I’m going to slightly misuse a quote from Wittgenstein:
Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt. [On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harper Torchbooks, 1972, page 68e]
He was writing about knowledge inside of a `language game’, which I think to be something like the active use of a hypothetical dictionary and grammar of what I call a `worldview’. To start up a game, language or baseball, you need rules beyond questioning, even if they’re clearly arbitrary or might be wrong in some larger sense. Doubts arise in the game but doubts about the rules of the game bring it to a halt.
Wittgenstein’s words made me focus on an idea I’d been holding at the edge of my mind for years. I think I’ve even expressed this idea in somewhat cloudy terms. My idea is: It’s just because I have faith in an all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing Creator that I can feel safe to engage in radical doubt about what I’ve learned or can learn from entities which are not God. I write `radical doubt’ and intend not any sort of corrosive skepticism but rather the sort of doubt Einstein held about Newtonian ideas on the nature of simultaneity leading to doubt about Newtonian ideas on the nature of space and time. Einstein greatly respected Newton but felt free to question Newton’s dynamics based upon knowledge gained well after the death of that great English physicist. (That knowledge was actually of electrodynamics as summarized in what we call Maxwell’s Equations.)
And then Wittgenstein speculates:
But mightn’t a higher authority assure me that I don’t know the truth? So that I had to say “Teach me!”? But then my eyes would have to be opened. [page 76e]
If that higher authority were God? If we were to hold a Christian faith, a faith held in common with Jews so far as the goodness of God’s Creation goes? To me, this goodness includes not only rationality but an openness to exploration and analysis and—in principle—understanding. It may take a lot of work over more generations than mortal man will have in this world, but—in principle—we can become truer images of God in our very efforts to encapsulate in our own beings an understanding of God’s works as Creator. In simple terms, we enter a conversation of sorts with the Creator when we begin to explore His Creation and to try to understand what we discover. In terms of the quote above, we say to our Maker, “Teach me!”.
If our faith is in God and not in any particular understanding of empirical reality—Creation, then wouldn’t we be able to—in principle—move smoothly from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s special relativistic mechanics and then on to a mixture, however tentative, of general relativity and quantum mechanics? Obviously, it’s not quite a smooth journey. I commented upon John Polkinghorne’s discussion of the difficulty that physicists and bright physics students have in accepting new understandings of reality in Shaping Our Minds to Reality. Polkinghorne was a theoretical physicist and then an Anglican priest, giving him an interesting combination of perspectives.
Much of our empirical knowledge, even at the fundamental level, must be held contingently, waiting for unexpected evidence that, perhaps, matter isn’t quite what we might think from our current versions of quantum mechanics, even that our own human natures might be based upon different foundations than we’ve thought. At the same time, some of our knowledge does come quite close to being absolutely certain, at least in the context of this particular Creation. Though the statement “1 + 1 = 2” can be in doubt when we try to apply it to entities, such as nucleons, that combine in funny ways, it’s not in any doubt as a formal truth. Even some of our higher level thought is pretty solid, such as the quantum mechanical explanation of the electrical charge—the accuracy of the calculation of the amount of the charge is extraordinary. General relativity also has a pretty well verified explanation of basic properties of spacetime. Our understanding of our own human nature is far less solid, though an intelligent evaluation of sociobiology and genetics and the modern social sciences gives us a picture very consistent with man as he has shown himself in history, including that included in the Bible. We need a better understanding if we are to be able to more fully understand human nature as it is likely to show itself in a rapidly changing world and we seem to be on the way to what Pope Benedict XVI called for—a more exact understanding of man, but not due much to the efforts of Christian thinkers. (There are Christians working in these fields but not working as Christians and not working to produce a Christian understanding of the results.)
Some of our knowledge of mathematical and physical reality, including parts of our own human nature, can be treated as fragments without leading to any obvious absurdity. Most of our knowledge is set into an understanding of some larger whole—sometimes even the entirety of what concerns us. Though discussed neither by Galileo nor by his opponents so far as I know, the real problem with Galileo’s discovery that the moon and sun and other objects were more like earth-stuff than ideal, unchanging entities is that it cast into doubt the economy of salvation. Where were Heaven and Hell if the universe were made up of just entities of the same stuff as the rocks of earth? Not surprisingly, the pagan view of Creation, simplistically called Aristotelian-Ptolemaic, had been consistent with contemporary Christian understandings of man and of the world. For example, the celestial sphere architecture of the Cosmos allowed Christian thinkers to speculate that Heaven lay on one of the higher and more pure spheres. That pagan understanding had become intertwined with Christian understandings of salvation and no one in Galileo’s age, including the great scientist and devout Catholic himself, knew how to understand in Christian terms this strange new world in which there seemed to be no place where Heaven could be.
Faith was needed that Christians had truly heard promises from God and that the same God had made this world as part of His plans for us. That faith needed to be of heroic proportions since it would be centuries before enough would be known to build a new Christian understanding of this universe, an understanding which allows also a coherent and plausible restatement of the sinful nature of man and the possible meaning of salvation to such a creature. Faith was too weak, or perhaps the right thinker was simply not in the right place at the right time. We have been missing a plausible Christian understanding of Creation for centuries. There is a sense in which faith was found sufficient to part of the task: the traditional understandings of the world were retained in a rather jarring context. Christian intellectuals tend to hand-wave their way around the problems while some Catholics, and Protestants in a different way, have returned to what I would call a baptized paganism—a natural state in new missionary territories but a sign of great trouble to come in regions where Christianity had been established for a thousand years or more. We lack a plausible account of salvation, of integration into the Body of Christ, but many of us are sure that Satan has godly powers to drag us into Hell, wherever it might be.
We’re now at a point where that new Christian understanding of all Creation can be built, an understanding which allows us to restore the economy of salvation to center stage in our thoughts, thoughts which are rational and make sense of the Big Bang and biological evolution and genes and the nature of communities and so on. Why is it not considered of greater importance to do so? Why is it that I feel so isolated when I’m trying to do what might be the most important task for Christians of our age: that building of a new understanding of Creation which accounts for modern empirical knowledge in the context of a Christian understanding of Creation? This understanding would give us renewed confidence we do live in a world which is a story God is telling of our salvation. That is the sort of confidence which can lead to the building of a new civilization or the reform of Western Civilization if still possible.
I can testify that a strong faith in God and His promises, a faith in the Real Presence of Christ on the altar and a faith in the corresponding sacramental nature of our embodied selves and all that we touch or see, allows me to doubt all the questionable and historically contingent teachings of the traditional Christian stories, allows me to doubt also that non-believers have it at all right when they tell us that modern science testifies to the lack of a purpose in this world.
I can strongly admire Plato and Augustine and Aquinas, Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Dirac. I can see what is truly good in their thoughts. But I can doubt their understandings of the world, even their understandings of their own valid insights. It’s God and the small stock of revelations He has gifted to us that I can’t doubt. Even when it comes to those revelations, I can doubt that Popes or Councils or the greatest of theologians got it absolutely right. It’s awfully easy to distort even the most important of truths, if only by imprisoning those truths in historically contingent ways of expressing and passing on those truths. Truths can become lies when stated in words and concepts which have changed.