In the Mind of a Bewildered Ape

Melinda Selmys

Originally published in Issue XII of Vulgata, February, 2004.


Looking back over the atheistic philosophers and ideologues whose doctrines I used to embrace so enthusiastically, I am struck again and again by the same question "Is this all they have?" I flip through pages of the greatest minds that have turned themselves towards the atheistic creed, and my initial reaction is essentially one of bewilderment. Why would these men -- men whose intelligence can hardly be called into doubt -- dedicate their lives, their minds and their considerable talents to the defense of a philosophy that is built upon a series of flimsy, long refuted arguments and murky misunderstandings of the theistic position?

Many orthodox Christians, especially those who have never been tempted towards atheism, conclude that it must simply be a matter of ignorance or stupidity. And yet we are confronted with men such as Bertrand Russel, who cannot really be construed to be either. What, then, is the cause of their atheism? And how is the Christian to attempt to overcome it?

But it is True!

Essentially, the defense of the atheistic position comes along two lines -- skepticism and humanism. This article treat the first -- the second I will deal with in next month's issue. Skepticism essentially amounts to a problem with reasoning -- not that the person is unwilling to follow an argument from its logical beginning to its logical conclusion, but rather that they have taken reason, built an altar to it and are willing to sacrifice anything and everything to this rather harsh and ultimately unrewarding god. Note, here, that this is true not only of the atheist who declares himself a rationalist, but also of the empiricists, who rely not so much upon the senses -- which tell me that David Copperfield can cause the Eiffel Tower to disappear -- as on the rational inferences that we derive from them.

When we look at what these men have to say, our first reaction is likely to be "Are they insane?" When Voltaire describes man as "Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, devoured by death, a mockery of fate," and Russel declares that "...only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation, henceforth, be safely built," the average person is likely to demand to know why they should desire to believe in any such doctrine. To which the atheist, with all the proud, self-destructive grandeur of a man who has accurately predicted the end of the world, crows "Because it is True!

The temptation, here, is to embrace this seemingly unshakable devotion to reason after all, if they are willing to stay by her side and defend her when she is a half-dead consumptive coughing up blood all over their shirt, then surely they will delight to discover that she can be brought back to health; that she can provide answers, and meaning, and morality, and all of the other things that she was created for in the first place. It comes as a surprise, therefore, when you knock at the door with a friendly, curative dose of St. Thomas Aquinas, only to have it slammed in your face by a vituperative and condescending guardian.

The problem is that the person who has actually embraced atheism as a philosophy has cast her as an idol in their own image. They are more than willing to burn incense day and night. They are willing to go on worshiping even when their god demands that meaning, morality, origin and destiny be sacrificed upon her altar: provided she will go on granting to them the only boon that hard atheism can possibly offer her devoted thralls -- the satisfaction of feeling that one is amongst those select few who are right.

There is a spiritual state, which I think is probably familiar to more than one of my readers (and which I am certainly acquainted with myself) in which one is actually willing to be deeply and profoundly miserable -- if only they can be miserable in the assurance that their misery is founded on correct beliefs. I will willingly believe, for example, that my husband thinks me worthless, that no one is grateful for anything I do, and that all of my efforts are spilled out in vain, provided I can have the grim comfort of imagining that all of these dire observations are correct. If, in this state, my husband maintains that he, in fact, values my contributions to the household a great deal, the news comes to me almost as a pain. If, on the contrary, he were ever to declare that my accusations were true, I would leap up in gloomy self-congratulation and cry "You see! I was right!"

It is upon this -- not on self-righteousness, but on self-rightness -- that the entire appeal of skepticism rests. It is better to believe nothing than to risk being shown to be wrong, and it is better to defend your thankless philosophy by suicide than to admit that you are in error. And it is for this reason that the Christian cannot hope to appeal to reason as his ally -- because, as Chesterton says , "A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent...If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect be cast into hell." The atheist's reason must not merely be cured -- for she is mortally ill and beyond operation -- she must be put to death and then raised again in Christ. Unfortunately, and painfully for the man in question, she must first be put to death.

A Post-Modern Medicine

Post-Modernism was predicted by Chesterton as the suicide of thought. I am personally inclined to say that thought had already committed (or at least committed to) suicide with the dawn of Cartesian skepticism, and that Post-Modernism is the attempt of Western philosophy to perform a post-mortem on itself. In either case, it is the inevitable philosophical cul de sac at the end of the abortive journey of hard atheism. Basically, it is the recognition that if we have killed God, then we have killed, with Him, every hope that there might exist a genuine Truth, and that reason might be expected to lead us reliably towards it. "Why should anything go right;" asks Chesterton, mimicking the post-modern mindset, "even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"



The man who has followed reason to this unfortunate end on his own initiative is usually inclined to stand gloating over the corpse with all the jealous possessiveness of the traditional atheist over his tubercular idol. "She is my reason!" he crows. "My own. And I have killed her with my own mind, and I shall hold her still!" Fortunately, unless he is already mad and well beyond help, he will not fail notice that his hard one prize is a decomposing cadavar towards which he can have no possible responsibility except burial. And having finally been persuaded to bury the remains of his murdered mind, he is actually in a much better position than the rationalistic atheist to find God -- for if reason has failed as a means of discovering meaning and truth, yet he remains in dire need of these greatest of human necessities, it is much easier to persuade him that there is nothing to be lost in trying faith.

What must be done, therefore, in the case of the philosophical skeptic, is to get him to realize that his absolute loyalty to what he calls truth -- and what is in fact his own desire to be Right -- is irrational. After all, if you tell a man that he is obligated to serve a master who offers him nothing in return, who beats him and denies him sustenance, and who is easily escaped, such a man will simply call you insane. And yet this is precisely what the atheist's diseased reason demands. She pouts that there is no God, that she alone is equipped for the making of dogmatic proclamations, and that her thrall is obliged to follow her even when she commands him to build his house on a foundation of absolute despair.

Reason, in this form, is not a reliable guide, but a heartless tyrant. She demands that she be set up upon the sapphire throne, yet what does she offer her prostrate worshiper in return? He asks for some scrap of meaning, and she says "Make one up for yourself." He asks where he comes from, and she asserts that he is a meaningless and random collection of naturally selected atoms. He asks where he is going, and she says that he will become diseased, die and dissipate. He asks why he should suffer, and she says that the universe is a hostile and uncaring environment. He demands of her, as Sartre did, to know why he should not kill himself, and she is silent. Finally, if he is sane enough to recognize his position, he demands to know on what basis he should believe any of the things that she tells him. On this point, she can appeal only to her own authority -- it is True because I say so. Yet if she is what naturalism claims -- a ghost emerging from the collision of electrical impulses in a web of neurons -- then on what possible basis can she claim this authority?

And even if, by some mystery, the random collision of atoms has produced a thing capable of discovering truth, what difference does it make? If this is truth, then truth is poison. A man who confronts such potent and categorical desolation must either go insane, as Nietzsche did, or take his own life. He must conclude that reason is the cruelest of nature's mistakes -- for out of the callous vicissitudes of choatic matter their arose a terrible monstrosity: a bit of organized slime that mistook itself for a man. To disseminate such a doctrine is a piece of sadism against which the atomic bomb appears a mercy -- for if man really is such an abomination as this, the bomb may at least be construed as a form of euthanasia. Against such a belief, the sane and sensible man will simply turn away. He will say, "If the truth is that Truth is inimical to my being, that my life is meaningless, my sufferings unexpiated, my dignity a sham, my origin random, my destiny non-existent, and deepest longings thwarted, then I shall have no more discourse with Truth than with a murderous enemy." It is to this plain and life-valuing sanity that the atheist -- even at the cost of reason -- must be led.

An Epistemological Pyramid

In my own journey from atheism to Catholicism, this jolt from the self-destructive rut of an abused and abusive reason came in the form of a strong dose of Buddhism -- perhaps not the ideal medication, but one that certainly had the desired effect. The notion that there might be some Good to be devoutly desired, something worthy of the name "Enlightenment" that could not be attained so long as the courses of my mind overflowed with the waters of reason, served as a sufficiently strong impetus for me to open the flood-gates and empty them. I did this, not surprisingly, with only the greatest of reluctance -- I spent days wandering about doing very little except to try to reason my way into an understanding of the irrational. For me, the moment when the flood-gates opened, was one that, in some respects, seems almost anti-climactic. Basically, I sat down, mentally exhausted, and looked at the nearest thing to me, which happened to be a rather ordinary suburban tree. And looking at it I realized that it was -- quite apart from all my conceptions, my knowledge of its inner workings, my ideas of Treeness, and my thoughts about it -- a tree. Or, rather, it was a thing outside myself that was entirely uninterested in the endless circling of ideas along the logical ruts and pathways that I had carved for myself in the silence of my inner mind.


What happened in that moment is something that I didn't completely understand until years later. I knew that it was catastrophic, that the very foundations of my philosophy had suddenly evaporated and that I was left, essentially, in a vacuum from which anything could potentially emerge. What I did not realize was that I had escaped, rather unexpectedly, from the entire false dilemma of Western epistemology. No longer was I caught upon the prong of independent reason, attempting to stand as an unbalanced spike, divorced from the senses and from faith. Instead of throwing arguments and insults at the empiricists and fideists, I was made able to unite, within myself, their warring kingdoms: to produce an epistemological structure that, because it was constructed of three supports instead of one, was actually stable.

Reason, I realized, was not self-sufficient -- the empirical world existed quite outside of her, and outside of her inferences about it. She was a means to an end greater than herself, and not the end and object of all worship. Nor was reason self-supporting, for I could not prove her validity against the Buddhist or the Post-Modernist without either appealing to her -- which is circular -- or else appealing to some authority beyond her. This authority -- the authority which states that reason leads to truth and that the empirical world exists as more than the mere play of pictures over the inscape of my mind -- I call faith, for it is an authority that derives its force not from reason or sense, but from the will.

Socrates contra Zeus

In reality, the position I was in, at this point, was a precarious one. From the realization that one's own reason is not absolute, we may ascend to God, or descend to the chaos of Post-Modernism and hard agnosticism. We may assert that reason cannot teach us everything -- and that therefore our epistemology must rest on more than just reason -- or we may despair and declare that, since reason has failed us, nothing is knowable. It is upon that movement of the will -- the leap of faith that accepts or rejects the mind and the world -- that everything depends.

Fortunately, in most cases we may rely upon the hard rationalist having a sort of double life -- as in Pagan Greece, there is both religion and philosophy, but no real discourse between the two. The former is expressed in the imaginative life, a life that centers around that joy which C. S. Lewis describes as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." Thus they may be, as C. S. Lewis was prior to his conversion, simultaneously a materialist and a fanciful dabbler in the mysteries of the occult. Or, as in my case, a hard rationalist who, in certain moods, seriously expects that they might discover in some haunted wood the secret pathways into elfland.

Christianity is startling because it unites these things -- because in challenging man to be holy, it asserts that he is whole. So long as Beauty and Reason sat upon their separate and opposing pedestals, my philosophy was fractured. When Christianity was presented to me in an adult form -- as it finally was in the weeks following the demolition of my hyper-rationalist idolatry -- it was like seeing the wedding of my two dearest companions. If God existed, I need no longer bitterly desire that the wood could really be haunted -- for I could believe, with every support of my rational faculties, that it was God-inspired.

It is upon this desire for wholeness that we may place our hopes -- for where Post-Modernism is the complete dissolution of the self, Christianity is its complete integration. Most atheists, if they stand upon ground zero and look at the ruins of their self-founded philosophy, will be far more inclined to accept the latter. The atheist's Tower of Babel is built on quicksand, but its pinnacle is too high in the air for him to see that it is sinking. From those heights, suffering under the delusion that the foundations of his philosophy are secure, a leap of faith seems merely suicidal. When the tower is in ruins, when he feels himself sinking, then faith becomes a solid rock which he can grasp. We need no longer attempt to demonstrate that God's existence is certain beyond a shadow of a Cartesian doubt, we must merely show that it is reasonable, and that it is desirable. If, at this point, we extend a faith that is both rational and joyful, a faith in which Beauty and Truth are wed, we may have great hope that our sinking atheist will embrace it and, finding security upon its solid shores, breathe that here, at last, is all that we can know on earth, and all we need to know.

 

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