“A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
Certainty of Mystery
Before knowing anything else about a rules-based system (other than whether it is non-trivial), before knowing its axioms and assumptions, before knowing its theorems or proofs, and even before knowing its applicability, we already know that it is incomplete in the sense that it contains unprovable truths. Gödel proved this. Since our universe is a rules-based system, it follows that, before we can be certain about anything, we can be certain of mystery.
A central thesis of this book is that the existence of unprovable truths is fundamental to reality. In other words, truth will always be found surrounded by uncertainty. The impossibility of an answer is the best evidence of its eternal truth.
Four characteristics about paradox emerge from this understanding: first, that the mystery often manifests as paradox; second, that such paradox is real and not mere trickery or imprecision of language; third, that we ought to get comfortable with paradox hanging around (even if we have not yet achieved Job’s level of comfort with it); and fourth, that paradox constitutes not only the substance of the mystery, but also the means by which we can recognize the truth in the mystery.
Our incompleteness is evidence of the existence beyond that is more real than this one. For many millennia, humanity didn’t need Gödel incompleteness to point to a transcendent reality. The universe – creation itself – was sufficient evidence of that. According to Paul the Apostle:
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.”[1]
Today, human inclination has veered away from the discipline of contemplating the spiritual (the invisible) through observing the material (the visible), and toward a belief that the material encompasses all that there is to understand. This is scientism, and what is lost through adherence to scientism is the ability to recognize that the transcendent exists.
Scientism limits efforts of intellect and reason to the boundaries of the universe, and therefore is itself confined to those same boundaries. By limiting ourselves and our thinking to the things that cannot transcend, we lose the ability to discern truths about things that do transcend.
Modern culture predominantly values the visible, temporal, and material over the invisible, eternal, and incorruptible because of pride, attachment, and need for control. In short, in the absence of God, we make ourselves gods. Thus, in a flurry of abject unoriginality, we recommit Original Sin.
Ironically, while claiming Nature to be absolute, scientism subjugates Nature to human will. By placing Nature both above us and below us, we pervert God’s order, forgetting that Nature is a creature just as we are creatures. As Chesterton quipped in Orthodoxy, “Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.” We are offspring of the same Father.
Thus, it is disordered to worship Nature or to subjugate it. The tendency toward such disorder can be countered by seeking to better understand Creation not merely by the scientific method but by the things that cannot be understood, by mystery. God’s Creation reveals to us elements of God’s character, and those revelations can in turn be used to better understand His Creation. This is the proper ordering of love of God before love of things. We must renounce the exclusivity of sense-based knowledge.
The laws of nature explain the regularities, but they cannot explain the anomalies, the singularities, the miracles.
The verdict of science is that we have no idea how the universe came to be (that is, how matter arose out of no matter), how organic life emerged from no life, and how consciousness emerged (not to mention what physical mechanisms sustain it, or what it even is). Regarding these, the only aspect we can even begin to explain is the emergence of variety in nature. But even the most ardent apologists for evolution by natural selection admit that it explains very little.
While science can speak about the Natural, it cannot speak to the Supernatural. However, the very fact that science exists is, at the very least, highly suggestive that the Supernatural exists. Science can only be done by conscious, thinking beings, and there is no natural mechanism for the emergence of conscious, thinking beings. As C.S. Lewis wrote, and poetically I might add, “In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”[2]
Scientism will always attempt to reduce reality to the observable and measurable; but by doing so it denies everything beyond it that gives meaning to our lives. Even the most renowned existentialist and atheist philosophers like Jean Paul Satre and Albert Camus recognized that a universe without God quickly reduces down to absurdity, and that absurdity doesn’t leave much room for life to have meaning. But science relies on nature following a set of rules; science cannot be accomplished unless the universe has meaning.
It has been said that the ability for science to describe the universe in terms of orderly and repeatable mathematics is in itself a miracle.[3] People like to wonder whether God will survive science. It seems the better question is whether science can survive scientism.
Reason’s Greatest Discovery
No tension exists between reason and mystery. Indeed, human reason that finds nothing beyond its comprehension is broken; it is called mere rationality. Mystery is reason’s greatest discovery. Without mystery, everything that reason could contemplate would be less than itself.
But reason that can peer into mystery and embrace its unanswerableness is reason that can contemplate something greater than itself, even infinitely greater. “In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain?”[4]
There is no tension between reason and mystery; rather reason is how we remain suspended within the sacred tension of mystery. The fact that truth, beauty, and meaning are hidden in mystery and shrouded by paradox is necessary for reason’s continued development and growth. This is the driving force, the strange loop engine, for better understanding the invisible by the visible, which in turn elevates how we understand the visible.
Through reason, we thereby relate ourselves to the infinite. This happens one way or another, either by disregarding reason and considering ourselves to be limitless, or by recognizing reason’s limitations and resigning ourselves to the reality of God’s infinite mysteries. Lean not on your own understanding, but trust God.[5]
God is Constantly Acting
One of the great mysteries is that God remains active in our lives and in the universe, constantly creating. The clockwork-like regularity of our universe can give the false impression that God is disinterested and inactive, as if He just wound up the clock and let it go.
The reality is that when God speaks, He calls things into being. His words, even those long ago spoken, forever reverberate throughout the universe, doing His will. Creation is God’s voice constantly echoing.[6] God is not idle. Only idols are idle.
“The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not see; they have ears, but they do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths. Those who make them and all who trust them shall become like them.”[7]
If we want to be able to truly see, hear, speak, and breathe, we must put aside our idols, our belief in the finality of science, our reliance on material things, our need for certainty. If we want to truly live, we will join our voice to God’s voice, which is the only thing truly acting in the universe. Otherwise, we are dead like the idols we have fashioned from our own hands.
The best example of the constancy of God’s action is the Incarnation, which sparked a New Creation from within Creation. God, who exists apart from His Creation, made Himself part of Creation to renew Creation. As the union of God and man, Christ’s every word and deed, every teaching and healing, every command and sacrifice, exemplified how God touches our lives in every moment. God didn’t just create us, He works to re-create us in the image of Christ Incarnate.
As Jesus said to His accusers:
“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled—can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”[8]
As the union of God and man, Christ showed us our destiny. Coming to terms with Christ’s dual nature means coming to terms with our intended nature. And so, once again, we see how we are called to join our actions to His actions, which are the only actions worth joining. It is not we who prove God, but God who proves the world.
What are Miracles?
Mystery is real. (Check.) Indeed, mystery is more real than what we call reality. (Check.) Recognizing this is the pinnacle of reason. (Check.) God is constantly working in our reality from His existence in the transcendent. (Check.) Now, given that all this is true, what happens when the transcendent collides with our reality? Miracles. Miracles are bits of the transcendent shining through.
People typically think of miracles, if they think of them at all, as violations of the natural law, as interference with the Natural by the Supernatural. Such a definition might lead someone to believe that miracles are exceedingly rare exceptions, and therefore that miracles are not repeatable in the same way that science is repeatable. But one does not necessarily follow the other.
Miracles are not subject to the repeatability of science because miracles come from outside of science – from outside of the natural universe. Nevertheless, miracles are happening all the time, and the evidence is all around us. The fact that life exists and emerged from no life is a miracle; it is surely an unrepeatable event from the standpoint of science, but whether it is an exceedingly rare event is debatable. Indeed, the fact that anything exists – that something came from nothing – is a miracle.
But does that mean that miracles violate the laws of nature? How can miracles violate the laws of nature when the fact that nature behaves laws is itself a miracle? How can miracles violate the laws of nature when nature was created by a miracle? Christianity understands that miracles do not contradict reality; rather, to a certain extent, miracles are responsible for reality. Miracles are what happens when transcendent reality touches our reality.
Moreover, miracles can only exist as miracles if there was already an established regularity in Nature that they could appear to defy. However, once a miracle occurs and is accepted, it then demonstrably exists, and so we stop calling it a miracle.
Harkening again to the example of the emergence of life, life spontaneously forming out of no life is not something that has ever been directly observed, and we cannot reproduce it in a lab. And yet, without any good explanation whatsoever for how it happened, we believe that it happened. Why? Because life exists. The emergence of life from no life is an anomalous event that defies regularity. It is a miracle that no one can deny because their very ability to deny it proves it.
Belief in miracles is not an attempt at an explanation. Those who believe in miracles do so with ample evidence. Those who disbelieve the existence of miracles do so out of blind faith, in the failure to recognize their own limitations.
One difficulty with accepting miracles is that they defy description. After all, the only language we have is language that describes our reality. We have no language to describe the transcendent reality. The best we can do is use metaphor.
You may hear people say that descriptions of the Supernature are “mere metaphor,” or “mere imagery,” or “mere allegory,” as if metaphor, imagery, and allegory were somehow ‘less than’ the literal. This is a false impression to the extent that what is being described by the metaphor is something more true, something transcendently true.
When describing what cannot be fully explained because it is, at least in part, outside of this world, we should not expect to be able to describe it in literal terms. In fact, any attempt to describe transcendent things literally will fail even before it is attempted, because the thing resides outside of the world in which the language is contained.
This, perhaps, is the point that Wittgenstein and the objectivists were making when they cautioned against talking about things for which we have no adequate language. But their conclusion was to refrain from talking about them, missing the fact that we are beings who are capable of glimpsing the world beyond, even if our words can’t express it.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”[9] Our eyes do not see with God’s eyes, our ears do not hear with God’s ears, and our words do not describe God’s glory. But that does not stop us from trying.
Threading the Needle
It is impossible to have no opinion on the question of our ultimate destiny, even if that opinion is that it’s best to remain indifferent. And yet, most people do not put in the time, effort, or energy necessary to support whatever their opinion happens to be. Certainly, very few seek to understand what Christianity has to offer them in this regard.
People who are disciplined about nourishing their body, who exercise and eat well, who discipline their will and challenge their intellect, yet remain unoccupied with nourishing their spiritual life or with building strength of soul. With everything else in life, they understand that good habits take concerted effort and a lifetime to build; but with the spiritual, they simply rely on their innate sense and leave it at that, content in the conclusion that seeking to learn more is, apparently, not worth their time.
Jesus promised that those who seek shall find, that those who knock shall have the door opened to them, and that those who ask shall have it given to them.[10] Yet even this we cannot be bothered to do.
Those who cannot be bothered to admit of the existence of the transcendent mystery typically fall into one of two camps: the secularly gnostic or the religiously agnostic. To be secularly gnostic is to be a follower of scientism, one who collapses the transcendent into the observable universe out of a belief that science will ultimately be able to produce answers to every question. To be religiously agnostic is to simply see no value in grappling with the unanswerable mysteries of the transcendent, and to therefore ignore the existence of mystery.
Embracing paradox is neither gnostic nor agnostic. It threads the needle between them. Resigning to the mystery overcomes secular gnosticism through humility, which is a disposition of accepting one’s own limitations. Resigning to the mystery overcomes agnosticism through docility, which is a disposition of being ready to receive.
We thread the needle by surrendering the confidence of pride and taking up the docility of obedience. We thread the needle by being comforted by the fact that the unfathomable mystery is under God’s full control.
Relinquishing the Right to Answers
Ultimately, the path to sainthood involves faith. But faith doesn’t put an end to the questions. If anything, faith increases the questions. Instead, faith involves relinquishing the right to answers, and therefore embracing the paradox.
We are not like God. We cannot understand things He understands. Insisting on an answer to the mystery is either lack of humility or lack of common sense, which perhaps amount to the same thing. When people point out the insignificance of humankind in this universe (an unnoticeable speck on a tiny planet orbiting a smallish star on the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy among billions of galaxies), it is usually in support of an awkward attempt to disprove God. But the diminishing of man does not diminish God, in the same way that comparing a smaller number to infinity does not diminish infinity.
Any finite amount, large or small, divided into infinity becomes vanishingly small, approaching zero. Actual insignificance and actual diminishment involve remaining stuck in the flat loop of insisting on answering the mystery. The only way out of the loop is to go up, to transcend it by accepting mystery as mystery and not getting caught up in our own hubris.
Accepting paradox is what adds the strangeness that transcends the loop. This is the comfort that Job experienced in the realization that God’s infinite greatness both diminishes us and elevates us at the same time.
None of this to say that we should not arm ourselves with the truth. Sometimes we are confronted with controversies, heresies, and outright evils that must be battled with a specific aspect of the truth, but that should not result in denying other aspects of the truth.
For example, the heresy of Docetism, which held that Christ was a purely divine being with a merely illusory human form, was corrected by asserting Christ’s full humanity. However, that did not mean denying Christ’s divinity. How often do we polarize issues in such a way that we are forced to take one side or the other, but cannot tolerate both?
Immigration in the United States is one such issue. Somehow, the virtue of welcoming the immigrant has morphed into inviting utter lawlessness, and the prudence of orderly border processes is seen as synonymous with xenophobia. The truth is that controlled borders and lawful immigration processes go hand in hand with welcoming immigrants. Human exploitation and degradation thrive on lawless chaos. While border enforcement can become cruel when corrupted, so too can compassion.
We so crave bright-line answers that we allow polarization to divide us not just from each other but from the truth. If we do this with conventional political issues, how can we help from doing the same with paradoxes?
The story of the golden calf[11] is about insisting on control rather than surrendering to God. The Israelites wanted an idol of the God who freed them from Egypt that they could worship the way they wanted to worship. Their error was not in making an idol of some competing god. Their error was in attempting to control how they related to the one true God.
The same drive to wrest control is what prevents us from relinquishing our right to answers, and what prevents us from embracing paradox. We must relinquish our right to answers, both in triumph and in defeat, in joy and in suffering. This involves being aware of our own limitations. After all, we are not God.
“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who has directed the spirit of the Lord, or as his counselor has instructed him? Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice? Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?”[12]
[1] Romans 1:19-20 NRSV-CI.
[2] Miracles, p. 212.
[3] See, for example, Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” reprinted in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. I, February 1960.
[4] Confessions, Book 10, Part VIII.
[5] See Proverbs 3:5.
[6] Consider Psalms 62:11-12, NRSV-CI, stating, “Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, and steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord. For you repay to all according to their work.”
[7] Psalms 135:15-18, NRSV-CI.
[8] John 10:34-38, NRSV-CI. In this passage, Jesus quotes Psalms 82:6.
[9] Isaiah 55:9, NRSV-CI.
[10] See Matthew 7:7-8.
[11] See Exodus 32.
[12] Isaiah 40:12-14 NRSV-CI.