Tag: infinity

Comte-Sponville: non-dogmatic, faithful, atheist mysticism

Infinity

1189 words, 6 min read

Avvenire, the Italian daily affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, has published a very interesting piece yesterday by the French atheist philosopher André Comte-Sponville, entitled “The atheist believes … But does not know whether God exists.” As I started reading it, I was immediately reminded of an enriching exchange with some atheist friends of mine – especially SC – after I wrote a very negative review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion some three years’ ago. SC, at the time, presented a new type of atheism to me, which acknowledges its belief in there being no God, as opposed to the New Atheists’ argument for that position following directly from rationality. Reading Comte-Sponville’s words made me immediately recognize that same position, and I would like to share an English translation of it with you here:

““Religion” and “spirituality” are not synonyms, nor should they be put on the same level. These two concepts function instead like species and genus: religions are a certain species, or several species, of the genus spirituality, but from among the many possible, some of which do very well without any personal God, indeed without any form of transcendence. [… S]pirituality is [simply] the life of the spirit.

Etymology speaks clearly: the two words, “spirit” and “spirituality”, derive from the Latin spiritus, which refers first of all to vital breath and, in second place, to inspiration, genius, wit, esprit. Now, atheists, as far as I know them, have no less spirit than others. Why should they have less spirituality? Why should they care less about spiritual life? As for me, I have always been interested in it. That’s how it was at the time of my youth, when I was a practicing Christian; but since I stopped believing in God, spirituality interests me even more, which might seem paradoxical and leads us to the heart of our subject. Those who have a religion, also have the spirituality that characterizes it. But how about those who do not belong to a religion? They seems devoid of spiritual resources, especially in the West. Even more reason to think about it. I summarize my position in one sentence: I am a non-dogmatic and faithful atheist. Why atheist? This is the simplest question: I do not believe in any God. Let’s not dwell on the reasons for my not believing; doing so would take me far away from the theme of my argument here, which is not metaphysics, but spirituality. Why a non-dogmatic atheist?

Because I obviously recognize that my atheism is not knowledge. How could it be? No one knows, in the true and strong sense of the verb “to know” whether God exists or not. It depends very much on the question that is addressed to me. If I am asked: “Do you believe in God?”, The answer is very simple: “No, I do not believe.” But if someone asks me, “Does God exist?”, the answer is necessarily more complicated, because, for intellectual honesty, I must begin by saying that I know nothing about it. Nobody knows. I say in my book, if anyone says, “I know for certain that God does not exist,” you are not dealing with an atheist, but a fool. The truth is that I do not know. Likewise, if you meet someone who tells you: “I know that God exists,” he is a fool who has faith, and who, foolishly, confuses faith with knowledge. But in the confusion between faith and knowledge I see a double error: a theological error, because in any respectable theology (at least in Christian theology) faith is a grace, while knowledge can not be; and a philosophical error, because it confuses two different concepts, that of belief and that of knowing. In short, I do not know if God exists or not; I believe that he does not.

A non-dogmatic atheism is an atheism that admits its own status as a belief, in this specific case a negative beliefs. Being non-dogmatic atheists is to believe (rather than to know) that God does not exist. But why a non-dogmatic and faithful atheist? A faithful atheist because, as an atheist, I remain bound with every fiber of my being to a number of values – moral, cultural, spiritual – many of which were born in the great religions and, in the case of Europe, the Judeo-Christian one (unless one wants to deny their history). […] Being an atheist doesn’t mean that I have to turn my back on 2000 years of Christian civilization or 3000 years of Judeo-Christian civilization.

Because I no longer believe in God doesn’t mean that I refuse to recognize the greatness, at least human, of the Gospel message. A spirituality without God is a spirituality of loyalty rather than of faith and of love in action rather than of hope. I could stop here, but I would be left with a feeling of not having touched the essentials. I said earlier that spirituality is the life of the spirit. Fine. But if the word is taken in such a broad sense, every human phenomenon ends up falling under the umbrella of spirituality: morality and ethics, of course, but also science and myths, the arts and politics, feelings or dreams. All this belongs to the spiritual life in a broad sense (in its cognitive, mental or emotional dimensions), to the life that, for clarity, you could define as psychological or mental (from the Greek psyche and the Latin mens, two words that can also be translated by the word “spirit”, but in semantic terms very different from those derived from the Latin spiritus). Now, it is not at all these areas that you think of when it comes to spiritual life.

It is better to take the word “spirituality” in a narrower sense (although, paradoxically, a more open one), making it a sort of subset of our mental or psychological life. The definition I propose is the following: spirituality is the life of the spirit, but especially in its relationship with the infinite, eternal, the absolute. This meaning seems to me to conform to its use and tradition. Our spiritual life is our finite relationship with the infinite, our temporal relationship with eternity, our relative relationship with the absolute. Thus defined, spirituality, at its must extreme, culminates in what is usually called mysticism.”

In an earlier interview, Comte-Sponville expands on what he means by “the absolute” as follows:

“This absolute, for them, isn’t a person, but the being or the becoming, the whole or nature, let’s say the immanent totality which contains them and surpasses them. They can ponder it, think about it, it’s what we call metaphysical, but also try it out, live it, and it’s this we call spirituality. We are open in the grand Open, as Rilke says. This opening, it’s the same spirit. Should I, because I am atheist, renounce all experience of eternity, the infinite, and the absolute? Certainly not. Many philosophers – for example Epicurus and Spinoza – have challenged the existence of a transcendental spirit, without renouncing the enjoyment of what Epicurus called ‘immortal rights’. It’s this I call a spirituality of immanence.”

Does the word “infinity” make you uncomfortable?

The Dominoes Are Falling

I learned a lesson today: never read the parish newsletter before the start of mass. This morning I did and it just lead to regret as I spent the vast majority of mass being distracted1 by it and trying to reconstruct in my mind the reasons against an argument put forward in it. What is even worse is that this wasn’t just the regular newsletter that our parish priest prepares (and that has as yet lead neither to disappointment, nor elation), but a newsletter – “Our Faith on Sunday” – prepared by the company who provides the weekly mass sheets and who ought to know better.

The argument in question is that of Aristotle’s unmoved mover (or first cause), which is a form of the cosmological argument. The basic idea is the following: since all change (motion, temperature variation, …) is the result of a previous change, there are two possibilities: either a causal chain stretching back into an infinite past or a first, “unmoved mover” that triggered a finite chain of causal links leading to the present. The possibility of infinite regress is dismissed as ridiculous, ergo there had to be a first mover. So far Aristotle’s argument from over 2300 years ago, which at that time was unarguably brilliant and which has survived without chinks into the 18th century (this by itself being pretty impressive too!). So, Aristotle comes out pretty well from this incident. The same cannot be said about the nameless author, who not only sticks it into a parish newsletter in 2012 without attribution, but who – to add insult to injury – finishes the piece with saying that the “unmoved mover” is God.

No it ain’t! And that is just the start of a litany of complaints that flooded my mind this morning, with the following being the 800 pound gorillas:

  1. In this context, the gravest mistake is clearly to present a piece of philosophy (however good it may be) and to equate it with God. Not just to say: “Well, this concept gives us hints about some aspects of what God may be like,” but to say “Unmoved mover = God.” Not only is this entirely divorced from Christian theology (giving a false sense of being able to grasp God in His fullness, etc.) but it is positively counterproductive. In essence the argument postulates a God who is relegated to a distant past, who is far removed from us and who just plays the role of a snooker player, hitting the first ball that leads to a vast sequence of knock-ons – a true God of Gaps. This is not the God of Christianity. It is not the loving Father who sent his Son to become one of us and the Holy Spirit to guide us. It is not the God who’s three persons love one another to the point of being one and who invites us to partake in His innermost life. The “unmoved mover” is a cheap imitation and one that is rightly and thankfully the butt of atheist jokes.

  2. Next, taking a philosophical argument made over two thousand years ago and (presumably, hopefully!) not checking whether there have been any significant challenges made against it is pretty sloppy too. And an excuse of obscurity cannot be used here either as the cosmological argument (whose one variant this is) has been debated to death! Furthermore, its critics have included such giants of philosophy as David Hume, who challenged the notion of causation itself (arguing that our senses simply don’t have access to the necessary connection between supposed cause A and supposed effect B – instead, all we have are repeated experiences of event B following event A). With causation undermined, there is clearly no necessity for a “first cause.” Does that mean a disproof of God? No – just of the grotesque God of Gaps of the cosmological argument, and not a disproof as such (those live exclusively in the realm of mathematics or other formal systems – and even there are limited by incompleteness) but a counterargument instead.

  3. Finally, and this is a criticism that I cannot fairly level at the authors of the newsletter, there is also that recurring misunderstanding of infinity that hampers many a philosophical argument from centuries past. Before Georg Cantor’s groundbreaking work on set theory and the concept of cardinality and the subsequent advances in our understanding of infinite sets and their properties (with contributions by pioneers like David Hilbert), an arm-waving approach to infinity and blanket statements about its unintelligibility or impossibility (e.g., by Thomas Aquinas2) were all we could manage. Today these are just not good enough anymore. E.g., a good example of how the impossibility of an infinite sequence of causes can be refuted can be found in Peter Clark’s paper: “Consider the set of events with no first member but a last member: {… an … a4, a3, a2, a1, a0} [where] for every j (aj-1 causes aj). There is no logical contradiction in this supposition whatsoever. […] Every event in the above sequence is finitely accessible from each and every event preceding it.” What this means is that an infinite sequence stretching back in time does not imply the necessity for a member that is infinitely far in the past. No matter how far you go back in the sequence (i.e., an) – and remember that you can’t go back to the beginning, which does not exist – there is a finite number of steps that bring you to the present (i.e., a0). All the infinity of the sequence means is that there is no first member, without necessarily entailing members that are infinitely removed in the past. This may sounds counterintuitive, but presents no logical contradiction.3

So: lesson learned. Next time, I’ll defer reading the newsletter until after mass and especially its “Faith and Reason” section, where, ironically, Aristotle’s argument was plagiarized.

1 I almost missed this gem of a line from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “And this is my prayer: that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value” (1:9-10), again pointing to an induction of orthodoxy from orthopraxy.
2 “The existence of an actual infinite multitude is impossible. For any set of things one considers must be a specific set. And sets of things are specified by the number of things in them. Now no number is infinite, for number results from counting through a set of units. So no set of things can actually be inherently unlimited, nor can it happen to be unlimited.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 7, Article 4).
3 I realize this paragraph barely scratches the topic of infinity, to which I hope to return in the future … Also, please, note that I am not advocating an argument for the universe having existed infinitely – I am merely pointing to the objection to an infinite causal chain being outdated.