A Word for Wonder

For Christian philosophers who still rely on strict, logical proofs of the existence of God, a British Jesuit has a bit of advice: save your breath. Says Father Vincent Turner in an article in Britain's highbrow Roman Catholic quarterly, the Dublin Review: "Traditional theistic argument no longer cuts any ice."

The reason: philosophers no longer have a common ground for argument. "Fifty years ago, your characteristic atheist...was as clear as you were about what it was he was denying when he said there was no God and what you were asserting when you said there was. Now...the bite of argument is gone: and the atheist or skeptic will say, 'I don't know what you are talking about. You are asking questions that need not be asked...'"

Against this passive resistance, the "theistic philosopher" has a tough row to hoe. His argument is not scientific, and it depends on a very intangible premise--"it is more like the reading of signs in a certain light." This premise Father Turner calls "a sense of contingency," i.e., some vague recognition, however arrived at, of man's "creatureliness"--his dependence on a higher cause or authority.

Without this sense of contingency, "there isn't any springboard for theistic metaphysics * ...After all, how would one expect [traditional metaphysics] to soften up a monolithic materialist like H. G. Wells, or an anti-humanist like Picasso, or a happy naturalist like British Cosmologist Fred Hoyle?

"I doubt if we can ever formally disprove an atheist, still less a consistent sceptical interpretation and outlook; in the end we find ourselves acting like...two people who disagreed about a painting, where the one said, 'That's beautiful,' and the other said, 'I don't see it.'...We think him blind, whereas he thinks us credulous... and what we call doing justice to the facts he calls the grip on us of settled routines or inertia..."

Father Turner thinks the answer to this impasse is not to outargue the skeptics, but to inspire them. "We are suffering not from too much logic, but from too little contemplation...Aristotle thought that philosophizing started out from wonder...I suspect that [modern] logical theories take the direction that they do because...wonder...is no longer there."

* A position stated in the extreme by another English churchman, St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who coined the famous saying, "I believe, in order that I may understand."

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