Here’s what happened in the last essay-- Pragmatism says that a belief is true if it produces the expected outcome in the world, as verified by empirical evidence.  I guess this standard is fine for analyzing other people’s beliefs, but it doesn’t help me at all.  I act in the moment, right now, on limited data, and I don’t know the outcome.  Common-sense gets me through the everyday, but for foundational matters, I need strong faith.  I need strong faith because for the things that matter, like marriage, I won’t know the outcome for decades.  In brief, life requires faith not pragmatism, and not just faith in anything: I need faith in the right people. 

 

Next, I ask whether faith extends from real people to God.  Is faith in God real, or am I just spinning myself up?  Different folks have different answers, and everyone walks through his own door.  William James says,

 

“The world may in fact be likened unto a lock… nature has put into our hands two keys, by which we may test the lock.  If we try the moral key and it fits, it is a moral lock.  If we try the unmoral key and it fits, it is an unmoral lock.  … The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a legitimate part of the game, -- that it is our plain business as men to try one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide.”  From Will to Believe, 1897, essay: Sentiment of Rationality.

 

I recall a story from Darryl Cooper (Martyr Made).  He was around 13 or so, at a revival meeting, and one by one his friends all heard the preacher’s call and walked to the pulpit, including the girl that Mr. Cooper liked.  She looked back at him asking, why aren’t you coming?  He just couldn’t do it.  Wrong door, wrong time.

 

I think of my dear old friend, Professor L, who is himself and no other.  He has his own key.  Professor L sees a universe of matter in motion, no more, and he stays humble and enjoys a good laugh.  For the Professor, if the world must have deities, let there be a separate deity for every village, and every villager can bang a drum and howl at his deity in his own way.    

 

I don’t need to shed tears for the Professor’s lack of faith because he’s doing just fine, thank you.  Hell, he might be right that I’m working myself into an hysteria with all my God stuff.  In Sentiment of Rationality, James says, “he who in the main treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis verify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honor to his sagacity.”

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What about the God of William James?  James is willing to believe in God so long as He fits within a pluralist universe and doesn’t come with big words like perfect, absolute, all-knowing, eternal, infinite.  James prefers a finite, open-ended divinity, closer to the God of the Old Testament.  The same is true of another of my intellectual heroes, Freeman Dyson.  In his book, Infinite in all Directions (essay: Butterflies Again), Mr. Dyson says that 

“God is not omniscient.  He grows with the universe and learns as it develops.  Chance is a part of his plan.  He uses it as we do to achieve his ends…. For those of us who would like to believe both in God and in free will.… Free will is the coupling of a human mind to otherwise random processes inside a brain.  God’s will is the coupling of a universal mind to otherwise random processes in the world at large.”

 

I deeply admire Messrs. James and Dyson, and I’m partial to their vision of God, but I can’t walk that path.  Their speculation is free.  The agnostic philosopher talks about God and religion and he has the luxury of holding out for more evidence and for slight changes to the definition.  But when I walk through the door of faith, I walk to someone who’s real, someone I can't re-define.  That’d be like re-defining my wife as someone else, someone more better.  No, I don’t get that choice, and anyway I’d rather have my wife, the real woman who is who she is, the woman to whom I’m grateful.

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Faith isn’t free.  When I have faith in someone, I take her as she is, and she binds me.  God says, I am that I am, and once I accept Him, I accept the fact of His will, and once I go to church, I’m bound by my church’s position on Him.  God and church make demands of me, and I don’t get to negotiate terms.  In sum, real faith restricts me: to believe in Christ is to belong to Christ, to submit, to re-order myself by his actions and words in the New Testament... and now I’m no longer talking about God because I’m already relating with He who makes demands of me (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis).

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All my life, I’ve been proud that I think for myself, and I've never backed down from my intellectual independence... hence I've engaged in the idolatry of me.  Self-worship.  In the words of St. Augustine, I am homo incurvatus in se: man curved back on himself.  Pity us lifelong agnostics whose moral key opens a door to religious faith, always proud yet wishy-washy, always negotiating terms, always the doubts about being a pretender.  I go through the door, jump the abyss and dangle in midair like a damn fool.
 

Which is why I’m grateful for Roger Scruton-- next essay.