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By Adam Dahmer, Class of 2013
With secularism on the rise in American popular culture, especially among youth and in academia, the question has arisen as to whether the belief in God is logically permissible in the modern age. Interestingly, while the vast majority of scientists answer the query with a resounding “no”, theism lingers among a sizable majority of philosophers. I was at first uncertain as to the basis for this statistical discrepancy, but have come to realize that it represents the fundamental dichotomy between philosophy and science.
At the nascence of formal scientific inquiry (and, indeed, for thousands of years thence) there existed no distinction between the fields of philosophy and science. It was not until the Renaissance that natural philosophy (the study of the material world based on the analysis of observable phenomena) became disentangled from the broader philosophical body, which dealt with more abstract concepts like morality, existential purpose, and the nature of human consciousness.
With the advent of the Enlightenment, the practitioners of natural philosophy opted to describe themselves not as philosophers, but scientists – thereby discarding their historical roots and elevating their profession from a mere substrata of academic thought to an independent field of study whose sole mode of inquiry was empiricism. Empiricism – or the derivation of knowledge from testable evidence discernible to the senses – is central to the scientific method, and has always been essential to the advancement of human knowledge. However, with the development of modern science, there arose an entire discipline which used empirical validity as the sole criterion for determining truth, a phenomenon unprecedented in human history. No sane or intelligent person would argue that empiricism has no place in understanding the world, but there is no reason it why should have the only place.
In the empirical model, any entity whose existence is unsupported by sufficient material evidence must be determined not to exist until proven otherwise. Secularists who justify their disbelief by adherence to empiricism contend that because there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of God, He quite simply cannot be. In doing so, however, they make the assumption that that empirical model is universally applicable to all facets of existence – a claim which (ironically) lacks sufficient supporting evidence to be believed.
In the divorce of science and philosophy, each party claimed half the estate of world understanding. To science went the study of the physical world, and to philosophy went the study of the metaphysical. By design, the empirical model is uniquely tailored to enable the comprehension of material objects. It requires an altogether different model, however, to gain a clear understanding of things that are quite simply more than material.
This concept is elaborated by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his 1844 discourse on modes of inquiry entitled “Philosophical Fragments” and its later-published addendum, the “Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” In these works, Kierkegaard reveals that God is not an object, but a subject, and must therefore be understood in a similar way to a human being. Not in an identical way, of course, because whereas human beings have at least an objective component (a body that can be undergo empirical observation) God, as Kierkegaard conceives him, does not.
Immediately, a non-theist might object that if God can be said to exist only subjectively, then all notions of divinity should be dismissed off-hand. If that is true, however, than we cannot justify our society’s adherence to numerous beliefs just as subjective as the notion of a living God – the widespread reverence for love, for instance. Love, if understood empirically, is nothing more than a highly complex series of electro-chemical signals that occur in the brain as the result of wide ranging physical stimuli. The same is true, in fact, of all emotions. And yet anyone who has been in love – or overwrought with grief, consumed with hatred, or paralyzed with fear – knows that the experience of emotion involves something far beyond the neurological processes revealed by medical science – something outside materiality altogether.
There is, of course, the argument only those things which can be determined to have matter can be said to exist at all. This, as it turns out, is a simple matter of semantics. The term “existence” does indeed typically connote an object – something which can be concretely measured and has physical properties like mass. However, there are once again entities that do not according to these criteria exist, but which still “are”. Emotions, once again, are an example, but so too are concepts like darkness. Darkness is only the absence of light, and so should not be said to independently exist. None the less, it would be nonsensical to say that there is no such thing as darkness, and equally nonsensical to assert that there is no non-physical component to existence simply because it cannot be understood by empirical means.
Something beyond the physical, is, by definition, metaphysical, and thus to negate all things metaphysical simply because they exist outside the empirical purview is to deny an entire dimension of existence, and one that ought instead to be celebrated. If our every emotion and intuition were consigned to irrelevance, the world might indeed proceed more rationally, but at the cost of what for many is the very meaning of life.
So this Christmas, be mindful of your feelings, and proceed serenely in the knowledge that although they can claim no empirical validation, they most certainly exist. For the believer, the same can be said of God.
If by now you still disagree, read more Kierkegaard.
Adam Dahmer, of Fisherville, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He is studying political science and Spanish.