The Quest for God

Alex Conradie

Undoubtedly, Australopithecus or an earlier

hominid gave no thought to history whilst taking
the first bipedal steps across open savannah or
shallow-water marshland. No less momentous
than Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon,
bipedalism began a journey irrevocably setting
hominids further apart from their primate
cousins. A later ancestor, Homo Erectus was a
stone-tool and fire user, possessing a brain
twice the size of Australopithecus. Nevertheless,
in a surprising lack of imagination, Homo
Erectus constructed the same all-purpose axe
for almost two million years. After the
emergence of Homo Sapience some 100 000
years ago, there is an explosion in the variety
and design of tools from fish hooks, harpoons,
bows and arrows, baskets, lamps, flints, sewing
needles and knives with handles. However,
what truly distinguished us from Homo Erectus
is the fact that we are a symbolic species,
evident from elaborate cave wall paintings and
carved figurines. Alongside this new-found
awareness of a past and a future, evolution has
left us deficient in genetic programming. Unlike
Theseus, we do not have Ariadne’s ball of thread to guide us through the labyrinth of life.
Without specific behavioural instructions as bees
do possess; we’re left with general instructions to
rather be inventive. Our magnificent brains are
forced to compensate for our lack of programmed
societal structure by supplementing with culture. As
such, value-loaded behavioural systems are
peculiar to the human species. Indeed, our ability
to invent cultural constructs is what our high
intelligence is for. 1

The Time Magazine cover for 8 December 1952

asks the question “Will man outgrow the Earth?”,
nine years prior to the first space flight and
seventeen years prior to a man landing on the
moon. Though still unanswered, it needs to be
imagined and qualified long before it can be
achieved. All aspects of human societies are strung
together around figments of human imagination.
Humans simply assert and behave that certain
1
Pre-Industrial Societies is a magnificent work by Patricia Crone. In un-Dawkinsian fashion, her chapter
on religion is a testament to a remarkably clear mind.
ideas or invisible beings are of great importance to their lives. Remove the assertion and
the society dissolves upon which the assertion is based, as it is only manifest in the
human mind and behaviour. The same is true of anything in which humankind has held a
belief; be it monarchy, democracy, totalitarianism, communism, socialism or the social
herding of omnipresent modern governments. All societies are built around the ability of
the human mind to construe.

Marx coined the

concept of religion as
opium for the masses,
that is as a tenth
century Muslim poet
said, “religious
doctrines are naught
but the means to
enslave men to the
mighty”. Or in the words
of a radical Puritan
pamphlet, “while men
are gazing up to
heaven… or fearing
hell… they see not what is their birthright on earth.” Within the context of justifying and
maintaining a particular world view, such opium is not limited to religious belief. Nor is
this opium necessarily administered consciously, nor necessarily pushed for
consumption only by the masses. Opium is being sold both consciously and
subconsciously to others and ourselves at all times. Without acceptance of one kind of
opium or another, societies would collapse. Religion may be the opiate of the masses,
but so is everything else. All of the great enterprises of our modern age involve tilting at
windmills. The quest for God is thus as noble or ignoble as any other human endeavour.

Extracting a practical philosophy,

William James claimed that “If the
hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in
the widest sense of the word, it is true”.
For James, truth was not a matter of
reality, but rather of its usefulness to a
particular societal need and time. This
apologetic stance served to assign
value to religious belief, where a
growing understanding of evolution was
imagining a world without God. The
reasonable and logical conclusion in the
face of Darwin’s Origin of Species is that
God does not exist. Evolution offers a world view that does not require God. Adherents
of such a science-based world view may insist that the world may only be understood
through rational, reason-based study of observable phenomena, rejecting notions for
which no proof may be presented. However, science-based world views generally reject
the notion of God by refuting biblical inerrancy or infallibility, neither of which has any
bearing on the actual exist of God. Fundamentally, the existence of God is neither
subject to Hume’s verifiability nor Popper’s falsifiability and therefore discounts
application of the scientific method. Extraordinarily, the existence of God has never truly
been humankind’s problem. It may well be argued that prevailing science-based world
views are rather a response to humankind’s frustration at an inability to harness the
power of God. We’ve harnessed the power of the wind to great effect, but Elijah’s God is
a whisper on the wind and harnessing a whisper is yet quite beyond us.

The enduring feature of theist views may relate to its seeming monopoly on providing
meaning. Genetic instructions do not require cultural justification; the instructions make
sense without there being a need to think about the instructions. However, culturally
imposed rules require meaning as such rules
so often go against our limited genetic
programming. There is no human society
without the practice of self control via
elaborate mating systems and regulation of
aggression. Self awareness may partially
have its origin in such practices of self control,
self-awareness bringing an awareness of
death. In turn, death is a source of
meaninglessness so profound that it
threatens to undermine the entire enterprise
of its purpose. Religion exists precisely
because it is an answer to a very human
search for meaning. That said, the human mind may have hit upon the reality of the
supernatural no less than natural matters, but again this is not a scientific question as it
is not amenable to empirical proof.

The great paradox of our age is that in a time when

we search for the purpose and understanding of
everything, all this logic leads us to believe that the
Universe has no meaning or purpose. Refusing to
accept a purposeless world, perhaps all Christians
are Romantics. Thankfully, even in this present age
of reason the world is ever turning. Intuition,
imagination and feeling are regaining ground against
the pure reason and logic fostered during the
Enlightenment. Who admires a sunset and sees only
colour and Newton? Science provides models
through which we understand the world, but these
models are not the world, and should not dictate how
we experience the world. Solely relying on scientific
models would be like experiencing the world in black
and white and claiming that there is no such thing as
colour.

Even Voltaire, that most enigmatic of men who embodied the Enlightenment and reviled
the existence of a personal God, wrote “what is this being? Does he exist in immensity?
Is space one of his attributes? Is he in a place or in all places or in no place? May I be
forever preserved from entering into his metaphysical subtleties? I should too much
abuse my feeble reason if I tried fully to understand the being who, by his nature and
mine, must be incomprehensible to me.” Thinking millennia, God has passions and
motivations, stretching beyond the meagre understanding of humankind’s imagination.
 Our rational and
conventional view of
mathematics may also be
challenged by intuition. The
number 37 may not only be
understood as one greater
than 36 and one less than
38. A high functioning
savant has described how
the number 37 feels lumpy like oatmeal within his mind. For some, mathematics may be
felt even more so than understood. Such a recasting of science may have delighted both
the scientist and philosopher in Blaise Pascal, bringing a sense of the unquantifiable to
an otherwise uncompromising discipline.

One may recognise Pascal as the Romantic vanguard in advance of the Enlightenment,
“In rare moments of inspiration we discover a reality which is absurd to dissect by reason,
which shows that Christ still operates in the world.
Reason’s final step is the recognition that there are
an infinite number of things that are quite beyond
reason. There is nothing more reasonable than the
rejection of reason. We come to know truth not only
by reason, but still more so through our hearts.”
Immanuel Kant echoed Pascal in his belief that
insight is more important than exact scientific
knowledge and moral experience carries us further
than the truth revealed by phenomena.

Unlike Pascal, I don’t think I could rejoice in the

implausibility of Christianity or God. Likewise,
Immanuel Kant’s conclusion, “I have therefore found
it necessary to deny knowledge in order to leave
room for faith”, is too much like Marx’ opium. I have
no appetite for delusion, self-imposed or otherwise.
God either exists or He does not. We have an
intellectual obligation to try to believe what is true and
to avoid believing what is false. All I can say
objectively regarding my own Pascalian moments of
inspiration is that it felt like Jesus. So, to the
agnostics I say; “Come, sit there no longer. Let us
seek Him out in quiet places”. Admittedly a knight-
errant rooted in rational implausibility; but is it not
written that the Shepherd will leave the ninety nine in
search of the one who is wandering? Through His
grace, Jesus would tear down the sky for his friends.
Beyond the realms of reason, He would bring all of Creation to a fall for the least of
these.

The quest for God continues, for above all the rhyme and the reason of this world, we
sense that it is the heart that matters. The unreason of the heart has a poetry all its own
and through its meter, maybe we’ll meet Him today.