question. I suspect that, if there is a God, He or She is also a universalist.

God or divinity has been a subject of concern for persons from the emergence of humans on the planet. Efforts to identify the source of fascination and awe have taken many forms. The earliest of these forms being mythological. Myth is not unimportant dream-like imagery, unworthy of our concern. Myth is an attempt by intelligent, pre-scientific peoples to come to terms with the fundamental mysteries at the center of their lives which are largely the same mysteries that we face today. What is death? Why am I here? What is love?

I begin with a look at mythological communications of this mystery that is God. ("'The Rite': A Movie Review.")

Cynics will grumble at this point that "We have science. We don't need myth anymore."

We need myths and cannot avoid creating myths or resorting to a language of archetypes. Mythological and magical thinking are found everywhere in popular culture because it is needed, not because people are stupid. In fact, mythological thinking is often couched in the language of science.

As I revise this essay the "pantheon" of Olympic athletes are receiving "gold medals" for their victories in the "games" which can be traced to ancient Athens and heroic myths. If you wish to study mythology look around you. This is America's presidential election season that ends when we crown a "hero/heroine" as our new leader.

A. Mythology.

Humans are self-aware, conscious minds (or beings), most especially in their knowledge of death. In the earliest prehistoric humnan communities archaeologists have discovered evidence of religious worship in attention to the burial of the dead, in traces of ceremonies commemorating passage from one to another stage in life, also in evidence of rituals of celebration and feasting marking Winter's transformation into Spring.

At several caves where prehistoric art has been found in southern France and northern Spain, for example, there are marks or "signatures" by artists/priests left for posterity. A child's handprint on a cave wall bearing a painting celebrating the hunt signals, I believe, a recognition of the spiritual renewal of hunted animals in Spring and, possibly, of the rebirth of persons through the consumption of the flesh of the beasts depicted, reverently and respectfully, from one generation to the next. The message of the child's handprint seems to be: "I am here and my child will live in the future because of these animals that we eat which live through her."

Literary-critic, anthropologist and philosopher Rene Girard says:

" ... humanity results from sacrifice; we are the children of religion. What I call (after Freud) the 'founding murder' -- the immolation of a sacrificial victim who is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order -- is constantly reenacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions." -- And ourselves! -- "Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way to enable their fellow humans to live together or at least not to destroy one another."

Rene Girard, "On War and Apocalypse," in First Things, August/September, 2009, at p. 17. (''Oblivion': A Movie Review.")

Mythologically, "God himself can be an object of sense-perception, and of course, there are many elements of this mythological thinking in the Bible itself, both in the old and new testaments. ... God might show Himself indirectly in physical phenomena or in unusual events, signs, wonders, miracles."

John MacQuarrie, "How Can We Think of God?," in Jerry H. Gill, ed., Philosophy Today, No. 2 (London: McMillan Co., 1969), p. 144.

It is significant that the intuition of divinity predates civilization. God is essential to the human story from the earliest emergence of humans in evolution. An ontological shift takes place with the arrival of consciousness in the evolutionary story of life on earth that may be summarized as "awareness" of self and mortality. Hence, the handprint that I discussed is a way of recognizing that both prehistoric artist and child -- as well as the revered animals depicted in cave paintings -- live within what we may call "God."

The story of Adam and Eve is about becoming human as an act of recognition and choice. Consciousness implies freedom. Freedom means choosing between good and evil. Eden is community with God before the Fall of Man. Evil enters the human story as an estrangement from our calling to love others. Evil is the "Fall" of man and woman. Torture of any human being sharing this moral space that makes humanity possible is always the self-torture of the evil-doer. Hurting an innocent person is the epitome of a pathological act because it is NECESSARILY self-destructive for the community. For this reason, we must never resort to violence intended to harm innocents. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

The problem of evil is usually framed in terms of a discussion concerning free will versus the existence of evil. To me, this is a secondary question. More fundamentally the issue is why we distinguish everywhere on the planet between good and evil? Why is this recognition that there is both good and evil fundamental to human beings? What inferences can be derived from this universal intuition and the impossibility of avoiding moral experience (or spirituality) while remaining human? Why is evil a "problem"? Why is the concept of evil meaningful?

After all, in a godless universe filled with happy nihilists there is no such thing as evil. There can not be evil without good. The distinction would never be made, but for the experience of choice or freedom, which is identical with the essence of persons. This core human identity makes the distinction between good and evil necessary as well as unavoidable. ("Is This Atheism's Moment?")

The sense of not being alone in the universe is essential to the experience of subjectivity -- that is, humans see themselves from the beginning of their history as conscious, feeling, suffering, and dying creatures who must search for means to express their genetic yearning for connection with that Other (or universe) whose essence is shared and from which they (we) come. This is ultimate meaning.

There is only one word that will serve for that Other -- "God."

The paradox deepens with the realization of the presence of that Other "in" us. Without that presence, no sense of self would emerge in (or against) what is "other than." (See my comments on language and humanity as the fish in the ocean of meanings.)

"There is no anthropological or naturalistic account which is any more convincing than the mythological one that speech is a gift to man."

Richard M. Weaver writes:

"What we do know is that language is specifically human in occurrence, that is, it is a specifically human endowment. Animals communicate among themselves by signs but a sign is a different thing from a verbal symbol. A sign is something imitative of or closely connected with what it indicates, as may be seen when we use the hand to beckon or the finger to point. ... "

All language --

" -- is metaphorical in its origin, and the use of metaphor is distinctively intellectual and non-naturalistic, because metaphor disengages the word from the thing. At the same time it sets up a new level of meaning [creates a world] which relates the word to the thing and to something else."

"The Reconsideration of Man," in Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Penn.: Bryn Mawr, 1964), p. 142. (See my short stories "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Pieta.")

With the emergence of the religious impulse love (separation into familial and tribal units) and art (painting, dance, music) appear in the story of humanity -- along with words, then, there are art, and love as kinds of languages making us human -- as means towards the ultimate end which is awareness and connection with a larger subjectivity of which we feel ourselves to be a part.

This cognitive power of feelings is important to our transcendental aspirations and wisdom. This idea is especially significant also in appreciating several of Kant's and Hegel's greatest theological insights. Compare Terry Eagleton, "The Law of the Heart," in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 38-40 with Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), pp. 54-57.

The connection between aesthetic experience and creation as well as shared or communal celebrations of life may be seen today in the music that features in Christian worship or in Purim celebrations which I have been fortunate enough to attend with Jewish friends in New York, but also in the song that is the call to prayer for the faithful in Islam. In Hindu festivals filled with color and dance, personal decoration, incense, and special foods the same drives may be seen.

Think of the singing of the "Ohmm" by Buddhist monks in meditation that "mirrors" the energy and movements of creation's eternal dance between being and non-being. I remember my grandmother's joy in singing at a Jehova's Witnesses' ceremony. Contempt for such people and ceremonies is the truest and ugliest form of elitism.

It is a single step from mythology to monotheism, along with the metaphysical thinking that brings us to modernity and beyond.

B. Metaphysics.

With the success of monotheism God was no longer seen as "located" in any particular place. He was "in" the world but not limited to it, able to dwell beyond or "outside" the world. God becomes transcendent and imminent. In the same way that human thinking began to distinguish between a world of forms or ideas and empirical reality.

By drawing on Platonic philosophy religious traditions sharpened the distinction between God and the world as well as the division of reality into "realms of being," Augustine's "City of Man" and "City of God."

Metaphysical sophistication in God-talk became possible in a religiously "centered" world whose ultimate purpose was the reconciliation and unity of God with humanity. Thus, philosophically:

"God was conceived as a Being who is personal, yet invisible, intangible and, in general, inaccessible to any kind of sensible investigation. ... "

MacQuarrie, p. 144.

Roger Scruton writes:

"God is immanent within the world, but he also transcends it. His vision of reality is from no partial point of view: it is a vision of the whole world, as it is in itself, regardless of its appearance to this or that finite perception. God is all-knowing and infinite: thought is of his essence, and he is himself the object of his thinking. (God, for Aristotle, is 'thought thinking itself.') To establish God's existence is to establish precisely that 'view from nowhere,' as Thomas Nagel describes it, which provides us with absolute truth."

"God" in Modern Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 121.

The tradition of reflection on the nature of God, deriving from Plato and Aristotle to the great Arabic commentators -- whose metaphysical speculations concerning God have not been surpassed and who influenced the greatest Jewish and Christian thinkers on the subject -- is still thriving in the work of contemporary philosophers, such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. From Al-Farabi and Al-Ghazari, Islamic thinkers whose effect on Maimonedes is profound, even as the latter influenced Aquinas, who in turn reacted to Anselm's proofs, humans have not been able to avoid thinking of God.

Analogous thinking in non-Western religious reflections compatible with the latest scientific insights are easily found. See Saxe Commins and Robert N. Linscott, eds., The World's Great Thinkers, Man and Spirit: The Speculative Philosophers (New York: Random House, 1947) and Tenzin Gyatso, (Dalai Lama XIV) Kindness, Clarity, and Insight (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1984), also C. Wright Mills, "The Language and Ideas of Ancient China," in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Ballantine, 1963), pp. 469-511. ("The Chinese do not oppose the subject of knowledge to its object as the West has done.")

Theological sectarianism is absurd in light of this diverse and shared history of speculation. Cooperation in our thinking about God is called for. Perhaps, this is also a moral lesson found in God-talk. The Mystery of God invites everyone's participation, including that of scientists. No one gets to usurp the knowledge field. "God" should not be an academic specialty as opposed to a subject of universal scholarly attention. Perhaps the same may be said of peace and love. Are these words pointing at a single topic or entity?

I believe that the demonstrable success of Chinese medicine in treating illnesses may be interpreted as an argument for what we call God. Philosophical ingenuity has resulted in the development of a number of highly successful and subtle arguments concerning the plausibility of faith in God as an idea or conceptually.

The arguments are said to divide into the cosmological, ontological and teleological. I think that historical and sociological arguments, as well as interpretations of scientific observations and theories, may also be added to the God side of the ledger. Stephen Hawking is not a religious believer, even if his literary persona appears (to me) very spiritual -- spiritual in a scientific rather than religious language:

"... a universe like ours with galaxies and stars is actually quite unlikely. If one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged, the odds against a universe like ours that has produced life like ours are immense."

John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 111. (Quoting Hawking.)

I will concentrate on only one argument which has received a number of new variations and subtle expositions in recent years. It is not the best or most compelling of these "pro-God" arguments. However, it has never been refuted, in my opinion, not even by the great Immanuel Kant, whose destruction of metaphysics is not challenged by me. I know that this seems paradoxical. Please bear with me for now. Any argument that is still standing after centuries of attacks by philosophers must contain some important truth or insight into the human condition.

There is much misunderstanding of Kant's philosophical project which was to "limit knowledge in order to make room for faith." Kant was a defender of religion who believed in God. This is a fact that many philosophical types -- my younger self among them -- find difficult to reconcile with Kant's (I think) unique philosophical genius. Philosophers try to minimize Kant's religious commitments.

This fact of Kant's mind is not trivial or unimportant in the effort to understand him. You cannot minimize Kant's religious concerns and do justice to his thinking. This alone suggests something concerning the centrality of eschatalogical and deistic thinking to philosophy and science in the modern Western tradition.

Divinity is inescapable to the history of philosophical thought -- or maybe to all thinking -- not only for Kant and Hegel, also in the Marxist secularization of the God idea in the proletariat and "workers' paradise." The Buddha would say that loving is inescapable to Being. Dieter Heinrich comments:

" ... as Kant says in a well-known passage, he had to limit knowledge in order to provide room for belief, a belief that consists in nothing but the contents of THE MORAL IMAGE OF THE WORLD. Hence, a discussion of the problems arising from the notion of a moral image of the world could very well pave the way into all Kant's philosophy."

Aesthetic judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), at p. 5 (emphasis added).

The words "belief" and "faith" alternated in Kant's texts as these words, allegedly, appear in several contexts in Kant's translated writings.

I will set forth the ontological argument, as stated by Anselm; I will explain Kant's important criticism; before suggesting a kind of synthesis or the use of a modified and enhanced version of the ontological argument which I find compelling; I then offer some hints of additional considerations that are relevant to this neo-ontological argument's resonance for us in the aftermath of the linguistic revolution in philosophy. I concentrate on only one argument for reasons of space limitations.

C. Science. 

Many people have been led to believe, as a result of philosophical confusions, that science somehow prohibits belief in God. In fact, some of the latest scientific findings support religious belief. (See my essay "Elaine Pagels and the Secret Texts of Christianity.")

Science explains events in the world only in terms of other events in the world. The need for positing God is said to be eliminated from human thinking by the "principle of parsimony." This is actually a very simplistic and inaccurate understanding of science and religion to say nothing of "God."

Science alone tells us about the empirical world. However, when science is said to be the only method that is properly used for knowing things which are not necessarily exclusively empirical or empirically-determined, like beauty or value, we are right to be skeptical. This is to claim that mythological, aesthetic, philosophical and theological thinking is obsolete.

I find this second conclusion or assumption in the works of thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins untenable and unacceptable. I am sure that such a view is mistaken (for one thing, it is not "scientific") -- this is not a criticism of science which is great for discovering the workings of the empirical world -- only a recognition of the limitations on scientific inquiry when it comes to questions of value or conceptual analysis that are concerned with meanings.

Science seeks to understand events in the empirical world; religion is concerned with the ultimate meanings of our actions and what occurs to us.

This essay may be thought of as one person's attempt to limit the province of scientific knowledge to what is (or may be) scientifically knowable in order to make room for warranted beliefs concerning spirituality and art, politics, and moral life where understandings may be the best that can be achieved.

My philosophical stance is a Hegelian-Kantianism -- not far from Ricoeur's philosophy -- but also an argument for the compatibility of science and religion. After all, the physical world beloved by "empiricists" is not so material these days. Matter, scientists tell us, is merely energy. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness" and "Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism.")

Stephen Jay Gould and many scientists recognize that science is not concerned with meanings or values, aesthetics or wisdom. Science cannot be concerned with these important areas of human inquiry, which are properly focused on human subjectivity and its products, nor upon empirical reality in an objective and/or external sense.

Some of the most important or ultimate questions that we ask about the human universe of values and meanings, accordingly, cannot and will never be answered by science. The knowledge provided by science will certainly be helpful in our efforts to find and/or construct satisfactory and truthful answers to such open-ended questions. Richard Swinburne notes:

"Science's inability to explain these things is not a temporary phenomenon, caused by the backwardness of Twentieth Century science. Rather, because of what a scientific explanation is, these things will ever be beyond its capacity to explain. For scientific explanations by their very nature terminate with some ultimate natural law and ultimate arrangement of physical things, and the questions which I am raising are why there are natural laws and physical things at all."

"The Justification of Theism," http://www.leaderu.com/truth/3truth09.html and see also: Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) and Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999), also Gordon H. Clark, The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God (New Mexico: Trinity, 1964), pp. 96-114.

Science leaves us with "open questions" to which science provides -- and can provide -- no answers, allowing room for belief in God. Einstein's observation that science leads to religion becomes very clear:

"There is also the matter of entropy. This measure of perpetually increasing decay and chaos is controlled by the second law of thermodynamics, which declares that any change in the universe will lead to a slightly more disorderly place. Entropy always goes up. Order always goes down. Evidence of this universal tendency toward disintegration is everywhere. Cars rust, stars grow cold and die, stereos break down, people become old, mountains erode, and buildings collapse. This leads to a dilemma: If the universe is a place that is like a watch slowly running down, how, in the face of this natural tendency, did it get wound in the first place? In defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, order has risen out of chaos." (Boslough, p. 111.)

Catholic priest and scientist Lorenzo Albacete, S.J. writes:

"Science has to exclude from its scope the transcendent, the eternal, the spiritual, the absolutely particular, the radically new and unforeseen, the creations of freedom. The dialogue between science and religion, then, deals with the different ways in which we can understand reasonableness, each following its proper method and its proper range of applications."

God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity (New York: Crossroad, 2002), p. 59.

Some of the most crucial questions that we face can only be approached religiously, philosophically or aesthetically. Among these questions, as I have indicated, is the issue of whether belief in God is rational.

Belief in God is at least as rational as atheism. It is very possible that the better arguments are on the side of faith in God. Astonishingly, there may be more persuasive philosophical arguments "for" than "against" God. This is partly the result of one set of interpretations of recent scientific discoveries combined with very solid philosophical argumentation.

A number of scientists seem to find the God idea or "Deus Principle" useful in their speculative or theoretical efforts to bring together findings from several disciplines, suggesting a compatibility between the God "idea" and the latest scientific views of reality. Those interested in such approaches may wish to consult the 1983 book, God and the New Physics and 1992's The Mind of God, both by physicist Paul Davies. Ian Barbour's When Science Meets Religion (2000) is also recommended. Nobel Laureate Robert B. Laughin's A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down (New York: Perseus, 2005) has been found useful by philosophers of religion. This may come as news to the author. Here is Richard Swinburne's version of the "Deus Principle":

"... in postulating God we come to a starting point of explanation in which the complex particularity we find around us has a simpler cause from which the complexity flows -- and that is always a hallmark of a well-justified explanation. That is why we postulate electrons and protons, neutrons and quarks to explain the miscellaneous data of physics and chemistry. "

I will offer arguments in support of these claims concerning the continuing rationality of belief in God. All of this is secondary to what I think is fundamental about religion or God. My position on this matter is identical to Immanuel Kant's philosophy, as set forth especially in the late writings and final Critique. A capacity for feeling and love is at the heart of human life and religion. Nothing and no one will change this fact, not even Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

Religion is about coping with suffering, appreciating the importance of love, and redemption. The concept of God is about meaning. I have no doubt about this claim. This is not inconsistent with agnosticism. I also KNOW that (for me) love is the meaning of life. The remaining question is what -- or Who -- we are discussing when we speak of love. Better yet: What is it that we become by loving?

Let us imagine love as a beautiful room with a roaring fire and a great feast spread out on a table. Outside this room is darkness and coldness. At the instant when we enter this room, when we love others, we become persons; some human beings choose to remain in the cold and darkness forever. I wish to suggest with this image (or analogy) that the idea of God is identical with this room where we become persons. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Furthermore, I believe that the story of Adam and Eve -- although it seems to say the opposite -- is concerned with how we must return to this room after leaving it. Suffering for the Other, resulting from the recognition of good and evil, is the door that we must open to enter this room. Sacrifice is the doorknob that we turn. We must choose suffering in order to become persons. Suffering and love are one. Mysteriously, memory is connected to suffering and our willingness to accept the pain of remembering. For this reason -- because of the importance of memory and suffering -- I argue for the crucial universal need for Holocaust studies. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "Out of the Past.")

II. Anselm's "Ontological" Argument and Kant's Destruction of Metaphysics.

St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) is credited with this formidable argument, along with others, for the necessary existence of God.

The ontological argument has survived for centuries and is stronger, I am sure, for the debates that it has inspired and for its continuing suggestiveness to us. This argument is one of the most beautiful in Western speculative thought. It is important to notice that there are two formulations of the argument by Anselm and only one of which (the first quoted below) is really the target of Kant's critique:

Version 1: "If therefore that than which nothing greater can be thought exists in the understanding alone, then this thing than which nothing greater can be thought is something than which a greater can be thought. And this is clearly impossible. Therefore, there can be no doubt at all that something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the understanding and in reality."

Proslogion, Opera Omnia, I, p. 101.

Version 2: "Something than which nothing greater can be thought so truly exists that it is not possible to think of it as not existing. This Being is yourself, Lord our God, [since] you so truly are that it is not possible to think of you as not existing."

Proslogion, Opera Omnia, I, p. 103.

God is a "singularity." God is a unique entity and Being ("Being as such") for which there is no comparison or analogy. The word "God" is used so often and unthinkingly by all of us that we fail to really comprehend what we are saying when we speak of God. (''Interstellar': A Movie Review.")

An adequate response to this argument is not a trivial observation to the effect that "just because I can think of something doesn't mean that it exists." We know that. But to participate in Being and engage in thinking -- while doubting the reality of thought and Being, as such, is a little tougher than it looks. S. Morris Engel, "Kant's Refutation of the Ontological Argument," in Robert Paul Wolff, ed., Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Anchor, 1967), pp. 189-211.

In rejecting and ridiculing the ontological argument, Michael Frayn (whose wonderful book is highly recommended) comments:

"I have only to describe the characters in my next novel as having all possible qualities, or as being perfect, and lo! there they are in the real world. Do we even need such elevated characteristics? Nowhere, so far as I can recall, does Jane Austen make the claim for Mr. Darcy, for example. [If she did, Michael, then Ms. Austen would be describing God by using the name "Mr. Darcy"!] ... If God is summoned into being by words, then so is Mr. Darcy."

Anselm would explain to Michael Frayn that it is words and descriptions of, say, Mr. Darcy, that are called into being and made possible -- like all communication in language -- by God.

This metaphysical point is demonstrated in Frayn's own discussion which closes with a realization that undermines his critique of the ontological argument:

"And indeed they [Mr. Darcy and God] are both so summoned. This is the truth -- the truth of fiction."

The Human Touch (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 265.

This is not the truth of fiction, Michael, but the power of language to mean (signify) in order for communication to "happen," thereby connecting all of us in a "realm of meanings" which is only another description of God.

We are indeed "summoned" through the use of language into a community. What is that community? God? The literary encounter? The "fusion of horizons"? ("What you will ...")

Consider the paradoxical statement of "truth in fiction" and you will see (even if Frayn does not) that Mr. Frayn has become a theologian arguing "for" the existence of God. Michael Frayn's delightful books create a space for meeting -- usually with laughter -- that reflects this idea of God as the ground of meanings. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

Persons who have "come down" from Oxford University will inform us that there is no such "thing-like entity" as "Being as such." This is because, as dutiful students of Professor A.J. Ayer's writings, they will take it for granted that all such abstractions are the result of "confusions by foreign persons," usually Germans. ("A.J. Ayer's Critique of Collingwood's Metaphysics.")

Awareness of a quality missing from a person who is dead and "gone" is immediate and intuitive. Something vital that was there in him or her now is gone. This quality "was" -- or the dead person possessed a "Being" -- which that individual no longer possesses. The person we knew or loved is no longer "there." However, there are still many things that "are" (physical things, like a body) to the extent that they share in this quality of Being, reality, existence in its many modes.

No abstraction is needed to experience "Being." As G.E. Moore held up his hands for students to see finding it impossible to doubt their "reality" and his own presence in the lecture hall, so we can all be confident of existing at least in a Cartesian sense when pondering these mysteries.

What is this quality that unites entities in the universe in Being (meanings) and that, somehow, connects them to us, as experiencing agents? Without such unity in Being ("the luminosity of existence"), all things drift apart into incoherence and chaos. Manifestly, this disunification of the universe of meanings does not occur. How is this possible? David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 11.

"Chinese philosophy," C. Wright Mills writes, "from the ancient period is dominated by the notions of Ying and Yang. These two 'categories' are at various times, and always indistinctly, valued as forces, substances, and genres. But strictly speaking they are not comparable to any such Western categories. Their function is the classification and animation [to "give birth to creation"] of all antithetical aspects of the universal order, which is Tao. [Tao is What or All that "is."] Ying and Yang synthetically evoke, they stir up ('suscitement') globularly [sic.] the rhythmic ordinance which presides over the lives of the world and the activities of mind. All of Chinese thought proceeds under the joint persuasion of order, of totality and of rhythm." (Mills, pp. 506-507.)

In Western terms this dialectic may be captured in one word -- God.

Chinese thought is, essentially, dynamic and relational. Appreciating the foundations of Chinese thought is more important today than ever in light of current scientific findings. Chinese space efforts are about to begin a moon project after the first Chinese astronauts have walked in space. Chinese thought is scientifically as sophisticated as any other nation's scientific thinking. Chinese thinking is also deeply respectful of spirituality as balance or equilibrium between nature and arts, humanistic thinking and scientific technology.

One of the problems in the Western world today is lack of balance between these aspects of cognition: Compare Fung Yu-Lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy (New York & London: Free Press, 1948), pp. 294-307 ("Neo-Confucianism: The School of Platonic Ideas") with Stuart Sim, Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodernism (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), pp. 27-89 ("Postmodern Philosophy" should be compared with "The School of Names" in Chinese thought, Jacques Derrida's religious concerns are relevant to Chinese thought, also the interpretation of Kant in China during the twentieth century).

Find me another entity or "energy" (ch'i) with the history and global impact of God, which everyone admits escapes all human efforts to encapsulate or define, in any description.

True, Mr. Frayn, I can think of ten dollars and find that I do not have ten dollars in my wallet. However, God is a little more complex than a ten dollar bill. To think of a mathematical description of the trajectory of a rocket is to describe that trajectory.

The mathematical description and the rocket's journey are one. Indeed, space travel was made possible, partly, by mathematical modelling. At the instant when you think of or discuss the concept of God, you have stepped into a history and dialectic in language. You have also said something profound about the universe and yourself whether you realize it or not. This is unavoidable in merely thinking or uttering the word "God." See the discussions at Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 11-17 and Hugo A. Meynell, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 131-140.

The number of contingent variables may preclude an absolutely accurate a priori mathematical description of a future event, in practice. This has no bearing on the theoretical capacity of an omniscient entity to make such calculations -- or not to require them at all -- from a totally-encompassing view that is inclusive of all times and beyond partial perspectives.

In living a human life, loving and behaving morally, you may be "instantiating" and knowing this God-principle, through thinking and feeling anything at all. Try stepping naked into the ocean without getting wet and you may appreciate the theological point being made here.

"God" exists in (or as) a network of principles and ideas, intellectual- and value-structures that are inextricable from one another. Each is involved with and implies all of the others just as the rustling of a butterfly's wings in a far corner of the globe will affect our weather in New York for weeks. (See James Gleick's excellent book on "chaos theory" in physics.)

"Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output -- a phenomenon given the name 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions.' In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect -- the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York."

Chaos (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 8. (Capra's recent writings on systems' theory and networks is useful.)

The reality of God, as thought, may be inescapable even for the scientist or atheist denying God, since that denial is also a thought or thinking about God or theological effort. Religious beliefs or doctrines are irrelevant to this point. An analogy to our economic and political interconnectedness is obvious:

"Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt." (These words were written by Pope Benedict XVI.)

God at the Ritz, p. 188.

Ask your atheist friends: "What are you denying when you reject the reality or meaning of God?"

In constructing a philosophy of atheism, proponents of non-belief may well be engaging in an act of "devotion" (Richard Dawkins?) to the extent that you participate in thought at all concerning or about God, or ultimate matters, or thinking at all. Christopher Martin, "Heidegger, Lao-Tzu, and Dasein," in Douglas W. Schrader, ed., The Fractal Self (New York: ONEONTA, 2000), pp. 175-201. Keiji Nishitani, "The Personal and the Impersonal in Religion," in Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California, 1983), p. 46. (J. Van Bragt, trans.) (Again: "'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The American': A Movie Review.")

Kabalistic thinking begins from this observation of linkage between God and thought to speech. To adopt the term and concept of God involves you in a system of discourse with profound implications. Furthermore, it may be that in the very process of articulating ANY thoughts in language, whatever the subject, you are already appealing, tacitly, to this God-concept as the "guarantor" of meaning. (See my earlier quotation from Donald Davidson's writings.)

Thus, we may agree with Kant's objection to the ontological argument that "existence is not a predicate" found in the Transcendental Dialectic, Book II, chapter III, section 4 of The Critique of Pure Reason Kemp-Smith translation -- which holds that we do not add anything to the idea of something by saying that it exists:

"We do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is. Otherwise it would not be exactly the same thing that exists."

Kant fails to realize (or does he?) that, in his second formulation, Anselm is making exactly the same point found in Kant's sentence quoted above.

God's essence and our descriptions are not exactly the same thing since God always is, necessarily, something more -- an existent Being beyond all of Her descriptions, who brings creation with Her into a dialectic with humanity, including the skeptic who is doubting Her.

God is the ultimate philosophical tutor and you better not be late for Her lectures. Anselm is arguing that God's existence is implied in the very attempt to reason and think about anything, given what is meant by the concept of God.

Theologians today who are scientifically sophisticated are suggesting that thinking and reasoning are involvements with and revelations of God. This is true whatever the subjects of your thoughts and speech, even in rejecting God. Iris Murdoch comments:

"Philosophical discussions of the [ontological] Proof, whether Kantian or modern, have usually tended to take the logical argument, stated by itself, as primary (as if one could talk of God without reference to morality) and in this guise it has attracted some amused observers. It was in this diminished form rejected by Gaunilo and treated by Schopenhauer as a joke. ... I would argue that the Proof, as something to be taken seriously, must be understood by looking at Plato. ... We gain the concept of this unique form of necessity from our unavoidable experience of good and evil. If God (or the unconditional element) is a reality anywhere it is a reality everywhere and is in this sense unlike other considerations."

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Viking, 1993), pp. 405-406. (Again: "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Kant sees God as the "regulative principle" of moral understanding holding duty in place. God is identified with Kant's "Categorical Imperative." The failure, as Kant sees it, of Anselm's first metaphysical argument merely makes possible the practical postulate that God "is" thus guaranteeing freedom, duty, and rights.

God always abides by the moral law, for Kant, that is why He is God. Thus, even if a voice from the heavens claiming to be God tells you to do something, unless the action comports with the "Categorical Imperative," do not do it.

Not only may we postulate God as source of the moral law, Kant insists, that we MUST do so as a matter of practical reasoning. (I deal with the Kierkegaardian issues below.)

Even if we cannot be certain that God is "noumenal" reality, we can and MUST act as if God is real, in reason, for all rational moral agents, if we are to be human, i.e., moral and rational creatures or PERSONS. Anselm would probably agree and is saying much the same thing:

"The investigation of nature pursues its own course, guided by the chain of natural causes only, according to general laws. It knows the idea of an author, but not in order to derive from it that system of purposes which it tries to discover everywhere, but in order to recognize his existence from those purposes, which are sought in the essence of the things of nature, [MEANINGS,] and if possible, also in the essence of all things in general and consequently to recognize HIS [GOD'S] EXISTENCE AS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY."

Critique of Pure Reason, [A: 604-698; B: 722-726] (New York: Anchor, 1966), pp. 451-452. See also, Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 223-224. (Again: "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

God is the practical precondition for the possibility of truth and Being that we experience as moral subjects.

When you come across a clever fellow who says -- "If God can do anything can he make a more powerful god than Himself?" -- you should point out that logical impossibility is not a limitation on God's power since logic is our encounter with part of what is God.

Reason and feeling lead in a single direction. The rules of logic and reality that we only dimly apprehend are part of God's essence (like love). It follows that in posing such a challenge for thought and thinking you may well be demonstrating the necessity of God's existence because you are assuming an idea of truth as coherent and universal.

Why do we feel love? What is love? Is love the force that "holds the stars in place" (Maya Angelu) -- for us?

For Abraham and pre-Enlightenment peoples, surrender to the will of God required a sacrifice of the intellect. Kant suggests that by limiting the intellect to intellectual concerns we need not surrender it at all since we have made room for a kind of faith compatible with reason.

We can make rationality reasonable.

To think or love is always to want or need more thinking and love. What is ultimate thinking and love? God. If the two come together (reason and love) what is the result? God. Loving is ultimate reasoning or knowing, but then, ultimate reasoning or knowing is a kind of love, which is God. Entering this discussion is playing chess with the ultimate supercomputer. The result is always the same: God. The difference seems to be that the supercomputer will not allow you to lose.

For Kant, even if we cannot have knowledge of God's essence we can and must have confidence in duty as a matter of being human. We cannot avoid knowing and experiencing ourselves as free agents. We have a sense of God as a "practical" postulate for all rational agents.

How is freedom possible? Where does freedom lead?

This includes atheists who are rational. To abandon morality, again, is to give up one's humanity.

There is a direct line from this insight to Kierkegaard: From the experience of subjectivity, "subjective truth" we infer the larger source and home of that truth in a subjective Other or observer -- God -- in whose essence we share. To share in that essence fully is to "come home."

Words like "truth, love, goodness" crumble into a single concept -- "God." For Kierkegaard, reason is secondary; For Kant, you can have both faith and reason, equally.

"Wherever there are two speaking my name, there am I" -- say the Scriptures. Now you may begin to see what was meant by the author of this text. See Josiah Royce's discussion of Descartes' ontological proof in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1892), p. 76.

When we speak of any subject what is the "third term" that unites us in language? What is meaning? God. What is the objectivity that makes subjectivity possible and plural, leading subjectivity then to rediscover itself as objective realization? We become a paradox, a question to ourselves, a dual-aspect phenomenon. Is God the third term in all representation? See "Las Meninas"? Or Magritte's Ceci ne'est pas une pipe Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Los Angeles: University of California, 1982), pp. 9-10 (Magritte says: "... the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation.")

Kant would not take the next step in this analysis until his final "Critique of Judgment." Relying on feelings to "know" what his intellect only suggested Kant would then "experience" God.

The essence of the Ontological Proof stands, even after Kant's critique, inspiring the insights of diverse thinkers echoing this Kantian intellectual journey -- for example, Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Before turning to those twentieth century philosophers, however, I will comment on Kant's aesthetics. I then return to the mystery of language and the puzzling statement by Heidegger concerning language as "the House of Being."

Please understand that it is both the Kant of the "Critique of Pure Reason" as well as Kant's older self in "The Critique of Judgment" and "Religion Within the Province of Reason Alone" who believes in God for very different and overlapping reasons.

The Kant of the first Critique makes it clear that it is impossible to say that you are irrational for believing in God; the older philosopher experiences God in sublimity beyond beauty and in our capacity to care for others. Deus caritas est.

There are and must be, Kant teaches us, non-intellectual forms of understanding (art and religion) that allow for scientific and other intellectual cognition or knowledge. This Kantian insight is the foundation for twentieth century hermeneutics.

III. From Kant's Aesthetics to Derrida/Levinas/Ricoeur and the "Metaphysics of Presence."

A. Kant's Aesthetics.

Kant's final contribution to the "Critical Philosophy" is his treatise on aesthetics which is much more than that.

I believe that this late book by the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment is crucial to philosophical developments after Kant's departure, notably to the rise of Romanticism and, eventually, to Hegel's dialectical movements in a revised version of idealism. ("David Stove and the Critique of Idealism.")

Hegel's scholarly training at Tubingen was in theology. We tend to forget that Hegel is a very Christian thinker, especially in his earliest writings produced under the shadow of Kant. The Kant who had the greatest impact on the young German thinkers of the early Romantic period is the late aesthetician, not the epistemologist and anti-metaphysician of the first Critique:

"The main themes of Schelling's [and Hegel's early] philosophy," Robert C. Solomon writes, "concerns the role of art in synthesizing the natural and the practical, understanding and reason, and the teleological view of the universe as a whole, the ultimate finality of nature."

In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 99. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

"Since aesthetic judgment does not engage any determinate concept, we are quite indifferent to the nature of the object in question, or whether it even exists. But if the object does not in this sense involve our cognition, it addresses itself to what we might call our capacity for cognition in general, revealing to us in a kind of 'Heideggerian pre-understanding' that the world is the kind of place we can in principle comprehend, that it is adapted to our minds even before any determinate act of knowing has yet taken place. Some of the pleasure of the aesthetic, then, arises from a quick sense of the world's delightful conformity to our capacities: instead of pressing ahead to subsume to some concept of the sensuous manifold we confront, we just reap enjoyment from the general formal possibility of doing so. ... If the aesthetic yields us no knowledge, then, it proffers us something arguably deeper: The consciousness, beyond all theoretical demonstration, that WE ARE AT HOME IN THE WORLD because the world is somehow mysteriously designed to suit our capacities."

Terry Eagleton, "The Kantian Imaginary," in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 85.

In setting forth the Kantian critique of the ontological argument, Mary Whiton Calkins is not surpassed by any subsequent commentator of which I am aware. For the purposes of my current argument and interpretation the seeds of my discussion may be found in footnote 2, at page 247 of her book then the paragraph before Professor Calkins' subsection "D. Kant's Correction of His Negative Doctrine." (p. 253.) The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York: MacMillan, 1917), pp. 247-269.

Calkins anticipates our hermeneutic or post-Hegelian reading of the Kantian discussion that restores the ontological argument as a practical postulate. This alone is a remarkable achievement for this neglected American thinker's "Critical and Dialectical Realism."

Compare Alison L. Brown, "Hegelian Silences and the Politics of Communication: A Feminist Appropriation," in Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel (Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 299-321 with Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Polity, 2003), pp. 31-54.

Kant's influential distinction between beautiful and sublime, his surrender to "awe" before the sublime/God, and his concern in the second part of the treatise on aesthetics with "transcendence," were and remain formative for many later philosophers, including both Heidegger and Gadamer.

Kant is unfairly, I think, criticized for a "looseness" of exposition in this work on aesthetics. Subject dictates form, for Kant, so that this so-called "looseness" or greater freedom is a result of Kant's "encounter with the numinous." This more open exposition results from recognition of the cognitive importance of feelings. The importance of feelings and intuitions to cognition in ultimate discussions leads by way of Mary Wollstonecraft to F.H. Bradley, also to Josiah Royce and Mary Whiton Calkins. All of the important images of divinity in Kant seem to be feminine.

The "masculine" side of Kant is expressed in the first Critique; the "feminine" side of Kant's intellect emerges in the final Critique; whereas the "Critique of Practical Reason" expresses a fusion of the two sides of Kant's mind "integrated" into a vision of moral life in the world of experience.

Before Immanuel Kant's reception -- certainly well before Kant's work was available in Britain -- Mary Wollstonecraft expressed nearly identical insights concerning the cognitive power of feelings and the ways in which emotions "fit us" into the world by way of Thomas Reid and John Locke.

Wollstonecraft related this insight to the plight of women in sexist societies as "revealers" of emotional truth as well as other kinds of truth in the world. The Kantian-Hegelian source of feminism remains an unexplored area for feminist scholars:

"How can I avoid [the subject of emotional meaning,] when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel."

Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London & New York: Phoenix, 2000), p. 342. (Quoting Wollstonecraft.) ("Is clarity enough?")

Wollstonecraft deserves to be included in our histories of philosophy. For the most part, Wollstonecraft is still not included in the syllabus nor in the history of philosophy. No doubt Wollstonecraft's writings were deemed by many of her contemporaries worthy of suppression or censorship, defacement or burning.

There were many contemporary persons offended by Wollstonecraft's "presumption" in thinking so originally and creatively even as her "social superiors" expressed themselves so poorly and in such tired phrases.

British idealism has a German source, but is also a home-grown expression of the so-called feminine side of the English mind in the thinking of wonderful philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Macfarlane, but also many others.

Many of the greatest mathematicians and logicians in Western history have turned to mysticism after sensing the limits of human scientific and mathematical faculties -- Plato, Newton, Pascal, Wittgenstein, Einstein, Weil and others.

With feelings -- and especially in the experience of beauty, even more of sublimity -- the ultimate synthesis of objective and subjective is possible leading to the greatest intuitive insights.

This dialectical move represents a natural progression and not a decline for the best thinkers in Western history.

The treating of nature as "purposive without purpose" (Kant) is fully realized only with love. Love is transcendence of the self in a necessary movement towards the Other which has the paradoxical effect of returning us to ourselves most completely. Jose Ortega y Gasset writes:

"St. Augustine, one of those who have thought about love most profoundly and who possessed one of the most gigantic erotic temperaments that ever existed, succeeds sometimes in freeing himself from the interpretation which makes of love a desire or appetite. Thus, he says with lyric expansiveness: Amor meus, pondus meum: illo feror, quocumque feror. ["Love is a gravitation towards that which is loved."]

On Love (New York: New American Library, 1957), p. 10.

Elsewhere Ortega y Gasset writes:

"... living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do. Do you see the enormous paradox that is wrapped up in this? A being which consists not so much in what it is as in what it is going to be: therefore in what it has not yet become! This essential, this most profound paradox is our life."

What is Philosophy? (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), p. 223.

This "deciding" is an aesthetic-moral challenge. Recognition of love is like an awareness of a magnetic pull, a "call" to love. For Ortega, love is what "we are and are always going to be." Freedom in the world becomes a kind of loving.

We are moving targets choosing our direction towards (or away) from telos or human purpose. This is to approach once again, in aesthetic language, the "Ontological Argument." Elisabeth Schellenkens, Aesthetics and Morality (New York & London: Continuum, 2007), at pp. 142-143. ("Beauty and Virtue of the Soul.")

The Standard Model in contemporary physics is expressed in "equations governing the various fields, but it cannot be deduced from mathematics alone. Nor does it follow straightforwardly from observation of nature" -- We cannot just go and look to discover the Standard Model! -- "Indeed, quarks and gluons are attracted to each other by forces that increase with distance, [emphasis added] so these particles can never be observed in isolation. Nor can the Standard Model be deduced from philosophical preconceptions. Rather, the Standard Model is a product of guesswork, guided by AESTHETIC judgment, and validated by the success of many of its predictions. Though the Standard Model has many unexplained aspects, we expect that at least some of these features will be explained by whatever deeper theory succeeds it."

Steven Weinberg, "Epilogue: The Grand Deduction," in To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (New York & London: Penguin, 2015), pp. 265-266. (Dr. Weinberg is a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics whose arguments confirm much of the contents of Professor Shellenkens' book.)

Kant realized that the world is ordered for our knowledge and the contributions of the human mind. This is because nature must present itself to us according to the ideas of space, time, causality and so on. More recently the categories have become language itself.

In his aesthetics and religious writings, however, Kant also understood that the mythological trappings of religious insights are secondary to the more important and deeper sense in which the world is also harmonious with human faculties beyond our intellects in feelings which yield knowledge and/or understandings transcending all formal explanations. Elegance? This is the wisdom of emotions which may be communicated religiously or aesthetically. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

Even in science and mathematics the greatest progress is intuitive and imaginative, especially at the level of theory.

How is it possible to "feel" a scientific and mathematical insight concerning nature? Does nature "wish" to be understood? Why is this invitational quality provided by the universe to human knowing represented mythologically in FEMININE terms everywhere in the world? The scholarship concerning the "goddess" in Western thought and all of the writings of Marina Warner are recommended to those who are interested in this issue. ("Pieta" and "Master and Commander.")

"The hour that man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world. The spiritual is distinguished from the natural ... in that it does not continue a mere stream of tendency, but sunders itself to achieve self-realization. [Gives birth?] But this position of severed life has in its turn to be overcome, and the spirit must, by its own act, achieve concord once more. ... The principle of restoration [nurture and care] is found in thought, and thought only: the hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it."

G.W.F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel (Oxford: 1904), W. Wallace, trans., pp. 54-57.

Love, through suffering, "bleeds creation" becoming the "rose in the cross of the present." God is always now. (See Boito's Mephistopheles and "Is this atheism's moment?")

This leads to Bergson's insight that religion and science are products of a single intellectual intuition created by nature itself to balance analytic reason with emotional wisdom. Hegel calls this intuition "Spirit." The unifying principle in thought is given feminine names "Juno," "Brahma-Shiva" (preserver-destroyer), Virgin Mary-Holy Spirit-Mary Magdalene.

Compare Carl G. Jung, Aspects of the Feminine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 5-25 ("The Worship of the Woman and the Worship of the Soul") with Leo Schaya, The Universal Meaning of the Kaballa (Baltimore: Penguin, 1958), pp. 118-119 ("metatron") with June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), pp. 144-164 ("Adam Kadmon in Kaballa: The Tree of Life as Androgyne" and see my review of "The Fountain.")

This leads to Carl Jung's development of Freud's psychoanalysis by means of discovering the archetypes found in our collective subconscious. This intuitive knowing is regarded as a "feminine" wisdom in the Western world that was rejected in the United States of America with the acquisition of great commercial and military power as one reading of the pragmatist ("manly") James replaced Royce's and Mary Whiton Calkins's (more "feminine") idealism and Emerson's earlier (religious) transcendentalism as our most important national philosophy.

India and China have not rejected "feminine" wisdom. But there is a countercurrent in American and Western thought at the moment in science and philosophy. (See the film "Mindwalk" and "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay.") Roger Scruton comments:

"We can merely confront this fact of sublimity -- in the immediacy of aesthetic experience, and in the suddenness of religious awe -- and acknowledge that there is something here that points beyond the limits of our thinking."

Modern Philosophy, p. 133. See also Timothy Cleveland, " 'What You Don't Know, You Can Feel It Somehow' : Knowledge, Feeling, and Revelation in U2," in Mark Wrathall, ed., U2 and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2006) and listen to the songs and music in "The Joshua Tree" by U2, then see the 2006 film "The Fountain."

Compare Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (New York: Anchor, 1982), pp. 1-40, 281-318 with Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (New York: Bantam, 1982), pp. 51-99, 263-421. (See especially Ms. Morgan's discussion of woman as "two-way mirror.")

Finally, compare the essays in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), pp. 3-24.

There is nothing to prevent scientists from experiencing these mystical insights in their work. The best of them do report such experiences. Although they tend to fear any experience which cannot be quantified or shared with laboratory rats. ("The Return of Metaphysics.")

Regrettably, contact with the imaginative power of collective subconscious imagery and imagination is being lost by young people cultivating a narrowing logical atomism and particularism in American educational institutions. Our schools are teaching students to be highly thorough, efficient, methodical salespersons. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Why Jane can't read.")

At this point the reader is directed to Iris Murdoch's important essay "On God and Good" written under the influence of Simone Weil's writings as much as Plato's dialogues as well as the later Kantian works:

"If, still led by the clue of art, we ask about the faculty which is supposed to relate us to what is real and thus bring us to what is good, the idea of compassion or love will be naturally suggested. It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. [Notice that objectivity is not limited to scientific method or positivism.] The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in the light of justice and mercy. The direction of ATTENTION is away from self which reduces all to false unity and towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability to so direct attention is love."

Existentialists and Mystics (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 354. (See again: "Is this atheism's moment?")

This is to speak of prayer. I define prayer as "attention directed at the Good, or love." Openness to the world. Murdoch hints at the immediate realization (or knowledge) of the necessary definition of God, who is found in this very "attention" which is simply love.

God is both source and ultimate focus of human intentionality.

Somewhere, St. Anselm is smiling because his "Ontological Proof" is really a definition of prayer as -- and in response to -- the recognition of the necessity of God/Love. The instant when you realize what God "is" you are involved in prayer and unable to deny God's presence. For Murdoch, you have fallen on your knees when you fully understand what (or that) God "means" through loving. That's what I call a "Proof."

To love is to be; to be is to love. Love = Achievement of full humanity. All great art reflects this "achievement of humanity." The aesthetic encounter provides an analogy to spiritual "space" because it is essential to art and spirituality as a kind of love. (Compare "Robert Brandom's Reason in Philosophy" with "'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

Mathematician Kurt Godel concurs in this insight: Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 209.

The logical conclusion of this reasoning is to see God in your beloved, as the very sharing in love or loving that defines your relationship to that person (or persons) and, ideally, to the world or every other person. All of this explains why many religious traditions describe an act of love between any two adults as a form of prayer that is always preferable to an act of violence directed against any other person:

"God's passion for us and for the whole of creation is what summons us to a comparable passion. And that passion must necessarily work itself out in our behavior with and toward the beloved."

Notice this crucial development of the argument:

"The eros that attaches us to God and the eros that attaches us to the world around us and to specific human beings are not in competition with one another. Both flow from God's passionate love for us and for the creation of which we are a part."

L. William Countryman, Love Human and Divine: Reflections on Love, Sexuality, and Friendship (London & Harrisbourg: Moorehouse, 2005), pp. 36-37. (No distinction is made between same-sex and opposite-sex love in this theological tradition currently under review and discussion in the Vatican where Pope Francis has called for reflection on the issue.)

I attended a performance of one of Shakespeare's comedies recently. By the end of the performance a community existed in the theater offering a kind of spiritual healing and celebration of joy that seems appropriate to the holiday season. I cannot explain how I know this to be true. I can only describe an experience of something wonderful and mysterious that was unique to that momentary gathering anticipated by (and even forming part of the subject matter of) Shakespeare's text.

This "sharing" is also an idea found in Chinese thought. Love is unitary or undifferentiated. Love is true harmony. This insight, again, must transcend gender and sexual-orientation. St. John in his Gospel says: "If you do not love your brother OR sister whom you have seen, you can't love God whom you have not seen." (emphasis added!)

Simone Weil and others realize that, to see and love any man or woman truly is also to see and love God. This is what Weil means by "attention." It becomes clear why --

" -- Levinas is saying that it isn't unreasonable to wonder if [life's] meaning might be found in the 'possibility of sacrifice' -- that is, in a self-surrender to an 'Other,' in a self-offering to another for whom I experience myself as totally responsible, the desire to 'substitute' for the other in his or her radical vulnerability." -- see my stories "The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "A Doll's Aria" -- "But if that is the meaning of the human adventure, of human life, then in some ineffable way it must correspond to the Mystery itself, thus opening the door to an incarnation. Is such self-emptying (the Bible calls it kenosis) then the very secret of what we call 'God?' Is this what transcendence, infinity, and eternity are all about?"

God at the Ritz, pp. 195-196.

D.G. Leahy argues:

"... an abstraction of a moment from existence is essentially impossible to this thinking whose essence is the essence of history. For this thinking therefore the appearance exists in absolute fact-evidence. For this thinking all Being diverted lies essentially beyond its ken, posing or reposing in its self, in its essential passivity unable to recognize the fact of existence, which fact is the object of the absolutely active contemplation now occurring. What time is it at which this critical occurrence to mankind exists? When is this now? At what time precisely does this thinking conscious of its essential historicity exist? Essentially the answer has been given before the question has been asked. This thinking now occurring brings with it the question that has been asked as its essential misunderstanding. It is essentially the answer to the question that has not been asked, because, before the occurrence of this thinking, it could not have been thought, while now that thinking is for the first time conscious of its radical historicity, it remains unasked as that question which belongs essentially to Being diverted to its own end."

Novitas Mundi: Perception of the History of Being (New York: SUNY, 1994), p. 11.

You become fully aware of darkness and coldness outside only when you are inside a beautiful and warm room.

The image of the Holy Spirit in Christianity (open wings) is an embrace that seeks to include you. YOU are specifically and personally within that embrace at all times. Judaism's shattered glass bound in cloth is the rebuilding of the temple that you are. The text illuminated in a Mosque is continued in you as the living sentences that complete the various quotations surrounding you in stone or words spoken by an Imam. The Hindu gods are metaphors for the plurality of forces and powers in the universe that are in you. The Buddha holds a single flower. The message is one.

You are the ontological proof for the existence of God. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Realization of your being as a "person" is only possible through loving. This realization may require multiple versions of yourself to absorb the lessons of love. This is the meaning of the phrase is the scriptures concerning being "born again."

To recognize the essential his- or herstoricity of Being is to appreciate your continuity with Being. You are. You must be. What is it to be? A one word answer is possible. St. Augustine says it in a sentence: "I hope that you will be."

God "bleeds" creation. You have already substituted for your brother or sister in that other person's moment of suffering except that you have not realized it. "The Kingdom of God is within you and you do not see it." ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")

For comparisons, see the discussion of moksa in Hindu metaphysics in Samkara, in S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, Volume II (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), p. 636, examined by Suxhil Kumar Saxena, Studies in the Metaphysics of Bradley (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 189-190; and the study of Sufism, the mysticism of Al-Islam, discussed in Edward Rice's biography of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (New York: Scribner's, 1990), pp. 150-151, et seq.

This powerful insight -- transcending all gender-limitations and sexual-orientations -- is found in every one of the great religions. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

When you love another human being, in all of these spiritual traditions, you stand in a social space. You are speaking a kind of "language" by loving. That language is speaking you. As with any language, its origins and nature are social and "inherent" in us, as humans. This brings us to the question: What is language? Why is language relevant to Anselm's argument?

The Hebrew tradition of reflection on names and naming, the word and meaning becomes very important. I do not wish to turn to these questions, however, until providing those promised references to Weil and Wittgenstein (both of whom were rebel Jews, unaware of, or even alienated from, their Jewishness). I suspect that they will prove useful to my continuing argument. Counterparts of these two thinkers may be found today in Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, also rebel Jews. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

B. The New Metaphysics of Presence.

Simone Weil's profound meditations and reflections on God amount to a restatement of Anselm's "Ontological Argument" in the language of morals and feelings. It is surprising that no philosopher has related Weil's writings to the late work of Jacques Derrida.

"The combination of these two facts -- the longing in the depths of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it -- constitutes a link which attaches every man [and woman] without exception to that reality."

Sean Miles, ed., Simone Weil: An Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 202-203.

Weil neglected to emphasize that merely by thinking or turning towards the concept of God/Love, one is, necessarily, already participating in the reality of what is postulated which is simply God.

By speaking you are accepting and even insisting on the possibility of true communication or establishing a genuine connection to another person. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

By entering the moral realm and loving -- which is as natural to humans as breathing -- you are admitting the reality of both those things (not only love "as" ultimate communication), but moral life. Hence, you accept, tacitly, the possibility of the complete expression of love and personal meaning as gifts "to" others. This is to speak of "God" which is Goodness and love "by definition" for believers and all who accept the meaning of the word in discourse.

In his posthumous Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of the various "language games" in which words become fully meaningful to persons. God is more likely to be found in the "game of language" which makes the idea of persons meaningful. This is to arrive at the "Metaphysics of Presence" associated with language which is to be merged also with Weil's language of love. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

In the notebooks that have come to be called Culture and Value Wittgenstein expressed a mystical yearning through describing an "experience of God":

"A proof of God's existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is to give their beliefs an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could 'convince someone that God exists,' by means of certain kinds of upbringing, by shaping his life in such and such a way. Life can educate one to belief in God. [Is this not the ultimate "Proof" or "argument"?] And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which shows us the 'existence of this Being,' but e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about Him. Experiences, thoughts -- LIFE CAN FORCE THIS CONCEPT [GOD] UPON US." (pp. 85-86.) (emphasis added!)

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, at p. 415 (with analysis by Murdoch).

What distinctively human language are we speaking by loving? What language do we speak by suffering for others? Are they not the same language? What is a language? (See the Oscar Wilde story "The Nightingale and the Rose.")

I was fortunate to listen to Jacques Derrida lecture on analogous themes. I entered with him into the French language in order to do so. Professor Derrida (deliberately) alluded to John Austin and other philosophers, at a great distance from his views, making them his "partners" in discussion, connecting his work to theirs, despite any analytical hostility to deconstruction. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

George Steiner approaches the topic from within the Hebrew tradition:

"Language creates by virtue of nomination, as in Adam's naming of all forms and presences; by virtue of adjectival qualification, without which there can be no conceptualization of good or evil; it creates by means of predication, of chosen remembrance (all history is lodged in the grammar of the past tense). Above all else, language is the generator and messenger of and out of tomorrow. In root distinction from the leaf, from the animal, man alone can construct and parse the grammar of hope. He can speak, [she] can write about the morning light on the day after [her] funeral or about the ordered pace of the galaxies a billion light years after the extinction of the planet. I believe that this capability to say and unsay all, to construct and deconstruct space and time, to beget and speak counterfactuals [see the works of David Deutsch and David Lewis] -- 'If Napoleon had commanded in Vietnam' -- makes man of man. More especially: of all evolutionary tools towards survival, it is the ability to use future tenses of the verb -- when, how did the psyche acquire this monstrous and liberating power? [How indeed?] -- which I take to be foremost. Without it men and women would be no better than 'falling stones'." (Spinoza)

Real Presences, p. 56 and see also George Steiner's Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 10-11.

A useful comparison may be found at: Josie Glausiusz, "The Discover Interview: Marc Hauser," Discover, May 2007, at p. 62 ("Is right and wrong in our DNA?"). (DNA is also a language.)

In this sense, as a "world-constituting power," Heidegger speaks of language as "the House of Being." A recent development of Hebrew thinking on these questions is found in Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

The universality of language and its inherent quality -- or the "intimate relationship" between language and the innate properties of consciousness or mind -- is also a key subject of Noam Chomsky's rationalist linguistics. For Chomsky, language is much more than a kind of behavior. Chomsky's "transformational grammar" may allow for the description of certain other typically human activities, such as art or loving devotion in religion, as kinds of languages or forms of communication. See John Lyons, Noam Chomsky (New York: Viking, 1970), pp. 2-10; and Noam Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (New York: new Press, 1971), pp. 3-53.

Conclusion: "Love is the Fulfillment of Being."

We live in a time when many people seem to experience a high degree of loneliness and alienation, leading to self-destructiveness. Unhappiness is not alleviated by proliferating schools of psychotherapists, each with a political or cultural agenda, many doing far more harm than good and a few doing evil. In addition, we can count on self-styled "social scientists" with their much-vaunted "neutrality" who are intent upon "observing" crime and social injustice, despair and misery, without providing any remedial efforts because they hope to be entirely "neutral" and "objective." ("Behaviorism is Evil.")

What I admire most about Chomsky is not his genius as a philosopher and scientific student of linguistics, but his social conscience and commitment to struggle with and for the poor and oppressed masses of the world. I support Reverend Sharpton in New York not only (or primarily) because he is a great public speaker, but because of his physical presence ("being there") at moments of struggle for the poor and victimized persons in his city. Sharpton lives his faith. ("Incoherence in 'The New Yorker.'")

For one account of where nihilism leads, see Jean Baudrillard, "Metamorphoses, Metaphors, Metastases," in The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotexte, 1988), pp. 50-51 ("From a biological, genetic and cybernetic point of view, we are all mutants. Now for mutants there can no longer be any Last Judgment, or the resurrection of the body, for what body would one resurrect?")

Far from disagreeing with Baudrillard Catholic philosophers and persons of all faiths would say that this "mutant state" is the result of abandoning human spirituality, freedom, ethics and love -- love is the "body" into which you are resurrected if one reads the Scriptures symbolically. Love is the body of Christ, the Eucharist: See John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 222:

"... the theistic alternative issues in the hope of an ultimate unity of persons in fellowship, [love] which gives meaning to human effort; while atheistic existentialism finds human relationship an insoluble problem and all human projects doomed to frustration and ultimate meaninglessness."

The issue is not whether it is rational to believe in God. It certainly is rational to believe in God. It is also rational not to believe in God. A better question is whether we will survive at all if we do not hold on to those crucial religious and cultural values that bind a people to one another, to their institutions, history, language and that "sanction" (think of the meaning of the word "sanction" from the root word "santus") their efforts for future generations, making them meaningful and good.

Contemplate your child or at anyone you love and you will know what is meant by God for billions of people in the world without reading the philosophers and scientists that I have quoted. Philosophy, science, and theology are for spiritually "average" persons, like me. (Thomas Merton) I met a man called "John" in Massachusetts who does not need any of this fancy theory because he seems to have an intuitive genius about these ideas. I am not as gifted as John. Hence, I find it necessary to read all of these clever thinkers. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

This is the point at which cultural conservatism and social liberalism meet. This is what we should agree on in the United States of America: community among free subjects, seeking to share that sense of community with similarly-minded people in the world, regardless of their beliefs -- there are billions of us -- as well as this intuition of our calling to Goodness and spirituality.

Use the word "love" or "God" whichever you prefer. It is not God or love that needs us, but we sure need a lot more love -- and in the language of the great religions, "God's presence" -- if we are to cope with the horrors that we face.

We must walk away from hatred and violence as tempting as such reactions are in response to evil. This is my message to the Palestinian people and all others engaged in struggling for human rights. Begin by rejecting violence.

We must recognize a loving "presence" in our every utterance and in our moral striving. I do not know how anyone from my parents' generation might have endured the trials of World War II and the moral impact of the Holocaust without some faith and a strong commitment to the core values of his or her society and spiritual tradition.

Does this claim make me a "fool" to be silenced, suppressed, controlled and prevented from speaking?

Please examine the number of times that this essay has been disfigured and corrected, then ask yourself: What are they afraid of if this argument is implausible and unpersuasive to many persons in the world?

It is sometimes essential to question and reform institutions, to work for social justice and economic equality and an end to racism like Dr. King or Senator Robert Kennedy, or Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis. In doing so, however, you must draw on foundational values that in our civilization and in the increasingly global and shared traditions of humanity, are and will remain religious. This is true whether we admit it or not. This will remain true whether we give "God" a different name, say, "social adjustment."

Human beings must seek a crossing of the distance to the Other through love -- crossing of a distance that is increasing every day because we have forgotten that the only bridge to the Other in our civilization is called "God." If you prefer the word "love" -- as I keep insisting -- that will do just fine. It is this idea that Islamic theologians point to in explaining why terrorism is evil and not rewarded in Islam. (See my essay "9/11: Philosophy in the Language of Wounds.")

Catholic theologian Thomas Merton is wiser than I will ever be in his understanding and discussion of this love that is God:

"Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. It has only one good: that of the beloved, which is, at the same time, my own. Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him [or her,] but by identifying with him so that his good becomes my own. The same good is enjoyed in its wholeness by two in one spirit, not halved and shared by two souls. Where love is really disinterested, the lover does not even stop to inquire whether he can safely appropriate for himself some part of the good which he wills for his friend. Love seeks its whole good in the good of the beloved, and to divide that good would be to diminish love. Such a division would not only weaken the action of love, but in so doing would also diminish its joy. For love does not seek a joy that follows from its effect: its joy is in the effect itself, which is the good of the beloved. Consequently, if my love be pure I do not even have to seek for myself the satisfaction of loving. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward."

No Man is an Island (New York: Image, 1967), p. 20.