On Religion
“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
Perhaps it’s an age thing, but I’m finding that a lot of the conversations I have with friends are increasingly turning to God.
The way I said it to one of them is that there are two ways you can arrive at this destination: One is through life experience, and one is through intellectual slash philosophical reflection—exactly what Bacon was talking about in his quote above. There are probably more than two ways, but I’m not that bright.
I tend to think the first way is a prerequisite for the second — life experience preceding intellectual rumination — although plenty of people arrive at the first without proceeding on to the second.
I happened to come to both at approximately the same time; we’ll focus more here on the second part, starting with why one is best off accepting Pascal’s Wager.
Without going into too much detail, two chapters of Pascal’s Pensées played a huge part in changing my worldview: Section II (The Misery of Man Without God) and Section III (The Necessity of the Wager).
The TL;DR of the Wager is that you lose nothing from choosing to believe in God, whether he exists or not. If you choose not to believe and it turns out he does exist, you’re in trouble. Thus, the logical path is to believe. Here is what you gain even if he doesn’t exist:
“Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.”
My thinking also changed as I came to a deeper understanding of Science.
Nietzsche wrote that Christianity is the most fatal and seductive lie that ever existed, and while I have zero opinion on that ridiculously provocative statement, the choice of words is powerful and they increasingly describe how I feel about most of modern science: a fatal and seductive lie. Not that science in itself is a lie, but the way that science is used to state opinions or unfounded speculations as fact.
I think 2020 woke a lot of people up to the fact that when you are told by experts that something is proved by science, like, there is a high probability that you are being fed complete bullshit. And once you look deeper into the scientific method, how research is performed and the margin for error in how conclusions are drawn, and the fact that behind all of it lurks the same corruption inherent in man (money, power, politics, etc), you start to question everything you were once told as “well, it’s just science.”
And then, once you start questioning, once you slow down, once you take a look around at nature and at this world with a beginner’s mind and look at the vast interplay of all living things and the beauty of existence, you have to just shake your head and say “there ain’t no fucking way, bruh. There ain’t NO way that all of this shit wasn’t created under the command of a Divine marshal.” Only humans, as vain and presumptuous as we are, could truly believe that we’ve come up with all the answers in the four hundred years since the Scientific Method snatched the crown from theology.
The introduction to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy sums this all up better than I could ever hope to, clearly defining the boundaries of theology, philosophy and science:
“‘Philosophy’ is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain.
Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend— belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.
Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries. Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind and what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? If there is a way of living that is noble, in what does it consist, and how shall we achieve it? Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valued, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving towards death? Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely the ultimate refinement of folly?
To such questions no answer can be found in the laboratory. Theologies have professed to give answers, all too definite; but their very definiteness causes modern minds to view them with suspicion. The studying of these questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of philosophy.
...Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
The list of those who influenced my thinking on religion goes on.
The next three, for similar reasons, are Dostoevsky, Voltaire and Tolstoy. This has less to do with the content of their writing and more with studying the patterns in each man’s life.
All three were voluminous authors.
Dostoevsky wrote from 1844 to 1880, dying in 1881 at age 59.
Voltaire wrote from 1715 to 1778, dying that year at age 83.
Tolstoy wrote from 1847 to 1910, dying that year at age 82.
Putting aside their respective bodies of work — I do not claim to have read them all, nor do I claim to have fully understood the ones I have read — what stands out is the topics they chose to write about at a given age. I suppose I have a growing appreciation not just for the art a man creates, but what he was going through at the time he created it, as in the example below (our own modern-day Voltaire):
As for the first three men mentioned, all of their later works were almost entirely concerned with God and the existence of God.
With Dostoevsky, we see this in Brothers Karamazov, which he published four months before dying. It is a mind-numbingly complex read but the entire book is underpinned by philosophical discussions of God’s existence and human morality. He was always religious, but in his earlier years he was influenced by his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, a radical group of intellectuals, revolutionaries and athiests who denounced the Orthodox Church and the regime of the Tsar. Dostoevsky’s involvement in this group led to his arrest in 1849 and his infamous faux-execution, where he was sentenced to death by firing squad, blindfolded, and strapped to a pillar. At the very last second, the Tsar commuted his sentence and he was instead shipped off to a Siberian prison camp for four years of hard labor. He returned a profoundly spiritual man.
Voltaire’s life story has some similarities and is captivating in its own way. He was educated by Jesuits at a young age, but went on to become one of the loudest voices in the Enlightenment’s “freethinker” movement, a group which shared some similarities to the Petrashevsky Circle in their atheism and disdain for the established order. Voltaire went on to spend much of his life openly challenging the existence of God and leading a full-blown war against the most formidable enemy to ever exist: the Catholic Church. This period of history, leading up to the French Revolution, is fascinating in that some of humanity’s most brilliant thinkers attempted to implement a moral code that wasn’t reliant on religion. It failed. It has always failed. For all its flaws, religion is the glue that holds civilization together. Regardless, at the end of his life Voltaire did a complete 180 and spent many of his final years at war with atheism. In 1774, at age eighty, he woke up early, climbed a hill with a friend to watch the sunrise, and exclaimed: O mighty God, I believe!
The third is Tolstoy, specifically his book A Confession. It is a brief autobiography that explores his journey through philosophy and religion, written in 1880 when he was around age 50. By that point, he had already written War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878) and enjoyed wealth, fame and career success. He had grown up religious, but like Dostoevsky and Voltaire, went through periods of skepticism and disillusionment. In A Confession, Tolstoy starts looking for the deeper meaning of life, reading the philosophy of Socrates, of Solomon, of Buddha and of Schopenhauer, four of our great thinkers — I’d actually argue THE greatest thinkers — of all time. Tolstoy’s understandable conclusion from these studies is that life is meaningless, and he starts grappling with suicide. What saves him — of all things — is observing the simple lives of the Russian peasantry. Tolstoy sees how God is their answer for everything, how God grants them strength to survive hardship and how God gives their lives meaning. Tolstoy becomes a deeply spiritual man from then on.
Putting it all together, my conclusion was, well, if these three brilliant thinkers all eventually arrived at God one way or another, I may as well save myself all the struggles they went through and arrive there now.
That’s the second angle — the intellectual one.
For the first angle, the life experience one, I’d just had enough moments where I fully relent.
“I waded back into the ocean and swam out a quarter-mile, treading water under the stars, and I looked up at the night sky.
I’m grateful to you for watching over me, Lord. I’m grateful for everything in my life and beyond grateful for everything you have blessed me with. If you give me nothing more from this day forward, I am a contented man. Thank you.
That night, I slept soundly for the first time in years.”
In 2021 and 2022, I was doing volunteer work, teaching English as a Second Language. There was a Haitian woman named Guerdalyne in my class who had been through an unbelievably tragic life, born unlucky and then grew up surrounded by poverty and violence and death, absorbing an unimaginable quantity of loss and physical harm along the way. And yet every time she came to class, she was smiling. Always grateful to God, always blessed, always thankful for all that he gave her. I wouldn’t say it was my Tolstoy Russian peasant moment, but it wasn’t far from it, either — just repeatedly witnessing the power of God to help people in horrible situations cope with the random and inexplainable cruelties of life.
After that, there were several moments of complete powerlessness over the next few years, behind concrete walls and barbed wire, where I realized I had no control over anything. None. I’d hear about friends and family going through difficult times, where I’d normally be able to help influence the outcome, but now, there was nothing I could do but pray to God to watch over everyone. This same feeling of powerlessness struck two of my close friends at different times. One had a bizarre and freakish stroke — he’s my age, 38 — and was laid up in the hospital, praying to God to help restore his health. My other friend had a son born earlier than expected, and he spent the next three weeks sleeping on the floor of the NICU with nothing he could do to affect the outcome, absolutely nothing, except fervently pray for the mercy of God.
Mostly, I just continue to find that there isn’t a question which can’t be answered by the existence of God. Every part of regulating your own conduct and managing your relationships becomes easier. Stop worrying about what other people think: wake up, do right by God, and go to bed that night knowing you did right by God. Everything else about life sort of falls into place.
I leave you with a beautiful quote from Pascal:
“There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.”
Stay blessed,
GB
