The danger of mockery
Some of the few occasions in which St. Thomas Aquinas seemed about to lose his temper were when he observed Christian thinkers making use of arguments in defense of the faith so without merit that they incur the irrisio infidelium, the mockery of unbelievers. St. Augustine, as these paragraphs reveal, was aware of the same problem:
37. In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture….
39. Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up a Christian’s vast ignorance and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they don’t understand either what they are saying or the things about which they are making assertions” (1 Tim 1:7). (Augustine, De genesi, 37, 39; PL 34, 260-261)
How did St. Augustine know about Bill O’Reilly’s “Tide comes in, tide goes out” proof for the existence of God? It’s uncanny!
This passage should be posted on the wall of every homiletics classroom. Few things are as cringe-inducing as hearing a preacher make an erroneous statement about a matter of fact. When it happens, I look around the folks sitting near me to see how many of them have the look of derision in their eyes. There are some quite well-educated, well-read and well-informed people in our congregations. It really is a credibility-killer.
Probably what happens the most isn’t a flagrant misstatement of fact (“the sun revolves around the earth”), but an oversimplification of a complicated matter – the kind of thing that suggests that the preacher has only a very superficial understanding of what he’s discussing.
I don’t claim to be immune from such things in my own preaching; but (odd as it may sound) Google is one of my constant companions when writing homilies. In the pre-Internet days, it must have required a lot more work – I’d think I’d have wanted to write mine in a library.
And then there was the woman who wondered why philosophers did not exploit, as an argument for the existence of God, that a river runs through the middle of all the great cities of the world.
St. Thomas did not believe that reason could not demonstrate that the the world is not eternal, and he was distressed that some contemporaries (among them, St. Bonaventure) were attempting to do so. Here is how he put the matter:
” Matters that are subject to the simple divine will cannot be demonstrated, because “the things of God no one knows except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor 2:11). The creation of the world does not depend on any other cause but the sole will of God, so that the things that pertain to the beginning of the world cannot be demonstrated. It is only by faith that we maintain the things prophetically revealed by the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle then added: “God has revealed them to us by the Holy Spirit.”
“There are two reasons why one should carefully avoid presuming to adduce some demonstrations of matters of faith. First, this takes away from the excellence of faith, whose truth surpasses all human reason, as it was said: “Many things beyond human knowing were shown to you” (Eccl 3:25); and things that can be proven are subject to human reason. Second, because often such reasonings are frivolous and give unbelievers an occasion for mockery when they think that such are the reasons why we assent to matters of faith. And this is quite clear in the reasons invoked here, which are ridiculous and worthless.” (Aquinas, Quodlibetales, III, 31)
By the way, that in theory the world might have existed eternally and still be God’s free creation–which was Aquinas’ position–makes for an interesting intellectual experiment, raising all kinds of questions about the meaning of eternity, time, creation, divine transcendence, etc.
As creatures in space-time, the only way we can look at eternity is from the context of space-time. The very idea of eternity may just be our way of trying to look at that which is outside space-time.
And then there was the woman who wondered why philosophers did not exploit, as an argument for the existence of God, that a river runs through the middle of all the great cities of the world.
Bertrand Russell was once approached by a woman singing the praises of solipsism as a philiosophy. She was so impressed by it that she was quite surprised many more people did not adopt it.
Jeanne: The problem is that so many people think of eternity as not “outside space-time,” but rather as endless time, so that questions arise such as: “What was God doing before he created?” Aquinas, following Boethius, does place eternity outside of time, but the idea can’t be imagined because our imaginations seem to be limited to space-time coordinates.
It would seem, though, that if there is “life after death,” the resurrection of the body, and so on, that human beings will always be creatures within time—endless, infinite time. If so, it raises some grave problems. Infinity is not just a long, long time. It’s . . . um . . . infinite.
DNickol: “…the resurrection of the body… raises… grave problems.” Badabing.
Hans Kung should nail this to the front door of St. Peter’s. It isn’t just about empirical facts. It’s also about the interpretation of Scripture. Look at the very first sentence:
“37. In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”
Note that St. A. has the idea of “progress” in interpreting Scripture. I wonder if he talks about this in other places.
Did Augustine subscribe to the notion of infallibility? Aquinas did. But he was wrong about the Immaculate Conception, so, contrary to the old Thomists, he wasn’t infallible either :-)
David N. –
Would you prefer that the infinite time of Heaven eventually end?
I think it solves a lot of quandaries to think of eternity as simply outside of space-time rather than thinking about it as a mere extension of time as we know it, infinitely long. Boethius was onto something. It is hard to imagine it, but we do it and modern physics helps, giving us lots of other unimaginable things to think about.
If Hans Kung is nailing anything to the door of St. Peter’s, he should add this ending to the quotation already given by Ann Olivier:
“That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture….”
And, while he and his disciples are at work, they should also nail it to the doors of Canterbury, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, etc. etc. churches. Suitably re-worded, of course, it should also be nailed to the doors of the temples of secularism. It’s a splendid statement about prideful humans.
Would you prefer that the infinite time of Heaven eventually end?
Ann,
I had really never thought about this until I read Chapter 1 of Brian Greene’s new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. It’s about the implications of our universe being infinite. It leads you to a form of the “many worlds” hypothesis. There are only a finite number of things that can happen (although the number is astronomical), which leads to the conclusion that somewhere now (or in the past, or future), there is another David Nickol writing this message on another blog called dotCommonweal. Also, there is another David Nickol writing a slightly different message. And there is another David Nickol not writing on dotCommonweal at all. And so on.
We all have heard that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But if we have eternal life, any one of us, if we strike a key on a typewriter at random every thousand years, will produce not only the complete works of Shakespeare, but everything else that was ever written. Assuming that along with glorified bodies, we have glorified minds and can understand every language, we will be able to read, in heaven, everything ever written, finish it all, and read it again, an infinite number of times.
I enjoy writing on blogs, but if I continue to write in English, and let’s imagine my messages are a billion letters, spaces, symbols, and punctuation marks long, that is a very big, but easily calculable finite number. If I go on writing for eternity, I will repeat myself over and over again, an infinite number of times.
If we stick to earthly music, and I decide I want to be a composer in heaven, with an infinite amount of time, I will eventually have composed everything possible there is to compose (including everything that ever was composed by somebody else that I am unaware of and so do not deliberately avoid). And the time left to compose more will be infinite. Suppose I then want to choreograph ballets. Assuming the glorified body is still capable of a finite number of dance moves, I can choreograph all possible ballets to each piece of music I have composed, and then I will have to start repeating myself if I want to continue, because eternity goes on forever.
Just about everyone I know has stories about their childhood or youth (or something else) that they tell periodically, often prefaced by, “I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but . . . . ” Well, with an infinite amount of time, you will be able to hear those stories again an infinite number of times.
This is, of course, assuming the afterlife is anything resembling this life (if there is an afterlife).
When I was a student my chaplain once gave a homily about time, eternity, and how God existed outside of time. I didn’t understand it then, and I felt stupid (which is why I remember it). I still don’t understand it now.
I also don’t see what is wrong with the argument that there is a river flowing in the middle of every great city of the world. Aren’t we constantly using images and analogies to make a point?
My most common arguments for the existence of God if I happen to fall into such a discussion: beauty or love. The usual counter-argument: suffering. My usual response: read the Psalms. I don’t even attempt analytical reasoning, where I would fail miserably anyway.
David N. –
You seem to be assuming (as so many physicists do) that the puzzles of infinity have all been solved, and that the ramifications such as you list them would all occur should the current understandings of infinity — and string theory (for which there is no empirical evidence at this time, and there might never be because it might not be possible to have such evidence, given our physical laws) — … I’ll start over.
You’re assuming that your theories of infinity and string theory are true. Infinites as described today lead to contradictions, so they will have to be revised. String theory? Who knows. You also assume that miracles would not be even possible — that God could not just not create those Ice Capades performances and could not give us instead some other, some delicious experience of a kind we could not even have dreamed of. In other words, you’re assuming that the Heavenly world will be very much like this one. But to quote Flannery O’Connor, “then the hell with it!”. If Heaven is just this world all over again, you can have it.
But that is not the Christia promise. The Christian promise is a glorified world, and, yes, at this point that too is a mystery.
Claire –
ISTM that the point about the river and the great cities is that it isn’t necessary to invoke a God to find an immediate cause of why the great cities are on rivers (or bays). They are explained by the founders’ need for water or for fast transportation or for a place to sell things, so they looked around for a river and then settled on its banks.
But the secularists who are content with these sorts of proximate explanations don’t ask the *ultimate* questions, e.g., why is there anything at all?
Ann,
I am not assuming anything about physics, and least of all string theory. I am just pointing out that given an infinite amount of time, and a finite number of events, the finite number of events must keep repeating, an infinite number of times. I am not pushing any version of the many worlds hypothesis. I am, however, assuming that life after death resembles life on earth in at least some respects. We are, after all, supposed to continue as humans with bodies.
I suppose some people would say that the beatific vision would be enough to hold everyone entranced for all eternity. But we do have all the speculation of the resurrection of the dead, glorified bodies, and so on, which does not imply a fixed stare for all eternity.
Of course, no one knows what heaven will be like. In fact, I would go so far as to say no one knows (for a fact) that there is continued existence after death. Not that it makes any difference, but of the people I have known who have died over the course of my lifetime, I have absolutely no sense of their continued existence. I think other people do have some sense that their loved ones have “passed on” and are still existing and even sometimes present. But of course, feelings like this either way don’t prove anything.
But in any case, if continued existence is something so radically different from what we experience as being alive, it may not be continued existence at all. If we arrive in heaven with no memory whatsoever of existence on earth, we will not be ourselves.
“why is there anything at all?”
A friend of mine answers: “Why does there have to be a reason? Why can’t the universe simply *be*, without any kind of ultimate justification?”
First of all, there are different kinds of infinities. There are “more” points on a line than there are integers, even though both sets are “infinite”.
Secondly, many people are far too quick to say, “In an infinite length of time, X must happen” or “whatever is happening now must happen again” or even “the same pattern must repeat again and again”.
Think about irrational numbers, like pi. As far as anyone knows, any finite sequence of digits occurs in pi and occurs an infinite number of times, but it IS known for certain that the same pattern doesn’t just keep repeating. Maybe a better example is to construct your own irrational number, like 0.1101001000100001000001000000100000001….. The rule for this simply involves putting more 0s between the 1s. If this number never has the digit 2, why would you assume that in an infinite universe everything will happen? Although there are finite parts of this that “repeat” (for example, the sequence “001″), this is not a matter of simple repetition, either.
But the secularists who are content with these sorts of proximate explanations don’t ask the *ultimate* questions, e.g., why is there anything at all?
Ann,
I really don’t think this is true. There is an ongoing debate in contemporary physics as to whether the universe is tailor-made for our existence, and whether if it were just a little different, life could not exist at all. Some physicists claim the universe is just too perfect for our existence to be a random event, and others see no sign of God or purpose in the universe at all. Stephen Hawking only a few months ago made everyone angry by stating that God wasn’t necessary to explain the existence of the universe, and a book on the topic is coming out next month titledThe Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us that is devoted to the topic. This is by Victor Stenger, whose previous book, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, I am sure you will rush out and buy. :-)
. . . . why would you assume that in an infinite universe everything will happen?
Howard,
I am not so much arguing that everything that can happen will happen (although it seems reasonable to me that eventually it will, and it will repeat), but that when there are a finite number of things that can happen, and an infinite amount of time, there must be repetition. The problem with using numbers is that they don’t correspond to physical reality. There may be an infinite number of points on any line segment, but if you are placing the smallest bit of matter (say, a quark) in a position along a line of given length, there may be an infinite number of mathematical points on the line, but there are a finite number of positions a particle can be in, because there is a smallest distance a particle may be moved (the Planck length). Given a finite number of particles in a finite space, there are a finite number of arrangements of those particles. Physically, it does not make sense to speak of moving a particle half a Planck length out of its current position.
In the real world, Zeno’s Paradox is not a paradox. If an arrow in flight has to go half the distance toward the target, and half that distance again, and so on, in the actual physical world, there is a theoretical distance so short that it makes no sense to say the arrow must travel that distance. The arrow is not, in reality, moving an infinite number of infinitely small distances. It is moving a huge but finite number of finite distances (Planck’s lengths) until it gets to its target. This may be bizarre, but it is easier for me to understand, since I don’t know calculus!
David,
Your assumption about infinite time leading to infinite repetition is only true in the absence of what Alfred North Whitehead calls internal relations between the past and the present. In a real sense, the past is “in” the present, and so the past can never again be repeated once it is rearranged in the present. Your theory of infinity (and I wonder perhaps Greene’s as well), still seems to be working with a billiard ball theory of reality, where reality is made of discrete chunks, cut off from each other in some basic way, that are then rearranged ad infinitum. If the chunks themselves are not fundamentally changed in the rearranging, then the conclusion you draw is correct. However, at it base, this view of reality is appalling, as it renders the wholes created by the parts mere epiphenomena.
Reality is future oriented. Change is real. The choice for some actuality now rules out other actualities from ever happening.
One of the reasons that I am suspicious of string theory is that it seems to desire a return to a fundamentally deterministic vision of the universe. Quantum theory at least has the good manners to make room for real openness. What will happen is never entirely determined until things that make up reality “decide” what will be. This appears to be the case even at the subatomic level.
Joe,
My main point doesn’t depend on any exotic physics, and although I threw the Woody Allen quote in because I have always found it amusing, I am not arguing that experiences in heaven will repeat. I am making a fairly simple point about the ramifications of having an infinite amount of time.
Take chess. There are various estimates as to the possible number of different chess games, and they are all enormous numbers. But given an infinite amount of time, if you play chess even once every thousand years, you will eventually wind up playing games you have played before. I am not saying that you will experience a past game over again. I am saying that given an infinite amount of time, chess becomes somewhat like tic tac toe. It doesn’t take very long, even with a finite amount of time, to find yourself playing the exact game of tic tac toe you played before, because the number of choices you make is very limited. The number of possible moves in chess is huge, but given an infinite amount of time, huge (but finite) numbers mean very little.
The odds of flipping a coin and getting a hundred heads in a row are one in 79 million million million million million. But say in heaven you flip a coin 100 times in a row once every million years. You will get 100 heads in a row an infinite number of times. Of course, you don’t ever have to flip coins in heaven at all (unless there are requirements we don’t know about). And you don’t have to play one game of chess. But if you do anything with a finite number of outcomes repeatedly, you will run through all the possibilities and start repeating, the same way (in principle) as happens with tic tac toe in any reasonably long but finite period of time.
Regarding the nature of reality, it is what it is, whether we like it or not. (Not that I am saying I actually know what it is.) Einstein was offended by randomness in quantum mechanics, and refused to accept it, but it seems he was wrong.
Infinite time would produce every imaginable combination in coin tosses or chess moves, but would not reproduce the works of Shakespeare or even a single sonnet. That is, it might produce the words as a random happening among a zillion zillion zillion other sets of words, but their all important sense or meaning would not be reproduced. There are human actions and experiences which are intrinsically unrepeatable. Hence the unreality of eternal return theories, which have never been coherently formulated, much less been found convincing, in the history of philosophy.
David N. –
I’d love to continue discussing the nature of infinite numbers (and the apparent paradoxes of set theory which throw the very possibility of infinite numbers into doubt) and the anthropic principle (that human beings are so complex that it is improbable that the world has existed long enough to produce the contexts necessary to produce us by an evolutionary process, which gets us into the whole question of intelligent design.. These metaphysical matters are, I fear, just too complex for a blog, and I don’t really know where to start.
I had thought that we might start with a discussion of transfinite numbers (the different sorts of infinite numbers), but I couldn’t find a good explanation on the net which could introduce the topic to other participants in the blog. Somethings just need a blackboard to be explained. Sigh.
But you do raise some interesting questions!
That is, it might produce the words as a random happening among a zillion zillion zillion other sets of words, but their all important sense or meaning would not be reproduced.
Fr. O Leary,
Yes, what you say is true, but my point is that given an infinite period of time, any finite endeavor no matter how complex will be exhausted. A computer (even a slow one) can print out all possible combinations of letters, symbols, and punctuation marks, and in a finite amount of time, it will print out everything that was ever printed and can be printed. Of course, that would be a tremendous amount of material, and almost all of it would be gibberish. It would be of no particular worth, although given an infinite amount of time, one person could read through it all and pick what he or she thought was worthwhile.
But it doesn’t have to be a computer. A poet, for example, with all eternity to write poems, will eventually run out of things to write, assuming he or she sticks to a given alphabet and a given language. As Joe Petit points out, the poet will know what he or she has already written, so repetition does not have to occur. But eventually there will be nothing left to write. Of course, if the poet wishes to coin new words, he or she can go on doing that forever, but if they are to be written in a given alphabet, the words will eventually have to be longer and longer, since all possible combinations of 1 through, say, 25 letters will be used up rather quickly (if the time scale is infinite).
The number of pixels on a high-definition television screen is finite, and the number of combinations of them is a huge but finite number. A random pixel generator would eventually generate every HD image that could ever exist, which would contain (among other things), all the vacation photos of everyone who ever lived, reproductions of every painting ever painted, and accurate depictions of all moments in history, from every angle. Of course, also generated would be a vast amount of purely random images of no interest whatsoever.
My basic point is not so much about any of the above, but that eternity is a very, very, very long time for a human being.
Very very long. Especially the gazing down happily at the torments of the damned part.
The following article by Cal Tech cosmologist Sean Carrol explores some of these issues:
http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/
The title is “Does the Universe Need God?”.