Walking back to a friend’s apartment the other night with a bag of to-go Thai food in hand, I asked him about his problems with Christianity. He’s a lapsed Catholic and I wondered why. As he began a stumbling answer, we passed a windowed sports bar. It was the ninth inning of game seven of the World Series: as good a reason as any to change the subject. We watched the game for a bit and our conversation never returned to theology.
But my thoughts never left theology. Turning on the game is not sufficient anesthesia for me. I am often envious of sport-watchers. Then again, perhaps they do not get to experience the chronic, unbearable lightness of existential dread the way I do?
Ever since I read the collection of essays What I Believe — which includes a contribution from Albert Einstein among others — I have been interested in writing my own “What I Believe.” Not so interested that I’ve ever actually done it, of course. Because as it turns out, writing such an essay is really, really hard.
As soon as one begins to write about metaphysics, one sees holes in his ideas. And the more attempts to patch those holes he discovers that the holes themselves have holes. For someone who came through a western education system in which rational certainty is the only thing sacred, this is utter disaster. Good luck maintaining rational certainty while considering the numinous.
The inadequacy of language for these topics and my poor little head makes me want to throw up my hands and watch baseball. But again, I can’t. I’m psychically unable to. Existential dread if I do; existential dread if I don’t.
And so I have this compulsion to think and write about these things as well as a kind of professional obligation. As an executive coach, individuals talk to me about the intimate details of their lives and their problems in relationships. Can I be trusted? Here’s a chance for me to demonstrate some intellectual honesty, which is a trait that’s probably interesting to the .01% of the population that’s actually a fit to work with me.
There’s arguably a practical reason to articulate what one believes, as well. Here I will quote Ayn Rand whose speech at West Point turned me on to the study of philosophy years ago: “Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.” There I am, then. Following either by conviction or by default. And let’s be honest, mostly by default.
Well, in case you live in a thatched hut in the jungle, I have news for you: America is in the midst of a culture war. (“Same as it ever was.”) And if, like I do, you believe that there is such a thing as a Global American Empire, in which the tentacles of American culture reach just about everywhere, one might say that the entire world is in the midst of the same culture war. And, per Ayn Rand, the generals of the culture war are the philosophers. Which brings me to the question on hand.
I actually had a “warm up” to the question of belief a few months ago, meeting with one of my mentors for the first time. One of his first questions to me was, in fact, “What do you believe?” A bold starting place for a meeting of the minds. A credit to him for asking such a bold question. The more I’ve meditated on life and things and relationships, the more I’ve come to believe that it is an absolutely necessary question to ask as a starting place for a meeting of minds.
My answer in the moment was a rambling criticism of Christianity that ended with sympathy for Tolstoyan freethinking and the Kingdom of God being within. Maybe I quoted Chesterton, too. Something like that. Surely, I made it clear that I was a deist and decidedly not a progressive, too. Maybe there was a maudlin, “This can’t be all there is, right?” Right?
In that conversation I defined my beliefs in antagonism toward Christianity. In the same conversation even more critical of secular materialist progressivism. If I wanted to, I could write lengthy criticisms of either faction. It is far easier to criticize than to affirm in these matters. And I am writing today to affirm.
The first pillar on which my theology rests is one of epistemic humility. I consider mystery to be impossibly strong evidence of a divinity. I’m fascinated by the limits of the five senses. The existence of something like “dark matter” makes me wonder: What else is there that we cannot sense? We can call it “pale blue dot” deism or something.
Beyond the limitation of sense-data, there are limits to consciousness and cognition. Limitation of language… This essay is a finger pointing to the moon. Not the moon. What lies beyond this sense-data and our cognition seems to me to be inseparable from divinity.
There seem also to be rules to the game of reality. Here, I suppose, I am a “platonist” or “occultist,” even—gasp—“New Agist.” There seems to be truth to something like the “Law of Attraction.” Every language I speak has a way of saying “Birds of a feather flock together.” There seems to be truth to the occult rule, “As above so below.” There seems to be truth to the existence of Magick and Miracles. And there seem, also, to be masters of these rules: Magicians and Thaumaturges.
I believe, also, in the necessity of belief. “I don’t believe in anything,” a belief I may have held when I was younger, is also a belief. There is no avoiding belief. I believe this is Harari’s initial point in Sapiens, the centrality of “fictions” in the human story. “I don’t believe in anything” within American culture seems to default to materialist utilitarian progressivism.
If any reader of this document is tempted to criticize it, let me save you some time: No one is more aware than me of its inadequacies. It’s a work in progress. Surely there is no better way than a blog to broadcast one’s foolishness to the world.
*I can’t believe that I reference Harari and Rand in this. This is grimly hilarious to me. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve read either of them. I’m going to go stare at a wall*