Philosophy and religion

I think the best philosophical works exhibit not just the rigour of logic and reason but also the creative vision of original thought; it is in the largesse of the philosophical imagination that brilliant new solutions to old problems emerge, often in the dimensions of startling new paradigms that are the manifestation of genius. Yet the deepest questions of philosophy are borne out of the same source as our simplest but most profound human concerns — questions about meaning, identity, God and values — and this is where the philosophical and literary imaginations converge, in the common vein of human curiosity and wonder.

The philosophies of so many thinkers seem to return again and again to the concept of God, whether in their metaphysical, ethical, aesthetical or epistemological works, tussling with the hypothetical existence of a deity that is both a philosophical problem and a solution. For Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, philosophy may be human reason acting on its own to discover truth, but theology is human reason acting in the light of divine revelation. Yet both his teleological arguments and St. Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God in Proslogium fail to establish a logically unassailable basis for belief; later-day thinkers like Hume and Kant dispose of them with ease. A number of philosophers devote many pages to anti-theism, lashing out tirelessly at the walls of every establishment and doctrine fortified by a faith in God. Nietzsche goes so far as to build his philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the onslaught of his atheist jihad, indicting mankind with the crime of a “slave revolt” that has inverted master morality, a misdeed manifested most dramatically by a suffering God on the Cross. Hegel blames Christianity for the alienation of man from the realisation that he has an infinite value as a part of the Absolute.

But for every philosopher seeking to falsify the notion of God, there seems to be another whose philosophy validates the necessity of a deity’s existence. Berkeley’s dictum of “Esse est percipi” leads him to postulate the need for God as an omnipresent observer; interestingly enough, even Kant admits the need for a supersensible agency capable of ensuring we can achieve the “summum bonum”, or the highest good. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he proposes that “the highest good is possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature”, and that this is God. Hegel himself was a Lutheran, and it surely cannot be denied that his theory of the Absolute Idea in his Phenomenology of Spirit, as Mind comes to realise itself, sounds decidedly panentheistic.

But such philosophies perhaps will always face the charge that what they lack, they leave to God, and possibly there is some truth in the argument that our imperfect minds are unable to grasp what might easily be comprehended by a higher-order intelligence. Thus in the matter of God's existence, I prefer Kierkegaard’s philosophy, established on a refutation of a paradox described in Plato’s Meno. For Kierkegaard, the leap of faith can only be taken with a teacher’s assistance; unless the learner’s nature has been transformed through an act of divine grace he cannot perform it. In Philosophical Fragments, I believe he depicts faith for what it is, in its most honest and accurate expression: “But in that sense is not Faith as paradoxical as the Paradox? Precisely so; how else would it have the Paradox for its object, and be happy in its relation to the Paradox? Faith itself is a miracle, and all that holds true of the Paradox also holds true of faith.”

It is probably this version of the defence of religious faith and the existence of God that Wittgenstein refers to when he comments, in an illuminating and typically inspired use of analogy: “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”