Guest Blogger Joseph Porter on the Inevitability of Mystery

It’s my pleasure to welcome guest blogger Joseph Porter to Cloud of Witnesses.  Joseph is a rising sophomore at Harvard College and Features Editor of The Harvard Ichthus, an undergraduate Christian journal at Harvard. He blogs at The Fish Tank (the blog of The Harvard Ichthus) and Deus Decorus Est.

“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

What do the Atonement, the Incarnation, the Trinity, Christ’s marriage to the Church, and the Resurrection of the Dead have in common?

The obvious answer is that they are pretty important Christian concepts. The less obvious answer is that they are mysteries of the faith (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:51-54, Ephesians 5:31-32, and 1 Timothy 3:16, inter alia).

What does it mean for God to become Man, or to be three Persons? The most honest response I can give is “I don’t know.” God gave us the Bible, a collection of texts concerning God’s pursuit of mankind and our various responses – not an instruction manual for formulating Christianity within the framework of twenty-first century analytic philosophy. Of course, every once in a while, we may sit down, scratch our heads, and figure out a theological question or two. More often, however, we are left with mysteries.

As a Christian, I confess that mysteries sometimes bother me. Why do I believe in Christianity if I cannot even understand it completely? Am I “copping out” intellectually? It certainly is easy to feel that way when good answers to important questions are elusive – or (for now) non-existent.

But mysteries, if you think about it, aren’t all that mysterious.

Shouldn’t we expect mysteries? Shouldn’t we expect it to be the case that we don’t understand everything perfectly? Shouldn’t we expect to be . . . human? After all, if mysteries did not exist, we would know everything. We would be omniscient – gods, even. But it is obviously not the case that we are omniscient or divine. For us, mysteries are inevitable.

We are embodied creatures whose understanding of the world is derived largely from our senses. How we think about things is fundamentally limited. We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch a four-dimensional world. That is it. We struggle in vain to imagine imagine anything but a four-dimensional world – even though our world may not even be four-dimensional. Even within the confines of my four-dimensional worldview, I can’t imagine the echolocation of dolphins or the sound-color synæsthesia of my friend Gio. Echolocation and synæsthesia are, in a sense, mysteries to me; I can ascertain certain facts about them (e.g., how they may correspond to certain neurological states of affairs in delphine brains), but little more. Obviously, that is hardly justification to deny their existence! But God is far more different from me than dolphins or synæsthetes. Thus, I should not only accept a mysterious God, but expect a mysterious God. A God Who is not mysterious – Who is somehow circumscribed by our impoverished imagination – is no God at all. Asking God to explain Himself fully would be like asking a dolphin to explain echolocation. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Of course, this isn’t just true from a Christian perspective. The fact of the matter is that every belief system – including metaphysical naturalism – has mysteries. (Trust me, quantum mechanics is mysterious.) If someone tells you that his belief system has no mysteries, he is either God or a liar.

The difference between Christianity and some other belief systems (such as the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) is that Christianity is operating with entities and substances that really should be mysterious. God may not exist, but if He does, we surely cannot understand Him completely. Belief in God is belief in the Transcendent – and the Transcendent is, well, transcendent. When God declares that His thoughts are higher than our thoughts (cf. Isaiah 55:9), He is saying something rather obvious. How could God’s ways not be higher than our ways?

The real mystery, to me, is the current popularity of the idea that “Science” will someday answer all our questions – the idea that there someday will be no mysteries. Even if modern physics didn’t have the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this much trust in human reason would still be woefully misplaced. After all, according to the scientists, we are glorified apes who arose from random processes and are ultimately no different from any other organism. If that is the case, what grounds can there be for idealizing our cognitive faculties? If anything, we should be astounded by the (relatively feeble) capacity for abstract thought we actually have. In a way, the most interesting thing about biology is biologists – organisms capable of studying themselves systematically. That minds arose from mindlessness – that truly is a miracle. (In fact, I have difficulty imagining that our current capacity for abstract thought could have developed without divine intervention. I am boggled when I think about the sheer brainpower that went into something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems or Debussy’s Clair de lune. I concede that prehistoric Man probably benefitted from basic arithmetic – but whence the leap from multiplication tables to this?)

For me, reality ends up being much less mysterious with God than without Him. I may not entirely understand the Trinity (for example), but I see no reason why I should be able to understand it entirely. Moreover, I see no real rationale for believing that the conjunct of spatiotemporally bound matter and energy we call the “universe” could have come into being on its own. In the eyes of science, at any rate, the universe remains very much a mystery; as (agnostic) Robert Jastrow writes, “Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced the effect? Who or what put the matter and energy in the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions.”

In the end, I must agree with Chesterton: “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

Philosophy Word of the Day – Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

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Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic Priest in the Dominican Order and one of the most important Medieval philosophers and theologians. He was immensely influenced by scholasticism and Aristotle and known for his synthesis of the two aforementioned traditions. Although he wrote many works of philosophy and theology throughout his life, his most influential work is the Summa Theologica which consists of three parts.

The first part is on God. In it, he gives five proofs for God’s existence as well as an explication of His attributes. He argues for the actuality and incorporeality of God as the unmoved mover and describes how God moves through His thinking and willing.

The second part is on Ethics. Thomas argues for a variation of the Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. However, unlike Aristotle, he argues for a connection between the virtuous man and God by explaining how the virtuous act is one towards the blessedness of the Beatific Vision (beata visio).

The last part of the Summa is on Christ and was unfinished when Thomas died. In it, he shows how Christ not only offers salvation, but represents and protects humanity on Earth and in Heaven. This part also briefly discusses the sacraments and eschatology. The Summa remains the most influential of Thomas’s works and is mostly what will be discussed in this overview of his philosophy.

(Via Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

“Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”

- Aquinas

Trailer for New Peter Jackson Movie, The Lovely Bones

I haven’t read the book The Lovely Bones (any opinions on it?), which this movie is based on, but the trailer looks compelling.  GalleyCat summarizes,

Director Peter Jackson has released a trailer for his adaptation of Alice Sebold‘s bestselling novel, “The Lovely Bones.”

Jackson directed the acclaimed adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and the trailer showcases some of his trademark fantastical landscapes. The actors starring in the filmed version of the bestselling novel include Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci.

Here’s more from Paste Magazine: “The expansive cast is made up mostly of veterans, but the girl at the center is Saoirse Ronan, who was a knockout in another high-profile literary adaptation, Atonement. The trailer is a little exploitative (which the movie no doubt will be, too), but the earnest beauty is hard to resist.”

See the trailer on YouTube here.

37 Tips for Better Blogging

Some great ideas here from Daily Blog Tips for easier and better blogging.  Here’s the first fifteen:

Plan out content with pen and paper.

Dedicate time each week to think of ideas.

Make it easy to record ideas.

Build a life of unique experiences.

Use WriteRoom for typing.

Set limits on the time allowed for writing.

Always have a large backlog of content.

Follow a lower frequency of posts.

Capture interesting tid bits you find with Evernote.

Be passionate.

Write about a broader niche.

Take extended breaks.

Don’t write till you drop – stop writing when you’re on a roll.

Follow clear structures in your content (headings, sub-headings, bullet points etc).

Pick a predominant medium.