Back to Lenten Practice

Copyright March 28, 2024

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

It has been years since I even noticed Lent much less formally practiced and prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I didn’t design the practice that I am going to outline below specifically for these 40 days. I had been writing about my relationship with Avery Dulles, a wonderful 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 both in the Jesuit order and the official Catholic Church. My guess is that he might have been 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. The initial impulse for my investigation of the question of god’s existence came from our last face to face meeting before he died. He asked me some pointed questions that I blew off at the time. I want to take them up more carefully and with the love that our friendship demands.

Another focus for my investigation has been the Compañeros y Compañeras. In 1997 I met my dear friend Morgan Zo Callaghan at a meditation group I organized in San Francisco's Tenderloin, and shortly after he introduced me to this group of mostly older, former Jesuits, their wives and partners, a few of their children along with some like minded friends as well as one or two men who are still in the order. Since then I have been part of their rather informal online exchange. Since Covid we have been unable to visit face to face, but the internet has provided an open forum for continuing the conversation about exploring this "Jesuit DNA." 

“Jesuit-Ken” is one very distinct side of my own spiritual DNA. In my various Buddhist circles, I am known as that Jesuit guy. Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that group. I was only in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back on the training. I talked about my Jesuit roots with only a few friends. Actually I indulged a kind of hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. Though I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen practice, there were still traces of a real Ignatian prejudice. It’s taken years of careful Zen work for me to uncover the obvious. My feet were so equally planted in either camp that it created an illusion of indifference. I became known as a Jesuit Buddhist. 

In my last conversation with Avery, he addressed Buddhist-Ken. The title I gave the draft was “A Buddhist Addresses Arguments for the Existence of god.” When in the course of my conversations with the companeros y companeras, I talked about my utterly disastrous philosophy oral exam with Father Ed MacKinnon, I hit on the missing sentence in the title of my project, “A Former Jesuit Weighs the Arguments in Favor of god’s Existence in the Zendo.” Ed if you’re watching, I apologize. In that summer of 1969 I might have been drunk, but I was certainly hungover. I hope you can see from my current effort, your teaching did make an impression. Here I am 55 years later trying to thread the logical needle you carefully laid out.

In the few weeks till Easter I certainly can’t settle the arguments 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. And to do this I will work as both a Jesuit (at least as much as memory, will and stamina allow) and a Buddhist. I continue to get up very early, make some coffee and then settle into zazen for upwards of an hour. I have continued to meet regularly with my teacher Edward Oberholtzer via zoom to check on my work with a koan collection, The Blue Cliff Record.. After breakfast I dedicate another three to four hours researching these well known arguments for god’s existence as they continue to be argued about to this day. This task has not been altogether pleasant. My 80 year old mind is creaky, and misunderstandings from my days as a Jesuit philosopher still lurk in the shadows. But I’ve discovered that I am not alone, far from it. The majority of these strictly philosophical arguments themselves seem very cranky, but there seems to have been a few important clarifications of the basic work that Aquinas undertook. The resources online are actually far more vast than what was available at Weston College and Boston College between 1968 and 69.

Then I write. I am not hampered by academic rules and conventions. 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 thank god the days of 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 will also try to have as much fun as possible. 

I take this work seriously. Half-way through this project my wonderful friend KA told me that he was considering becoming Catholic. Needless to say I was startled, but the obligations of friendship dictate that I be as available as possible to K and not stand in the way his heart is leading him. So in a way, it is love and friendship that have turned my attention back towards the faith of my birth as well as my Jesuit training. One of the standard descriptions of relationships among “X” is “It’s complicated.” I can check that box. A more complete title of this project might be “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” 

And finally my conclusions surprised me. I cannot even pretend to have reached a satisfactory resolution to the issues that I tackled. But I have at least been able to tie together a few fragmented questions that have been floating around, put others to rest, and sketch out a new line of investigation.

Note: In most of this essay I use the lower case “g” for god. Capitalizing God as an honorific carries so many linguistic nuances and preferences that have come down to us through the ages, I would like, and try as much as possible to separate us from our preconceptions, and treat god in the discussion as a concept and not in the preferential way that the usual capitalization “God” might infer. I do not intend it to be either theist or atheist, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH or Jehovah, of the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ Or I try to, I may not always be consistent. 

Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmoved or the Source of All of It? It is more than likely that in the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we have traced many thoughts, feelings, stories we tell ourselves to their source. You’d think that the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

We were sitting sesshin up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins. For one of our afternoon meditations Jon Joseph 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 had a decade on me but moved with the grace of a man 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, maintaining as best we could the practice of walking meditation, kinhin. It was a difficult climb up a very narrow path, the small fast moving stream dropping off sharply to the north. I needed a stick to stay balanced. I had to put more concentration on where I was stepping than my exhalation. The thick green moss covering the stones that were 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 much more difficult than originally 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 either beavers or storms felling the tree trunks that closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still mirror-like water. Perhaps the stream was too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life hiding under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that provided 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, it seems to be 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 itself changes our world. When I finally got to that still pool high above the Klamath that might have been the beginning of something, feeling my racing heart and the quickness of my breath, I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a first mover very hard if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover such a vague idea as to be meaningless. 

Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and god knows there is no justice in the world. --Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments not convinced that there is a god, and following my own logic, all I can really say is that if these proofs alone are the only source of my knowledge of god, I am tending towards an atheist position. However, because I say that these arguments don’t hold water is not to say that god does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal--my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgement of Evil as moving them closer to believing in god. I am going to call this exploration “stories that we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” They claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness as well as their coherence also depends on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment we can set this aside, and simply say that we have experience of evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent god, this presents a problem, but is it also an opportunity to prove the existence of god?

The relationship between evil and the existence of god is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity, The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency back to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic host. The existence of Evil should convince us that god exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all powerful Jehovah. In the myth I learned, before he fell Satan was called Lucifer, or light-bearer, a name which indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appear much in the Hebrew Bible with the major exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels as well as Revelations, it was Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) who put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the god-in-the-sky myth is that god creates an existential problem by allowing evil--a la Job--why do the bad prosper while good people suffer. For the pious this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: god only wants to make us better, and this requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also on some very real level entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it--a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. Not a minor flirtation with some new age religion. However, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably I need to look no farther for the reason why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in god is acknowledgement that god exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. She says this myth contains the roots of the long horrendous history of antisemitism. Pagles says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I am going to use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of god’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion::Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extend this odd belief to Lucifer extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself, ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I am calling “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you, and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she further compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and delivered an unredeemable rag? That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

Angelina, according to the Psalmist (8.5), is fashioned after the image of god, “a little less than the angels” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined that you, Angelina and the dry cleaner were standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Certainly the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Perhaps Judge Judy, even though not Solomon, she is Jewish and has a no nonsense tone, could set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt really violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of personal investment in that little black dress, but I am going to use it to examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We also know from experience that the verbal tongue lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum 5,000 dollar fine and you are able to collect it, is not really sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that given similar circumstances almost everyone except the super rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings and that’s really just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help increase the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I really think. There really are bad people. The only justice in the human realm has been devised by us humans to order ourselves and create some space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we might even entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world that humans inhabit. There is no god. He/She/It disappeared with that little black dress.

A Buddhist addresses arguments for the existence of god.

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 entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in the realm of Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm, and for Avery the existence of a godhead, a personal deity, was central along with expressing or “confessing” your assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of that bond, I felt as though Avery was trying to pry out an answer that would undermine my Buddhist “beliefs.” His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was nonetheless serious. He may have been trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because for him, as 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 original thoughts about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions about God that Jesuits liked to argue about, for example with M. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists.

In a way this inquiry is a belated response to my friend. I am calling it “A Buddhist looks at the arguments for the existence of god.” In my view, examining the question of God's existence can only be done in terms of the question as posed and not in some universal ontological context of “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” We’re back to questions and answers. Spoiler alert: I will be arguing in favor of what I take to be the basic Buddhist non-theistic response.


“Why is there something?” (Hint: The question is itself un canard, French slang for "a hoax" or "a fabrication")

Firstly let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something (as opposed to nothing)?” is a religious question. It is not scientific or psychological. It might be philosophical, but I will need to set some parameters. My characterization is not going to win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some even call it “the Big Question,’ encompassing questions of 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 say that it deserves, even demands an answer. There is “Something” but we are going to define exactly what that something is. Or get as close as we can.

I am going to argue that it is not a good question. It is concocted, and deserves hair splitting questions directed at the disambiguation of all possible answers. It is poorly formulated which skews any answer. It’s really just a canard designed to introduce the question of god into ordinary discourse and untimely leads us down a rabbit hole. Any answer is at best an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. (See Ed MacKinnon’s paper: the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics).

If we examine the way that a child learns about the world, his or her first question might be “what is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask “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.”1 In our case “Something” becomes “identified meanings,” vaguely about god. This is much like the neo-Platonists identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues in order 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 ontology and demand justification for its existence.

And because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Why “why is something?” is not a good question. We can begin with the concept of negation. It posits “not-Nothing.” However, there is no definition of “nothing” other than it is not all that presents itself to our minds, and even that is just my extrapolation or inference. (And it serves no purpose in the argument other than to get god in the door).

“Something rather than nothing” is not ordinary language. The way we normally speak does not include the inherent logical claim that we cannot know that something is something unless we posit its negation. We have to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is of course absurd, and certainly not the ordinary turn of words. Joni Mitchell teaches us that “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 “Nothing?”

Ms. Mitchell is pointing to a 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, 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 blank 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.

I hesitate to use this analogy but why not, we are all adults. When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress (and I hung on every word) 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 that 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” to bridge the gap between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be.” And I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is what we are doing--parsing the verb “to be.” There has “to be” something out there or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s go back to our little Freddy or Frederica learning that Fido is a dog, and that there are some useful ways of behaving that will help avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding and training and learning to gauge Fido’s moods, as well as how to get him into his dog house if need be. But the question for me remains how do we get from there to “why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?”

How did this become the religious question and why is it so important to get the correct answer? And to lay out the direction of my paper. I’m going to ask a Buddhist before Thomas Aquinas though I might use him as my reference point when I try to describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. My intention is to just see if I can hold them as an object of meditation, in a good 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.


1 Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research