Minimalist Monotheism

The Limits of Logic

Let us begin with logic, because logic—and the somewhat more nebulous thing called “science”—is often treated as faith’s natural enemy. For convenience, I will use a Humean division between the tools of logic and the empirical world. Logic is a mechanical instrument: given determinate inputs, it always produces determinate outputs. (I am not claiming that the outputs are “correct,” only that they are determinate; nor am I discussing the historical development of logic itself. Here, “always” refers to one particular logical system left unchanged.) Outside logic lies the empirical world, made up of human perception and induction. Hume pointed out how unreliable experience and induction can be: a pig in a pen may conclude that breakfast arriving every morning is a law of nature, only to discover on Christmas morning that breakfast is not coming because the pig itself is going to be slaughtered. The limitation of logic is that its inputs can only come from experience. Logic may guarantee the determinacy of its outputs, but because its inputs are empirical, its conclusions remain empirical as well—which is to say, in Hume’s sense, unreliable.

Hume’s division was later criticized. Kant, for example, argued that the so-called empirical world itself depends on logical structures. Even so, the distinction remains useful in practical work. One example comes from my experience with formal proof assistants. In a formal language, we can define concepts and prove propositions about them—for instance, that the output of a linked-list sorting algorithm is always a sorted linked list. The proof assistant can guarantee the validity of the logical inference. What it cannot validate is the act of definition itself: the process of formalization remains empirical. A proof assistant cannot tell you whether the thing you defined as a “sorted linked list” really corresponds to what you mean by a sorted linked list.

No matter how powerful a logical system becomes, some empirical tail always sticks out of it. We have to “believe” that tail on the basis of experience before we can believe that the operations inside the logical system mean anything at all, rather than being the motion of empty symbols. More expressive and more complicated logics can reduce the portion we must accept on empirical faith, but they cannot eliminate it altogether.

Science is softer still. Unlike logic, the very concept of science already includes empirical inputs, so even its process of inference cannot be regarded as fully reliable. The physical counterpart of Hume’s pig is simple: physics can calculate the gravitational attraction between two objects, but physics does not answer why gravity should still exist one second from now.

My Faith

Hume’s purpose in making arguments like these was to attack rationalism—the idea that human beings can understand the world completely through reason. He was not trying to defend religion; his contemporaries often regarded him as an atheist. Yet, amusingly, Christians today frequently borrow his arguments to defend Christianity in a modern culture that prizes the “scientific spirit”: I can study physics while believing that a God who loves order is the reason gravity will not disappear tomorrow. Such arguments are often paired with painstaking archaeological evidence for the resurrection of Christ, all in an effort to demonstrate to atheists who “believe in science” that we are every bit as rational as you are.

To me, this is an obvious sign of modern Christianity being swallowed by rationalism. From the perspective of the previous section, faith does not operate within reason. It is a tail protruding from reason. Even if you personally witnessed the resurrection of Christ, reason alone could not establish that his claims about the salvation of the human soul were therefore true. Why, for example, could he not simply be some lesser deity with a malicious sense of humor and a taste for tormenting humans?

What makes faith distinctive is that this tail is not empirical either. You can only believe it without reason and then use it, much as one uses a self-evident axiom in mathematics. Hume himself rejected this kind of thing: whatever came from neither experience nor logic, he famously thought, belonged in the fire.

Here, then, is my faith—that is, the thing I believe without reason:

Absolute sovereignty over the world belongs to an omniscient and omnipotent God.

This is the foundation of monotheism in general. Actual monotheistic religions, however, require several additional beliefs on top of it. One example is the correctness of scripture: a Christian must believe that the writing and transmission of the Bible, under God’s protection, possess an absolute correctness of some kind. As a tail outside reason, a minimal faith places less burden on reason. For now, believing in the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God is enough for me. The existence of the human soul, the Fall, salvation, and judgement are not part of my faith.

For readers unfamiliar with the concept of faith as I am using it, I want to emphasize the point once more: faith does not operate within reason. This means that reason can neither defend God nor attack God.

One familiar attempt to attack omnipotence asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it. But this paradox is plainly a problem produced by the logical machinery itself, not a problem with God. The inability of a logical tool to capture something does not imply that the thing does not exist; formal systems, for example, cannot completely establish their own formal correctness from within themselves.

Another, more vulgar form of attack is to smuggle in a value judgement. I once heard a Christian pastor criticize Buddhism on the grounds that Buddhism lacks concern for worldly human life, whereas Christianity is deeply concerned with it—and that, therefore, one ought to believe in Christianity. Similar arguments can of course be made in the opposite direction. But if faith is dogmatic in the sense described above, we do not arrive at it because reason presents us with the “better option.” Faith is a blind loyalty to something that cannot be proved or falsified.

The View This Faith Provides

My monotheism is deliberately minimal, but even this minimal version is enough to derive a fairly complete picture of the world. In this section I will lay out the conclusions I have drawn so far.

One qualification is important: my aim is to derive conclusions without quietly introducing new articles of faith as premises. I may, of course, fail at this without noticing. And because the faith itself is so sparse, there are necessarily many questions I cannot answer. This does not trouble me. Acknowledging the ignorance that comes with being human is itself part of the perspective this faith produces.

God’s Absolute Justice

From God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty over the world, we can derive God’s absolute justice.

Here, “justice” should be understood as what ought to be: whatever God brings about is what ought to happen. If instead we understand divine justice as ordinary human fairness, we immediately fall into a problem that has been discussed countless times: if God is both omnipotent and just, why is there so much evil in the world, and why must human beings suffer endlessly? Christianity’s classical answer requires a certain amount of intellectual gymnastics. It introduces original sin and free will in order to explain why suffering does not compromise God’s justice: suffering, in this account, results from humanity’s abuse of free will.

But if justice means “what ought to be,” suffering is not a problem in the first place. God’s justice comes from sovereignty over the world, not from a value judgement. Even if evil flourishes and good people suffer, all of it remains just in this sense.

If that is difficult to accept, I can add two points:

1. As human beings, we can never know what an event really means, because we cannot see the whole from the scale of the world itself. The death of one person, or the destruction of an entire social class, does not mean that the time has come to settle the accounts of justice. The world has not finished unfolding. We do not actually know what the tragedies and comedies that have already occurred will ultimately mean.
2. Humanity is not the owner of the world, and God does not act according to the justice human beings would prefer. The Abrahamic religions emphasize a special relationship between humanity and God, but that claim is not part of my faith. Perhaps humanity is merely a tool God uses, within a thousand years that pass like an instant, to move the state of the world toward some target value. Human welfare need not be part of God’s intention at all.

What It Means for the World to Unfold

From God’s omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty over the world, we can also conclude that the unfolding of the world is an expression of God’s will.

By “the unfolding of the world,” I mean the movement of everything. But “movement” suggests a unified and linear process, and we have no reason to assume the world is that simple. If we replace “the unfolding of the world” with “movement,” we would have to include both the movement of things we know and the possible movement of things unknown to us.

The basic proposition here is straightforward. Absolute sovereignty over the world means that the world’s unfolding must take place within the scope of God’s will. There are only two minor complications worth discussing.

The first is the familiar dispute over whether the world unfolds mechanically and whether free will exists. The Abrahamic religions generally affirm free will. Some atheists who “believe in science” insist that every movement was already fixed at “the Big Bang”. Modern philosophers often regard the entire argument as metaphysical teeth-grinding with little substantive meaning. But whichever side is right, nothing changes about God’s sovereignty. Whether the world is mechanical or continually changes itself as it unfolds, it remains under God’s sovereignty.

The second complication is deism. If God made the world and then “left it alone,” how could the unfolding of the world still express God’s will? But this question quietly presupposes a “world outside the world”: God exists in some external world, turns away, and neglects ours. My definition of the world is meant to be complete. There is no “world outside the world.” The complete world, as a whole, is the complete expression of God’s will.

What It Means to Live

On the basis of this faith, I understand an individual life as a microscopic form of the world’s unfolding—that is, as a microscopic reflection of God’s will.

As such a reflection, every way of living, no matter how noble or contemptible by secular standards, inherits God’s absolute justice. This means that people may choose their own way of life; their existence is itself evidence that it ought to exist. At the same time, an individual life becomes a concrete answer to many metaphysical questions. Why, as I complained above, do the wicked (you lot) prosper while the righteous (my venerable self) suffer? God does not answer us directly. But we can live out the answers to such questions, because God’s will is present in our lives.

On the other hand, every life will be irresistibly integrated into the complete unfolding of the world. We cannot know what our birth or death ultimately means for the world. But if we insist on asking what our lives mean, we can at least infer that the world, as it is unfolding now, requires our lives.

The same inference applies to death. A person’s death means that this death is required by the world’s unfolding, and that the world’s continued unfolding no longer requires that person to remain alive.

For the first twenty-five years of my life, I was deeply afraid of death—especially of the idea of disappearance. A continental philosopher might say that our time, or our lives, do not belong to us; we are merely monkeys caught in the structures of language. The first half of that particular “consolation,” at least, also belongs to my faith.