How I Believe

This is not at all, in the least, a suggestion of what anyone else should believe. But I was asked, so I'm answering.

(We’ve changed our name to Rats from Rocks, and this felt like a suitable post to announce it with, but don’t worry: we’ll get back to technology- and music- and movie- and dead-people- and White Lotus- and literature-posting after this one).

I don’t want to post this! I have many reasons you can no doubt imagine: embarrassment, disinterest in argument, anxiety about disappointing others, especially those with whom I share an overall temperament or orientation but from whom I may annoyingly differ in particulars. I have another reason, too: I worry, as I discuss below, that the epistemological situation for the soul must remain one of tension, such that “sharing arguments” may actually cause certainties and confidences to supernaturally recede, for the individual at least. I am superstitious.

But I also take

Dayne Rathbone

at his word, and he said I should post it. I wrote it mostly for him, after he asked me to explain just what I mean when I say, as I did here, that “I believe in almost all traditional Christian claims.” I want not to be falsely subtle, or to try and present my beliefs defensively; while I’m someone passionate about the issue of whether people should feel permitted to believe things, I’m not especially passionate about what people believe, nor do I generally seek to persuade, beyond to rebut various under-considered regimes of disbelief. To be very clear: I do not say others should believe any of this. It is closer to a forensic presentation of how I believe in Christian claims specifically, for anyone curious, and nothing more. It even preserves, to some extent, the order of my thinking over the many years I’ve wondered about it all. I think it’s fair to call it, in its entirety, merely hunches, impressions, even flights of fancy one might also call leaps of faith.

(It also so happened that one of my heroes did his own version of this, so it’s in the air, and I take what’s in the air seriously).

So, here goes:

• I find arguments for the existence of “God” highly persuasive (especially the cosmological argument). Just what the term “God” means —especially at this stage of my “reasoning”— is hard to be precise about, but broadly: I believe that the cosmos has a supernatural origin; I believe that this origin likely has or features or is entangled with consciousness like ours, consciousness of the kind entailed by: regular natural laws detectable by intelligence; mathematical phenomena; creativity; rationality; and love. And I believe that this origin has intentionality, agency, purposiveness. I think all of this is strongly suggested by the aforementioned issue in cosmology, the comparable issues with the inception of life, the features of the world and humanity as we find them, and the inescapability of “transcendentals” as explanations for things otherwise impossible to account for. Like many before me, I call this origin “God.” Several of these claims are probably best argued in this book.

• I believe that God is beyond space and time, and that e.g. “time for us is not like time for God,” and that many forms of reasoning we engage in —being time-bound, being categorical, being linguistic— are insufficient for a full sense of what God is or how God may or may not “operate.” I do not believe it’s hopeless, however, because I do not think the present inexplicability of mind, consciousness, natural laws, etc. is an isolated fact; I rather think it’s likely that all of what is perennially inexplicable is related, and thus that our mind and our world contain ‘clues,’ at it were, to God’s nature, and thus that e.g. science, inner reflection / meditation / prayer, creative work, love, and so on are indeed informative about God. (I think mind itself is particularly fertile as a subject for reflections about God, as, like Schrödinger, I think that mind is a fundamental part of the cosmos, possibly only illusorily individuated, or individuated incompletely).

• I think it likely that God, in creating the universe, had sufficient intentionality that it’s reasonable to expect that God has preferences, even “goals,” so to speak, and thus periodically intervenes in it, constrained only by logical possibilities or other, supervening goals. I think “divine interventions” are suggested by a great deal of what we encounter, not only all that’s been mentioned but even testimony from large numbers of humans across time and cultures of phenomena like miracles, or signs, or prophecies. Indeed, the “total data” we have about phenomena unaccounted for within naturalism or materialism is so large that I consider it irrational to assume, as most people do, that “someday we’ll learn why that was all natural”; this attitude is merely the inverse of the idea of “the god of the gaps.” (This is why materialists despise “god of the gaps” arguments so much: they recognize the maneuver).

• I believe it’s likely God has an “interest” in us, that our spectacularly improbable existence and the absence of anything comparable to “human consciousness” anywhere in our ken —to date, anyway— suggests this, as does some of what I’ve mentioned above. I think that this interest may be general —that is, that God is interested in the evolution of consciousness and mind and the trajectory of the human species— but I also suspect that it is highly specific: interest in us, in you and me, in all individuals, possibly in all life forms, and in our choices, experiences, joys, agonies, lives, deaths. Thus I further suspect that interventions are part of his relationship to us.

• If God exists, is supernatural, and intervenes, then many religions are plausible, for nothing can be “ruled out.” Even things ruled out by e.g. temporal or conceptual exclusivity are not ruled out, and I’ve said in the past that I think it’s likelier that “all religious claims are true” than that “no religious claims are true.” How to adjudicate “truth,” especially historical truth, in this context is of course mysterious, if it’s even important (which many religious texts and figures say that it is, while I myself am unsure). For example: outside of time, and with infinite capacities of attention, and within the dominant “many worlds” multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, it is wholly possible for God to appear in many ways, to many peoples, while expecting any given individual or society to detect and live according to just a singular truth, and indeed for just one truth to be true to them, in their local world. It is also possible for there to be just one truth across worlds. It may be possible, to quote

  Alex Dobrenko`
  , for both to be true: one truth, many truths. I think God wants us to try to figure this out, individually and together, but I don’t think we can achieve any certainties (and therefore should be more oriented towards the development of our own beliefs than the rebuttal of others’).

• At this point, we have only “just-so” reasoning available to us, I believe by design. There will be no sorting of this “from without”; no experiment will confirm that so-and-so was a true prophet, while so-and-so was false. The epistemological state remains in difficult suspension, provisionally resolvable by one entity only: the human individual, the soul, in concert with a community or all alone, as the case may be. It is well to remember that apart from personal experience, all religious ideas are mediated by other humans, and that we know that like us, other humans are unreliable: no matter how smart, how holy, how broadly admired, the writer of the text or the witness of the event or the achiever of the state is a human. I consider it foolish to be cross at disbelievers, for we are all practical disbelievers in many religious claims. I also consider it foolish to be cross with believers, because we cannot know anything with certainty ourselves and even science is but a continual substitution of misconceptions; new theories often obviate entire worlds of claims, and it’s puzzling that many who acknowledge the possibility of the “simulation hypothesis” struggle to see this. (That many believers and disbelievers are fools who do evil has no general bearing on the matter, and I find similarly irrelevant analyses of which religions or sects seem to have behaved well or poorly, now or in the past). Even our own experiences and perceptions are unreliable, can turn out to be something quite different from what we thought, and are certainly no basis for fury or hostility with others. They are for us, in any event. Whoever has ears, let them hear; but this does not entail a mandate to speak.

• Thus we come to the subject of Dayne’s question: “what of the stories in the Bible,” the Old and New Testaments? What of them do I believe? It’s rather case-by-case, for me as I suspect it’s been for nearly all believers. I do not take the Bible as “comprehensive textbook,” in which one “falsehood” indicts the entire work or anyone’s credibility. I take the Bible rather as I take the sum of all religious texts: the cumulative effort by many across thousands of years to hear what God has said to them, to see what God has shown them, to record what they’ve heard from others about God, to impart what they feel should be imparted about God and his interrelation with humans and his interventions, and to build on what came before (in many cases). Because all the writers and prophets are human, I expect variances, “errors,” misinterpretations. Even if every figure of repute in a given religion’s history was without flaws, the recording, reproduction, and translations through the ages of their lives would not be, nor would they be processes I could “validate” except by chains of provenance as subject to doubt as anything else. The Bible is already a partialized, fragmentary, political work; it has undergone many selection and editorial processes. So too with most religions’ texts.

• What I will say is that I do not find anything in principle unbelievable. A man living inside a whale is not less plausible than the existence of men and whales! It’s not less plausible than the existence of matter, even! Once you grant the violation of Occam’s razor that is existence itself, the floodgates, as it were, are rather wide open. If you believe that time and “exclusivity of world-line” are not likely to constrain God as they do us, nearly anything has some way of being true, to say nothing of the more common view that much is metaphorical, “truer than the truth” in the way novels can be, for example. This latter idea is common, but the former interests me more: what would be the basis for assuming that everyone lives within the same regime, given the fact that a majority of quantum physicists believe that the many-worlds interpretation is true? We really, really, really don’t know what’s happening on Earth or in the cosmos now. We don’t know how minds work, or how life could come from inorganic matter, or how countless things work or even could, in principle. I believe we will know all these things in time, but that there will always remain foundational mysteries, because I believe that God maintains an epistemic situation suitable for us to make consequential moral and imaginative decisions. In any event: this mystery inclines me not to worry deeply about the particular “plausibility” to a man in 2025 of some event from thousands of years ago. I simply have no idea, and make my choice.

• My choices about “what to believe” are in part informed by my personality, perhaps needless to say; but although this weakens my “case” —were I making one— it allows me to note something else: that there is something of the personal in my relation to my religious figures of all kinds, and I believe there should be. I think of the peoples of the past, in all religions, as my ancestors. I try to “take them seriously” as I have learned I should have taken my father and mother, and their parents, seriously: not without question or interpretation or modification, but neither as “lesser” people “without access to the latest information,” information I find decreasingly relevant and persuasive as I age (indeed: I often find it the opposite of the truth). The present is as often a source of error as the past, and I read the words of the religious thinkers of the past with an open attitude, with a real sense that “they probably knew more than I would guess”; they seem ahead of me, not behind me. I think all of us, within our “groups,” may have ancestors in different traditions of greater or lesser relevance for us —and that this may be as it is supposed to be— and I generically celebrate religious belief as a sign of people being in touch not only with their past, but with themselves as such, for, again, I do not think our experience of time tells the full story, and I agree with Faulkner’s famous observation that “the past isn’t even past.” (I should add: to the extent that our consciousness is “like God’s” or “from God’s,” it’s possible it is only partially “time bound”; and perhaps this varies among individuals, or with practices).

• None of this impedes on my interest in or enthusiasm for science, or history, or archeology, or any other progressive and falsifying process of trying to understand, which is to say: trying to conjure increasingly accurate misconceptions and metaphors for our world; I am very fond of the proceeds of these fields and the spirit which propels them. I believe that’s part of our work as well, and that it’s not rendered less important by a dynamical unfolding of potentiality and fact across God-knows-how-many worlds or regimes. The idea that “everything must conform to natural laws or the sciences fall apart” is an absurdity that, if true, would render the sciences already-fallen: for they begin and continue in a universe with entire zones beyond their reach (at any given moment, anyway). Quantum physics alone constitutes so many revisions to what were considered natural laws merely a century ago that I can hardly begin to take such a claim seriously; it seems both tautological and empty, however frustrating this may be to human pride.

• So, to be more specific as to the Christian Bible: I believe that the God who created all became incarnate as Jesus Christ and died on the cross; I believe that people had foreknowledge of this, and witnessed many miracles during his life as well. I also believe he returned after dying, and I believe he said much of what he’s said to have said. I believe this for a few reasons: I find the volume of testimony and the behavior of witnesses highly persuasive; I find the theology of it highly naturally sensible, too. To put it rather childishly: I would believe that God did this having made us in his image and seen that “the creature who desires without instinct” cannot avoid mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism —in Girard’s phrasing— required a demonstration of the utter innocence of victims to escape a Satanic pattern of violence that would destroy them. Unlike God, we do not have perfect knowledge; whereas God needs no such demonstration, we did, and we got one —suitably “ambiguous” to keep us from being rote, and since then we have had a means for escaping mimetic violence, although we achieve it only fitfully. I find it easy to imagine that God has created other beings, in other realms, and I find the existence of Satan easy to imagine, too. Again: being “outside of time” makes all of this much simpler, in a way. There need not be figures rubbing hands and darting about sabotaging individuals, although there could be; it is likelier to me that Tolkien’s metaphors in The Silmarillion are illustrative: themes are unleashed, ends become patterns, and the thoughts of God and others are woven into reality in ways that express and re-express and contend with one another. But many possible metaphor-sets can be imagined, all with the normal variance from a reality we cannot directly know. All of these beliefs are “judgment calls” for me.

• I believe in many of the miracles attributed to the saints, and many of the stories in the Old Testament; this is too large and varied a field to get into specifics, but suffice it to say that I believe more rather than less, even of stories like that of Genesis. Can you imagine the world before time, before the Big Bang? I cannot. Why should I forbid anything from possibility? More absurdly, I believe that in believing we may influence; belief may be a means of causing wave-form collapse, or of instantiating our minds in this-or-that slice of the multiverse, or of otherwise breathing continued life into the living traditions of our forebears, if you like. At a minimum: the more I believe, the more I’ve prayed for belief, the more I’ve believed; that may indeed be a minimum to the skeptic, of course, and she’s welcome to that opinion. I wouldn’t argue!

• I am sure this will seem even more childish, but: I think of games —and especially “video” games— as extremely useful for reasoning about all of this. If you imagine attempting to make a game for a being such as yourself, scores of useful concepts and patterns are immediately at hand. First, you really cannot “just make it reliably easy and pleasurable and safe”; you cannot give every player infinite resources, or make everything undo-able; “war is a force that gives us meaning,” as the fella said, and we are all well-aware upon reflection that in any game that could be a “meaningful” existence for minds such as ours, a lot of the problems with religious belief seem less like problems and more like necessities. Even at the outset: free will of import mandates an immense range of action, which includes evils; “balance” requirements being interwoven into the fabric of reality unleash all the competitive nightmares of evolution, constraint, etc. Your world would need, in some senses, “edges,” and yet edges constitute limits that indicate that something has been deliberately created and cause a variety of other problems of coherence and extension. One solution would be to procedurally generate new space as “players” reach limits, and indeed this is what I think happens with the growth of scientific knowledge and exploration: a kind of constant extension and elaboration from what is to some larger state of affairs yet to be understood. Costs must be real; consequences must be real; assurances cannot be given, or when they are given, must be situated within some context that keeps the “purpose” of the game intact. How many servers are there? Are all characters of the same “type”? Etc. How might a developer guide without eroding freedom, or intervene across different “eras” of development, with different systems and maps? What would the players “within” this game be able to tell about the world beyond it? How different would the forms of suffering within this game appear if you knew there was a larger world beyond it, if players voluntarily entered it, etc.? And: wouldn’t an ethical developer need, at some point, to somehow “fully inhabit” the game, to playtest it as a player, without any special mode or provision for his or her comfort, perhaps without memory of the “outer world”? And yet might not such a developer feel the need to convey, perhaps though special rule-breaking, the orientation they felt players should have, or would want to have if they had not been misled by this or that dynamic (or faction, or force)? All childish, as I said, but I do think this framework is productive for understanding the need for open-endedness and complexity and pain, among other things. (Dayne noted that this recalls Alan Watts’ famous metaphor of the dream; I was greatly affected too by

  Frank Lantz
  ’s note about how “art has this adversarial relationship between the audience and the artist, it’s an arms race between entrancement and boredom”; many such “arms races” in games and in this world).

• I find the Trinity compelling and likely for reasons many theologians have: that God must be relational, for example, and embody relational dynamics, if he is to be said to have had a creative impulse or a loving nature; or because of the Augustinian argument that our minds —will, consciousness, memory— reflect a Trinitarian structure. Broadly: I find much old theology —and not only Christian theology— persuasive, because I believe, perhaps after my Buddhist studies, that we are indeed equipped to reflect, experience, and reflect on experience with profitable, predictive, and transformative results. That is: I think all the dead people who spent time trying to understand God’s “nature” made “progress” on it, even without the help of scanning electron microscopes, because that nature is our nature, or is in us, or beneath us, however we think of it: the loving-kindness intermixed with pure awareness or being, for example, or the spiritus mundi, etc.

• I find much of the Old Testament to be more mythical, but again: I don’t make that much of such a distinction, as I find the idea of the past as “mythical” in fact, not in epistemic status, very plausible. That is: the world may have been different; the world was different in scores of ways, some of which we cannot explain already. Even a Deutschian who believes in the infinite reach of explanation concedes, for example, that information exchange among universes within the multiverse is impossible (until God the Developer ships a patch, in any event). There are things we both can understand in general and cannot peer into, connect, integrate.

• I do go to church —an Episcopalian church here in New Orleans, mostly for reasons of personal history— and I love it and find it all resonant; I pray every morning and every evening and whenever else I feel it’s appropriate, and find prayer powerfully effective on a few dimensions, not least in resetting my own sense of what I need, or could even ask for. I’ve mentioned this before, but I also pray the rosary and use the Book of Common Prayer, and lately I’ve been using the Liturgy of the Hours as well (substantially overlapping). I also call on my ancestors and make heavy use of Buddhist concepts in daily life.

This probably suffices for my limited purpose: to explain how I think of religious texts and claims in my own life, here, now. I could of course go on: I could attempt to document what I believe from other religions, for example, and could talk at length about Buddhism in particular. I don’t want the focus of this piece to suggest disbelief in other religions. Or I could discuss the salience in my opinion of “observer” problems in physics for the argument that there are “clues” to what’s happening here in existence, or supporting data for my metaphors. But the more I specify, the more I am likely to offend through exclusion or variance, and I’d rather not do this, as I do not especially suspect —to return to a theme— that beliefs… well, I’m simply not sure in the present historical moment there’s immense importance to specifying, defending, or arguing about beliefs, if there ever was. To confess it candidly: I worry that the enemy can make as easy use of beliefs as of nihilism, of truth-seeking as of greed or any other human propensity, and I worry so much about scale and the Internet that it’s even occurred to me that they may fundamentally corrupt even the most innocent attempts to pursue the Good. I hope not, but who knows? As I’ve argued, to me no stories are more germane to our time than those of Faust and the Tower of Babel; and whether living in a post-Faustian world or on the 50,000th floor of the tower, doing “more of what we’ve done” —disputation, factionalizing, etc.— is unlikely to reconnect us with what we’ve lost.

I not only could be wrong; I am sure that if I’m not already wrong, I will be in time. But this is how it unfolds in my mind, a mind I hasted to remind is officially broken, designated as unreliable, prone to precisely these sorts of errors, etc (and if it is so, I am grateful). To date, every involvement I’ve had with the world’s religions has improved me, so far as I can tell, and I do believe I am in greater communion with the women and men who made the world, and made me, than I would be otherwise, women and men whom I believe still exist and are in all sorts of ways still present in the cosmos. This is all enough for me: that it is possible and that it seems to “work,” so to speak. I have this attitude towards many things, including things far from religion, and if it’s a poor one intellectually, then there seems to be a gap between “accuracy” and “fitness” that would be without precedent in the world we see around us. Of course, I believe that unprecedented things are possible, are indeed manifest. But I would at least find it mysterious, as I do so much else.

Me reading everyone’s posts on religions, the spiritual, the paranormal, or the transcendental / philosophical on Substack // “The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew,” by Mikhail Nesterov, 1890 (and via Nik Prassas’ post).