As Published On
→ The Human conspiracy
Blog: http://www.jaygaskill.com/blog3
And
The Policy Think Site: http://www.jaygaskill.com
All
contents, unless otherwise indicated are
Copyright ©
2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 by Jay B. Gaskill
Permission
to publish, distribute or print all or part of this article (except for
personal use) is needed. [Permission for use in group discussions is almost
always routinely given.]
Please
contact Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law, via e mail at law@jaygaskill.com
HUMANISTS, ATHEISTS AND BELIEVERS
INTIMATIONS OF
CONVERGENCE
WHY WE NEED
THE MORALLY AWAKENED ATHEISTS
AND THEY
NEED US
This was updated on April 8, 2008
An earlier version of this manuscript
contained an excerpt from a discussion between Christopher Hitchens and a Roman Catholic scholar. That part was a bit too long and it tended
break the flow of this exposition without adding anything that I couldn’t
summarize in a single paragraph. I added the paragraph and deleted the
discussion.
INTRODUCTION:
INTIMATIONS
OF CONVERGENCE?
Mobilizing the Allies
of Necessity
I write this as a neo-theist who rejects the right
of any particular institutional religion to monopolize access to the holy, the
true and the good, and as a practicing Judeo-Christian who finds refuge and
nourishment in a particular tradition.
Here’s our problem in a nutshell: A Dark Age has
never been far from the human condition, but we now face a new threat that
will, if ignored, drag us, kicking and screaming, back into the pit.
This threat requires that all humanists
(broadly defined as those who find common refuge in liberal civilization and
the underlying moral foundation essential to its survival) must locate our
common moral ground and stand on it together.
This is a heads up call to the friends of the human species of all
stripes - religious, anti-religious,
atheists, theists, theologically indifferent - all of us who care about the dangerous
prospect of the destruction of liberty-friendly civilizations and understand the
necessity of providing ongoing protection for peaceful human creative
activities:
The name of our common threat is contagious
nihilism.
It has many faces and guises. Whether nihilism erupts under the thin veneer
of an ideology (almost always a form of secular or religious fanaticism) or in
its idiopathic forms, it is difficult for many civilized people to detect the
common thread at its core.
The recent upsurge of family murders followed
by the suicide of the perpetrator (how we might wish the suicide had gone
first!) was prefigured by the disgruntled homicidal employees who – for a time
– contributed to the common epithet, “going postal”.
Well, the Post Office has been exonerated.
The common thread in all these cases is existential
and essential human disconnection (social, cultural and moral). This is a
rupture that is never adequately describable in mere psychological terms. Moral terms are also necessary. It may be prefigured by social disconnection
(from family, friends and community) but contagious nihilism represents an
essential disconnection in which the moral lifeline, the vital link to the
holy, the true and the good, has been severed.
This disconnection allows a form of suicidal
narcissism to take hold. It begins
with a seductive, malevolent delusion, one that holds out the lure of solace via
destruction. In this mindset, you long to bring down all that irritating goodness
around you, to negate all the examples that make you “feel bad” about yourself;
you bring them down to your level (by getting them to share your addiction,
poverty of spirit, your sense of futility and failure – it’s a very long
list. When that project fails – and it
always does, except in a Dark Age - you long to bring them the extinction they
surely deserve. After all, you are the
moral center of all the reality that matters. .
So in the extreme case, large scale murder is
validated, and suicide becomes the grand exit.
The clinical term malignant narcissism applies to these cases,
but hardly captures the evil manifested in the latest nihilistic mutation:
murder-as-therapy.
As I have written elsewhere, this is the
common tread that links the Islamic extremists who are practicing homicidal
jihad-as-therapy with all of the other disgruntled ideologues and our local
grown murderous nutters many of who haven’t a clue why they are killing people
before killing themselves.
This presents a particular challenge for all
people of good will who support the fundamental ethos of creative civilization.
But we find ourselves engulfed in a
nihilist-friendly post modern culture so infused with multicultural tolerance
that the moral component of the growing pattern of malevolence is rendered invisible.
Just as our need to find common ground
and stand on it together is most acute, just as our species finds itself in the
greatest need for a spiritual/ ethical / religious renaissance, we are tearing
ourselves apart in a primal (and unnecessary) struggle between the religious
and anti-religious, between the believers and the anti-believers.
But Will Religion
Survive?
Developments in the 21st century will
determine the future of major religious institutions for a thousand years.
Specific institutions and practices will wither, but spiritual practices and
beliefs will probably endure, because they are driven by needs central to the
human condition.
Institutional religion itself will arrive at
a critical moment when its very survival is at risk. Human religious
institutions will remain relevant and robust only to the extent that they
continue to serve their primary function, which is to provide safe and vital
places for the sacred, authoritative centers of moral wisdom, and vital
supporting communities united in common spiritual practices.
Increasingly, there is a free market in
religion. That trend will accelerate.
Most European have already voted with their
feet. Chapels, churches, cathedrals, and temples, largely empty of worshipers,
have become de facto museums.
Is there a Humanist
Convergence in the Making?
In the best case, we may see a powerful
convergence of two currents. A humanism of renewed depth and reach, grounded in
transcendent authority (which may or may not be understood or expressed in
theistic terms) may join those branches of religious and spiritual practice
which are equally universal in depth and reach. This convergence will take
place – if it does at all -- whether or not the teachings and doctrines of the
religions and spiritual disciplines survive in their present institutional
forms.
We can see the vague outlines of this trend
already. But we can already see the power of a superficial secular hedonism and
the attraction of spiritual hedonism, in which an aromatic crystalline
narcissism has filled the God shaped hole in the psyche.
GETTING
BEYOND
SECTARIAN AND SECULAR BICKERING,
LOCATING
THE COMMON MORAL GROUND
We should not be terribly
concerned – or distracted - with the institutional history of any church. It should come as no surprise to any student
of the human condition that our social institutions are flawed and that we
humans all too often succumb to the lure of power.
We can take that as
a given.
I think the real
issue is much more fundamental, and can be described as the problem of “faith.”
Since our information about life, the universe and everything is now and will
forever remain imperfect, and that our individual life situations constantly
require us to make decisions based on imperfect information (to take a lover,
to have a child, to leave a job, to start a war), all of which require acts of
faith. The real conflict is always between reasonable and unreasonable
faith.
At the level of
life’s major intersections, faith is best described as a deeper approach to
reality than mere physical empiricism allows. When we say that someone acts in
“good faith”, we are implicitly acknowledging that faith aims at truth, though
not always perfectly.
All faith that is
not strongly reinforced by one’s experience is provisional, unless one, by
virtue of some absolute a priori
commitment, simply rejects evidence in advance.
I prefer to think of provisional faith as inherently heuristic.
The heuristic
property of provisional faith comes from an open mindedness to new information
and insights and a sense of journey: this mindset is engendered by a core set
of operating beliefs, none of which are inconsistent with the general stance of
the scientific mind:
(a)
that
“there’s more to life, the universe and everything than meets the eye”;
(b)
that
“mere” human conscious intelligence is pre-equipped (for most of us, at least)
to receive information about the domains of reality that can’t be empirically
verified in a controlled physical experiment;
(c)
that the
capacity for empathy, the perception of beauty, goodness and awe, represent key
faculties of “mere” human conscious intelligence; and that all our empathic
inspirations, and apprehensions of
beauty, goodness, and “awe worthiness”, are pointers to another domain, the
reality of which is not fully captured in any mere physical description;
(d)
and that our
knowledge of these things is necessarily imperfect and “subject to error”.
THE “POST-THEISTS” WHO MAY CONVERGE
I find it interesting that the atheist author Christopher (“God Is Not Great”) Hitchens, in many conversations, seems almost ready to accept - at least provisionally - the Einstein-Spinoza view of an intelligently organized universe. This would go a long way to explain his acknowledged sense of awe at the beautty of creation, one explicitly shared by that famous atheist-mystical humanist, the late Carl Sagan.
For my own part, I think we must undertake the task of climbing out of that arid desert of the soul -- that imagined realm where there exists no good, no evil, and no loving Creator - as a matter of survival. Finding the way up and out is a matter of attaining the appropriate scale perspective and a willingness to take in the deep implications.
We have a hint of that process from that nominal atheist, Carl Sagan, who wrote:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you
look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone
you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived,
lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands
of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and
forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations,
every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every
mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every
corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and
sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended
in a sunbeam.
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of
the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory
and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the
dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot.
How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another,
how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our
imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in
the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will
come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said
that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience.
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human
conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Excerpted from the famous
commencement address delivered by the late Carl Sagan
on
Without necessarily being able
to explain how, human intelligence is able to proceed from the awe-at-creation
narrative to an ethic of kindness and compassion.
Awe is the beginning of wisdom.
Humanists have been struggling with the “death of god” of at least of what Einstein called a “personal god” for the last 200 years or so. I find two figures very interesting and instructive as guideposts on the path towards the hoped for convergence: Spinoza and and the legendary Dr. Albert Schweitzer, whose life affirming humanism is almost universally venerated.
Each life story is somewhat emblematic of the two enduring threads in the non-religious humanist tradition.
Spinoza’s vision of reality was of a well ordered materialism in which all was part of the God whose essential nature was order; this was hardly the deity of Abraham, Sarah and Jacob, and it seemed to allow no room for good and evil because, all was God.
Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow 17th century Jews.
“[H]aving
long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, they have
endeavored by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But
having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily
receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which
he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this
numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect
in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of
this matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the
honorable hakhamim, they have decided, with their
consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the
people of Israel...”
Spinoza was later reclaimed by his modern Reform Jewish coreligionists. His 20th century almost-but-not-quite secular camp follower was Albert Einstein, another ethically enlightened humanist, one who – truth be told – was not a full-on atheist, but certainly one who had rejected a “personal god” in favor of an impersonal Source-of-all-order. The core issue with Spinoza’s materialist pantheism is the problem of evil, which I view as a problem in moral differentiation.
Schweitzer’s ethical model, reverence for life, was colored by a tragic vision in which he saw a universal will-to-live torn by the Darwinian struggle. We can trace his sense of revulsion to the deeper normative unity implied by the use of the term “universal”. I located Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s compelling aphorism (“The world presents the ghastly spectacle of a universal will-to-live divided against itself”) in his book, “Philosophy of Civilization”, long out of print. Put so elegantly, his inadequately differentiated life affirmation seemed to blur the distinction between intelligent, morally conscious, creative human life and animal life. The core problem with Schweitzer’s world view is the added value of intelligently directed creative activities and, inter alia, of the extraordinarily complicated developmental processes that have brought them into being-in-the-world. We humans fail, of course, but we do incarnate the novel virtues of benign, life affirming creation. Again, I see a problem in moral differentiation.
Both thinkers clearly experienced reverence for the universal. But I detect a similar confusion in both Spinoza’s arid pantheism* (ref. my extended footnote discussion about “the god models” below), and Albert Schweitzer’s richer, but tragic Reverence of Life.
It seems to me that both models missed or disregarded the moral distinctions based on the local presence of absence of living, volitional, moral conscious, creative beings (Spinoza’s rocks, trees, and stars, may be “God” - the non-local whole - but they are not living sentient, thinking moral agents, and Schweitzer’s animals, though alive, are not as morally valuable, say, as a small child). To be fair, Schweitzer was a physician, and his actual practice was more reasonable than his aphorism implies; he saved people in preference to animals. An aphorism, however penetrating, is not an axiom.
Both models, it also seems to me, seem to blur the nature and significance of intelligent morally aware, potentially creative consciousness beings vs. proto intelligent non consciousness objects or pre-conscious living things. Not everything in the “world” is equally alive, or equally awake. Spinoza and Schweitzer’s visions (however compelling in part) seem less morally persuasive to me than classic historically-founded humanism, the kind abstracted in the aphorism “man is the measure of all things” attributed to Protagoras, and given flesh during Renaissance Italy.
I note for later discussion that - like some of the biblical models – Spinoza and Schweitzer’s humanism share a common a view of the world as – for better or worse – essentially a finished project of the Creator (for Spinoza, perfect in its cosmic order or for Schweitzer, eternally broken by endless cannibalism).
THE ‘GOD’ MODELS
Ecclesial humility begins with the
insight that all our attempts to describe the Creator of all that is, the Architect of all moral foundations, the
Holy One, all of our attempts to capture that which cannot be captured, will
fail. We may apprehend God, but of
descriptions, especially those set out as “theologies”, these are just = useful
approximations, the “God Models” of the day.
Theism in its most common forms is dualistic, in that it posits the world and humans as separate, created entities, not actually directly sharing in God’s being. [In the Hebraic model humans are modeled after the Creator, but connected primarily though a dialogic relationship that many Christians find exemplified in the life of Jesus.]
Pantheism, in its most comprehensive form, does not allow for evil except as part of a God-as-Universe whose very ontological dominance trumps the independent existence of all else. To a degree, theism encounters the same issue, because of its premise that God, though separate from Creation, continues to exercise some level of control over events. Many theologians (presumably including some pantheists) address the problem of evil through the model of kenosis, or a purposeful divine withdrawal or emptying from creation.
So the question naturally arises: How, in the world described by comprehensive pantheism, can a human love God authentically or be loved in return? How can evil truly be “of God” and truly evil?
Panentheism is a term that first appears in the writings of Karl C. F. Krause (1781-1832), popularized by the Harvard trained Unitarian theologian, Charles Hartshorne, (1890-2000) who taught at the University of Chicago) - and more recently by Matthew Fox, the former Roman Catholic priest who was re-ordained as an Episcopalian rather than return to Rome to face a possible heresy admonition.
Both Pantheism and Panentheism attempt to
close the sharp dualism between deity and creation, but Panentheism attempts to
do so by allowing for independent loci of being that enjoy an ontologically
independent existence and scope of action without being “far from God.” In the Panentheist model, all reality -
material and not material – is in God. By analogy, the universes
are parts of the divine body, but the divine persona and consciousness is
greater than the sum of all the parts. But
the subparts are engaged in the processes of creation.
“Santiago Sia [in
his God in Process Thought,
Please note that I share a criticism of pantheism that also applies to some versions of panentheism: I believe that evil must be clearly differentiated from deity; but the necessary moral differentiation becomes almost impossible in those metaphysical models and theologies that fail to account for how forces in the “real world”, even intelligent forces, can arise in opposition to the moral order. [The “primitive” vision of Satan as rebel actually did a better job at this.] Any valid system of ethics, at least in my moral universe, must account for the duty of all moral agents to detect evil and to actively, courageously and intelligently oppose it. After reflection, I line up with those accounts of evil in which the realm of “the world”, i.e., that of space-time bounded material/physical reality, is seen in a state of development leading to the emergence of living creatures who become morally aware and who increasingly “incarnate” the divine moral virtues. In these models of reality, when we notice the fragility of the developing good, we are strongly called by the divine conscience to vigorously oppose and overcome evil forces. These are the evil intelligences and agencies in the world that would, if unchecked, abort the good, innocent and hopeful, smothering them in the nursery, so to speak. Yet, even in my moral universe, failure is possible, even common. We are endowed with the capacity for conscience and the power of optimism; we may expect divine support and encouragement but we can be given no guarantee of “victory” within any one mortal life. Of course the topic of evil deserves more attention than I give it here.
Atheists of the morally outraged variety – Christopher Hitchens comes
to mind - rightly reject an “arid materialism”; it is the core implication of
the atheistic materialism of Marx and the source dispiriting moral ambivalence
of those who allowed Marxism to become a murderous tyranny. In this rejection of “arid”, amoral
materialism at least, the atheistic humanism of Christopher Hitchens and Phillip
Pullman are very similar in their esthetic and ethical richness.
Christopher Hitchens is
an engaging, thoughtful essayist with a conscience worthy, say, of Burke. Phillip
Pullman is a wonderful writer,
living in
From each writer we get a sort of Eric Hoffer-esque* contempt for all forms of ecclesiastic authority.
*
Hoffer’s best work, “The True Believer”, exposed Nazism and communism as secular religions the organizational morphology of which mirrored the authoritarian religions that both Hitchens and Pullman deplore. I had the privilege if seeing this passionate, coherent, trenchant self educated longshoreman twice in the sixties, a man who maintained from life experience that the common people were “lumpy with talent” and that the idle intellectuals were a dangerous combination of skill and lack of judgment.
Among the species of morally outraged atheists, the contempt of the abuses of ecclesial authority is a bias-engendering attitude that is allowed to reflect back against divine authority itself. For these intellectuals, the abuse of earthly authority by church is presumed to reflect that of the divine. It is as if some of the institutional proponents of religion are actually mirroring an unjust deity. The resulting atheism is morally inspired, and entails the rejection of a deity that is seen as too external, too hierarchical, too controlling and too unjust. I also get the strong impression that these, and other humanist atheists, are reacting to a specific theological construct as if it were the only one – while possibly knowing that it is not – in order to make a more effective moral critique. In this they might resemble the early first century Christians who, from the point of view of the Roman polytheistic pagans, were the world’s “first atheists”.
I believe that the deeper core of this thread of atheistic
writing, imbued as it is with a civilized humanism, represents an overbroad
rebellion against non-essential religious doctrines, like the vicarious denial
of moral accountability based on one version of Christ’s atonement for the sins
of the rest of us for all time. [I acknowledge that this statement of the
atonement doctrine is something of a caricature.]
CURING “P E A S”
I propose that the “hate religion” reaction patterns,
when closely examined, tend to be versions of “Post Ecclesial Abuse Syndrome”
or “PEAS’.
This may explain why the typical secular atheist’s (or agnostic’s) threshold of proof for acceptance of the divine’s existence is so often set much higher than for any other beliefs that aren’t empirically verifiable in the sense of a controlled physical experiment. To someone of conscience who is infected with PEAS, the outcome of such a belief system seems to validate one’s arbitrary condemnation by “higher authority”, the loss of one’s creative autonomy and even the diminution of individual moral accountability.
PEAS finds its original
impulse in divine-engendered conscience.
After all, many of
us who are the neo-theists, if you will, are equally offended by any loss of
any human creative autonomy and we also vigorously oppose the cheapening of
individual moral accountability whether via value-free multi-culturalism or a
theology of fuzzy, pan-value “forgiveness”.
Then there is the “this life is much more important to than any mythical life after death” point of view. This formulation (true as it is - in part) avoids two life’s tow great questions:
(1) What, if anything, should matter to us, post-mortem?
(2) Why?
I should note that, among the most morally self conscious
secular humanists, the notion of conscience is usually accepted
as a given. But it is too often taken as a comfortable, unexamined given,
without the necessary (and difficult) inquiry as to “How can this be?” [A
brilliant attempt to answer this question has just been written by Jacob Needleman, a philosopher of
the old school, one equally comfortable quoting Socrates,
It is assumed, I suspect, that as long as conscience is shared among one’s civilized colleagues, further inquiry is neither necessary nor fruitful.
Again, the deeper question remains essentially unanswered (Why should we care about anything that happens after we die?) other than by saying, “because I want us to”.
Among the wisest and most sensitive secular humanists you tend to find a confession of longing for some of the comforts of the religious sensibility - “If only it were true”, they tend to concede, followed by – “but I care most about what actually is the case”.
What if “God is actually the case” As if the non-atheists did not also care about the truth.
One senses that for an atheist of a certain stripe to weaken his or her hard stance, say, by believing in a universe imbued with meaning and purpose, is somehow psychologically threatening. I sense that it threatens to set up the “believer” for profound disappointment. First it was the Tooth Fairy. Then Santa Clause. Then the Indisputable Moral Virtues of the Clergy. You can almost see the still painful wounds revealed by this stance. This is PEAS as wounded hope.
So we tend to hear the claim that one’s awe at the majesty and beauty of nature is the sufficient substitute for that which is dismissed as supernatural belief. [“See we have a sense of material transcendence, after all!”] But this, too, is done without a deeper inquiry as to why the human faculty for awe-filled apprehension should be even possible for us.
Ultimately, what is really being rejected here? I suspect it is the model of an extrinsic deity, one that is all too easily appropriable by abusive human authority, a deity that – from the perspective of these critics – is (if real) unwilling to intervene against the counterfeit prophets.
But missing from this worldview is a robust connection to hope, holiness and the divine intelligence; these are the gifts that only the confidence engendered by faith can provide us. In the last two examples I detect the atheism of the painful disappointment of the disillusioned.
To be fair, at the same time I have witnessed evidence of a robust sense of conscience and justice among many self professed “non-believers”. But this commitment, however passionate and brave, must be asserted by our atheist friends as an arbitrary stance, firmly held “in the air” as it were, but without the taint of a foundation in “faith”.
This is sometimes called heroic atheism. I firmly believe that any dialogue abut the human condition will be enriched by their welcome inclusion.
THE TELLTALES
Wherever we find ethical integrity and fierce moral allegiance we are detecting evidence of an explicit or implicit pan-generational source of ethical motivation. I propose there are “god implications” in such moral alignments towards the universe, whether acknowledged or not.
We can readily find the telltale “God traces” in the natural world (our sense of awe is a clue), but we often disregard them and neglect to tease out their implications.
There are the clues inherent in meta-scale morphology of things (e.g. that at some yet unidentified moment or pre-moment, being was selected over non-being; that an unexplained Singularity generated the Big Bang, which in turn, generated Big Civilization), and the fleeting epiphanies of the receptive mind. [Many of our atheist friends encounter the numinous level of human experience without naming or acknowledging the encounter.] Yet there will always be a reductive explanation.
But equally, there will always be a much deeper and wider context, one that points to the subtle operations of Ultimate Being.
THE PROPOSED REORIENTATION
We would do well to reconcile the atheistic and paleo-theistic preconceptions about deity that dominated our species’ former centuries with an emergent understanding. This emerging reconciliation is foreshadowed but not fully accomplished in the notion of “panentheism”, a model I’ve cursorily outlined here.
Below I discuss several of the newly emerging insights that will take us beyond both pantheism and panentheism. These are some insights and ideas as developments in theism that take us beyond its dualistic formulations into (for want of a better term) neo-theism.
(a) from the model of a extrinsic controlling creator to an understanding of the “pantrinsic” subtly urging creator;
(b) from the conception of a complete natural order to an acceptance of and engagement with a completing natural order;
(c) from the notion of a natural order fractured by randomness and discontinuity to one in which the divine engendered creation processes exploit apparent existential randomness and discontinuity to achieve an opening to essential emergent being which leads the natural order to ever higher and more subtle integrations.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Fate is provisional ….
In life, we make fateful elections. These are choices between our alternative “destinies”.
Each choice links us to a potential cascade of events. Each decision line leads us to an emerging destiny. The further we travel down a chosen line, the more it becomes destiny in the classic, ancient sense.
I think that Heraclitus was getting at this notion in his famous aphorism, “Character is destiny”.
Heraclitus, who lived near
I now believe that this core insight, writ large, of a universe still incomplete and of the Deity-form, still incompletely expressed in the “World”, will be the basis of the great humanist-theistic convergence in thought later in the present century or early in the next.
Waiting for the convergence is a bit like waiting for the discovery of extra-terrestrial persons who also have discovered the benign footprints of deity and have sometimes felt that awesome and comforting Presence. Most of us will have to wait a bit longer than a single lifetime for faith-validation. That does not make a particular faith unreasonable. For example, I have the reasonable faith that, should I pass away in the night, the dawn will still come, that babies will still laugh and the innocent will still be defended. We can all go to bed tonight and every night knowing that the Good News embedded in the warp and woof of the universe will, in spite of everything, continue to find its way into the World of men and women…
[][][]