I want to talk about faith, and I want to come at it from the perspective of two of the greatest modern philosophers: Immanuel Kant and Douglas Adams.
In Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Immanuel Kant tries to reconcile two seemingly impossible demands: the priority of human freedom and the ultimate subservience of humanity to God’s will.
This was of course a longstanding problem in Protestant faith, with huge and bitter debates over predestination generating major factional conflicts in the previous centuries. However, Kant is not precisely trying to resolve those conflicts. Instead, he’s trying to secure the philosophical primacy of reason.
At the heart of his philosophy (expressed in far more depth in the more famous Critique of Pure Reason) is a belief that reason alone is capable of establishing a synthetic moral order. Armed with the tool of a reason, a subject is capable of originating a moral order that he [sic] can accept as binding.
In Religion, Kant tries to establish a notion of freedom, which he contrasts with ‘choice.’ To choose is an act of agency, but it is a limited sort of agency. You can choose haphazardly, without any particular care for the implication of the choice, and (most importantly) with no sense that the choice stems from a moral maxim. I choose to eat oatmeal for breakfast; I choose to take this path rather than the other; I choose to do what feels good even though I know it isn’t right. Freedom exists when my choices stem from will, when I affirm that my choice can serve as a maxim of the moral law of reason.
But this is a very strange concept of freedom! An act is only truly free if it is expressed within the scope of reason. Except where does reason come from? Do I invent it, as the thinking subject? If so, then reason is entirely subjective and determined by each person, and it’s indistinguishable from mere choice. If it exists outside of me, then my supposed ‘freedom’ is an illusion, since it implies that I am only free if I choose to accept absolute external authority over my decisions. And even more critically, the principle of reason is meant to ensure that all thoughts can be grounded in rules (maxims) that make them universalizable. But where does this chain of foundations end? What, at the center, provides the justification for reason itself?
Kant’s answer is to return to faith, in the hope of deriving the underivable. And the thing I find truly fascinating about this argument is how well it maps onto the work of one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers: Douglas Adams. To illustrate, let’s first consider his discussion of the Babel fish:
“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leachlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, p. 59-60.
Then consider this, from Kant:
Whoever, say, for authentication, demands in addition also miracles…thereby confesses at the same time his moral unbelief, namely his lack of faith in virtue…for only faith in the practical validity of that idea which resides in our reason has moral worth.
Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, p. 69.
Obviously, Adams’ point is made through satire while Kant’s is deeply serious. But they are both getting at the same thing. Namely: that the power of the sacred stems precisely from its inaccessibility. If the meaning of faith could be precisely defined, it would cease to be faith. If God can be perfectly described, he would “promptly vanish in a puff of logic.”
And I think it’s actually important to come at this point from Adams’ perspective. Because Kant—for all of his brilliance—is too damn stodgy to capture what is really going on with faith.
To show what I mean, I want to first work through what Kant is trying to get at.
One way to think about it: Kant is essentially trying to construct a moral universe that operates on Newtonian principles of determinate meaning. We may not always understand, but the math itself is perfect. You can never just say “this must be because God wills it” or “this effect can’t be explained, so it must be a miracle.” This sort of reliance on external miracles is wrong because it locates the generative act outside the subject. This denies the capacity for the subject in and of itself to articulate and then act upon just maxims.
In Kant’s view, there is only one true miracle: the capacity to exercise the freedom of self-construction. This miracle, by definition, is inaccessible to reason. It can’t be established or ‘proved’ because it is the thing that makes proof possible in the first place. It is one “of whose cause the laws of operation absolutely are and must remain unfamiliar” (Religion, p. 98). Our certainty that we are capable of articulating a moral law to govern ourselves in freedom is proof that justification is possible. But this faith in the existence of morality can’t be justified itself. It simply is, or is not. To have faith is to believe that it is.
Kant concludes the book by deriding those who attempt to anthropomorphize God in the name of offering him worship. He thinks that this sort of ‘worship’ is actually antithetical to God’s will because it amounts to nothing more than the shirking of responsibility. To venerate ‘god’s law’ as if it exists outside and above us is to refuse God’s greatest gift: our capacity to generate the law from within.
And this is all good, and very interesting stuff. But the thing it’s missing is any sense of irreverence, any feeling of delight or wonder. And not to dig too deeply into the personal history, but it’s not hard to see Kant’s Pietist upbringing at work in his philosophy (and his habits and occupations for that matter). He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who finds anything remotely humorous about life, religion, faith, morality, or any of the other bizarre things we all lean on for security and comfort.
But what are human beings other than a huge mess of contradictions and desperate energy seeking a purpose? I’m all for trying to make some kind of sense of it all, but I often struggle to take seriously any philosopher or Great Thinker who appears to find nothing funny about the predicament of human existence.
That’s why I genuinely think that Adams should be considered one of the key philosophers of the 20th century. Because there are very few writers I have ever encountered who can match his perceptiveness and skill at isolating exactly what is so preposterous about our self-satisfactions.1
So his take on the problem of faith is joking, but makes a quite serious point. Or actually, makes several serious (and not entirely compatible) points. First, it illustrates (along with Kant) a real and central feature of faith: its basic incompatibility with proof. It also then sends up the sort of rules-lawyering practices of philosophers who fixate on logical rules as if you can concede premises to ‘win’ arguments. Combining these two elements gives us a new way of reaching Kant’s argument, but also takes the wind out of its sails in the process. That’s solidified in the conclusion: having disproved God, Man then proceeds to blow himself up with his own ammunition. Of course he does.
The core issue here is that faith doesn’t make sense. It can’t make sense. If it did, it wouldn’t be faith. Kant is doing very interesting work, trying to articulate how faith in God and faith in reason can co-exist, but at some fundamental level it breaks down—not because there’s a necessary logical incompatibility, but for a far stupider (and more transcendental) reason: because human beings make a mess out of everything we touch.
Kant recognizes the embedded contradiction in his theory of reason—it relies on a certainty of justification that can’t itself be justified—and sees God’s grace as the key to unlocking the problem. But maybe the better answer is to recognize the contradiction as ultimately just a more sophisticated version of the four year old kid who keeps asking “why” until it drives his parents mad. What eventually convinces him to stop asking ‘why’? Is he presented with a final incontrovertible foundation stone which admits no further inquiry? Or does he get distracted by his train set and wander off to do something else fun?
I’m certainly not trying to suggest that esoteric philosophical or theological inquiry is pointless and we should all just go play with our trains. If nothing else, I’d personally be out of a job. But we all would benefit from having our self-certainty and seriousness punctured from time to time. After all, the real test of faith isn’t whether it can stand up against an army of reasons. It’s whether you are secure enough in your beliefs to be able to laugh at them now and again.
Who else is in the conversation? Nietzsche, certainly. Walter Benjamin. bell hooks. Shakespeare. Wittgenstein in his best moments. David Foster Wallace.