© Kenneth Ireland, March 28, 2024
Back to Lenten Practice
Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024
It has been years since I even noticed Lent, but this year, I prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I had been writing about my relationship with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a remarkable man from whom I learned an enormous amount, whom I loved and, as a quirk of fate, happened to be a famous and well-regarded, even revered figure in both the Jesuit order and the official Catholic hierarchy. For several years, while I was a Jesuit, he was my spiritual advisor, and informally held that role for the rest of his life. He was disappointed when I stepped away from the more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith, but he was never harsh or judgmental. He always treated me as a friend and was extremely generous. I am very grateful for our friendship.
Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that elite group. I was in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back. In total honesty, I indulged hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. When I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen, I discovered traces of Ignatian prejudice in my practice. Uncovering what was not apparent to me has taken years of careful work. My feet were so planted in either camp that I couldn’t distinguish any separation. I became known in my sangha as a Jesuit Buddhist.
I hit on another sentence to describe my project, “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” It became important for me to specify that part of my argument had been colored by meditation practice.
In the few weeks till Easter, I certainly can’t settle any argument about the existence of God, but following the age-old Lenten practice of penance and purification, I hope to clear away some of the underbrush obscuring these old questions, at least for me.
When I write, I consciously try not to allow academic rules and conventions to hamper me. I know that this can be what we used to call the occasion for sin, but I also don't owe allegiance to any religious authority, and the days of the burning at the stake are over. Although I will try to be as balanced as any aspiring bodhisattva can be, I know that I have a definite point of view, which I will state as clearly as I can and then, like a good Jesuit scholastic and Zen student, try to refute my own argument. I take this work seriously, but I will also have as much fun as possible.
Capitalizing God as an honorific carries many linguistic nuances and preferences. I would prefer to separate us from our preconceptions and not treat God in the preferential way that the capitalization “God” might imply, but I’ve decided to follow the linguistic convention of capitalizing God. I intend it to be neither theist nor atheist, and not derogatory, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH, Jehovah, or the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ I may not always be consistent.
And finally, my conclusions surprised me, though I cannot claim to have satisfactorily resolved any of the issues I tackled.
A Jesuit theologian with the papal imprimatur asks me about God's existence.
During our last meeting, Avery Dulles said to me, "I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course, he knew the answer: most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not usually entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm. For Avery, the existence of a Godhead, a personal deity, was central, along with expressing or “confessing” assent to its existence.
That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of it, I felt Avery was trying to pry an answer out of me that would undermine my Buddhist beliefs. His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was serious. He was trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because, for him—and for most serious Christians—assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because, honestly, I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations.
Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy, although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.
We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or, to return to my speculative ruminations about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions that Jesuits liked to argue about with Pascal and the Jansenists. Avery would have enjoyed that: this essay honors our friendship.
“Something rather than Nothing”
First, let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something as opposed to nothing?” is a religious question, or at least religions worldwide have appropriated it. Any preacher worth their salt will warn you to think about what happens after death. They call up an ontological fear and create an answer to the question: what persists after our experience ends?
That question seems based on raw emotion, so it’s not scientific or philosophical. It might be psychological, even then, you have to lay down some parameters. I’m going to leave it for another time. My characterization won’t win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some of them even call it “the Big Question,’ encompassing belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell, dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers claim it demands an answer.
The question itself is a canard, or in French slang, a hoax. To clarify the possible answers, let’s give it the hair-splitting it warrants before we begin. The question is designed to introduce the question of God into ordinary discourse and ultimately leads us down a rabbit hole. It is formulated to skew the answer. Any answer is, at best, an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. My former Jesuit philosopher teacher, Ed MacKinnon, argues that the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics. (Why is There Something? Edward MacKinnon, Philosophia 51 (2):835-855 (2023). I disagree.
If, for example, we follow Piaget and examine how a child learns about the world, among his or her first questions might be, “What is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask, “Can I pet Fido?” “Why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post-grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy,” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic." (Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.) In our case, Fido becomes “something with identified meanings vaguely about God,” much like the neo-Platonists who identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “Something” as ontologically real and demand justification for its existence.
Is the question “Why is there something?” even a good question?
Because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.
Begin with the concept of negation. The question posits “not-Nothing.” However, in this sense, nothing may just be “not everything that presents itself to our minds,” as an extrapolation or inference, not a definition.
The double negative serves no purpose in the argument other than to get God in the door. “Something rather than nothing” is not even ordinary language. The way we speak in ordinary language does not include the inherent claim that we cannot know “something is something” unless we posit its negation. We are not obliged to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is absurd.
Joanie Mitchell teaches us, "You don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “What’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Not-a-parking-lot?”
Ms. Mitchell uses a rhetorical strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return, he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, which is another problem to which he will return later). At this point, it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell, or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation, though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg et al. blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blanks with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again, I would point to the neo-Platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.
When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” as an ontological bridge between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be” concerning sex. I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is why we are parsing the verb “to be.” There has to be nothing out there, or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.
Let’s return to little Freddy or Frederica, who learned that Fido is called a dog. Hopefully, they also learned practical ways to avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding, training, learning to gauge Fido’s moods, and how to get him into his dog house if needed. But the question remains: how do we get from there to “Why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?”
How did this become a religious question, and why is it essential to get the correct answer? I will ask the Buddhist before I ask Aquinas, though I might use him as my reference point when I describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. I intend to hold them as an object of meditation in a Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.
Instead of proving or disproving that God exists, I propose a more modest goal: to examine the claim that God exists. This avoids what seems impossible — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a supernatural being has control and power in the universe, and whose existence or essential being makes the workings of the universe possible. It also sets philosophy on a more solid footing (in my view) — to use the tools that are available to human beings and evaluate various claims solely to determine whether or not they are possible or reasonable, and secondarily, that these beliefs provide us with some guidance about living our lives in a fully human way that is ethical and loving. Based on our understanding of human history on Earth, these questions and their proposed solutions have been debated. That is all we can say with certainty.
On a personal note. I have spent several hours a day for the past six weeks thoroughly reviewing and examining as many of these arguments or claims as possible. My emphasis has been mainly on the scholastic proofs following the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Catholic seminarians have studied since the Council of Trent. In addition to reviewing my intellectual history, I also searched for new work that has been done since I was at Boston College almost 60 years ago. But I was also trying to honor the question proposed by my friend and mentor Avery Dulles before he died: how might Buddhists settle the question about God? I will be 80 in a few months. I have spent far more time in meditation halls than in seminary, which has influenced my views.
Clockwork Orange, or shooting marbles on the Lyceum’s almost perfectly level floor
Let’s tackle “The Unmoved Mover.” It purports to be the most universal of the arguments, or at least the TV Bishop Robert Barron would have us believe so; it is allegedly the most palatable that believers put forth to their enlightened naturalistic colleagues because it is based on a particular analysis by Aristotle, which also gave rise to the scientific method through his understanding of causality. Its religious formulation might be broadly called “Deistic.”
Those who claim to follow Aristotelia over the 2400-year crooked path to our discussion talk about the existence of God as the “Unmoved Mover” or the “Uncaused Cause.” However, for each of the five contingency arguments that St. Thomas takes from Aristotle, there are two prongs: observation and logic, the moving parts, and the moving mental parts. One is locked down by observing the world as it is, and the other is abstracted from those observations, with hypotheses or checking questions.
Using the instruments of scientific observation, we can measure speed, distance, force, resistance, gravity, sound waves, etc., all of which seem to give the Thomists a comforting certainty that there is an “unmoved cause” at the very beginning. But is that conclusion supported by science? You can “move” from moved to unmoved using carefully constructed experiments, scientific instruments, and observation. However, tracing back to a primordial mover observation seems to uncover more moving parts, going faster and in all directions. I assert that focusing on one single mover is inconsistent with the data and requires a leap of faith.
For the moment, let’s set aside some of the more irksome consequences of conceiving of God as a personal being and merely describe him as a kind of clockmaker who has set the universe in motion according to a set of observable and predictable physical laws. Thomas Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, gave this advice to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." God and reason are synonymous, or God him/her/itself is reasonable. This is a distinction that I am going to have to sit with.
If God sets the universe in motion and allows reason, even divine reason, to dictate or at least guide its workings, does this guarantee that justice, love, and benevolence will prevail? We no longer need to believe in a revealed God to be a good person, but can we point to the intricacy of the mechanism and say that God exists? But how do you find the benevolence of our universe being swallowed up in a black hole or the 700 species of Ornithoscelida, dinosaurs extinguished by an asteroid that veered off course 65 million years ago? The burden of that proof rests on the Deist. Mr. Jefferson.
Jefferson held a deep conviction in “The Laws of Nature and Nature's God.” We should also examine the proposition that such laws exist without blindfolded fear. In Deist thought there is a hierarchy to the things that God condones or encourages. We know that God exists because of the good order we see in nature. Nature, being revealed as science, allows us to understand the order of the universe. The science of the Enlightenment was based on the unfolding principles of the scientific revolution.
Driving south on Highway 280 from San Francisco, I cross over the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a huge isolated tubular structure over two miles long that passes under the highway near Sandhill Road. Since 1966, the SLAC has been conducting experiments using isolated electrons traveling at speeds beyond my powers of imagination. Beyond that crude description, I don’t understand much, but I do know that scientists at Stanford won the Nobel Prize for developing a facility that allows us to decipher the actual activity of particle physics. This is centuries and worlds away from Aristotle’s Physics, which I envision being the careful study of the action of marbles on the (as level as possible) floor of the Lyceum from which Aristotle and his students began to measure mass, movement, distance and time which led to his geocentric model of movement in the universe. But rather than fault Aristotle for failing to grasp that our earth was not the focal point for movement in the Universe, I am astonished that his school was able to decipher so much given their primitive instruments of observation and measurement.
Centuries later, these crude experiments would lead to both Newton’s Apple, Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological proofs for the existence of God, and after the Council of Trent, most Catholic priests were taught in seminary that the Universe was created ex nihilo by a Being who set the world in motion. The question remains: has it been shown that there was an urge or force at the beginning that initiated the inevitable, linked causal incidents we observe?
Hiking into the Source
What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmover or the Source of all of it? In the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we might imagine that we have traced many thoughts, feelings, and stories to their source. You’d think the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.
Late one Fall fifteen years ago, I sat in a week-long retreat up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins with Jon Joseph Roshi. For one of our afternoon meditations, Jon asked a long-time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps having a decade on me but moving with the grace of a man many years younger.
That afternoon, we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, practicing walking meditation, kinhin, as best we could. It was a challenging, narrow path; the small, fast-moving stream dropped off sharply to the north. I had to concentrate more on where I was stepping than on my exhalation. I needed a stick to stay balanced. The thick green moss covering the stones, the only toehold, was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect, who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving more difficult than initially advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.
Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb, we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine, plus beavers or storms felling the tree trunks, closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still, mirror-like water. The stream seemed too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that gave them an almost Technicolor background. I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.
Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, change is the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe. When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant, he said, “You’re going to die, and along the way, the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation changes our world. When I finally reached the still pool high above the Klamath, which might have been the beginning of something, I felt my racing heart and the quickness of my breath as I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a First Mover hard, if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover so vague that it is meaningless, or at least extremely limiting. I’ll go with vast and holy.
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