Oct 31, 2024
I wrote this summer about the need for the prescriptive disciplines in any university, but Brad East says it so much better:
One way to frame knowing God is to describe it as a quest for ultimate truth. Philosophy is an explicit form of this quest, and science is an implicit form of it. On this quest for truth with a capital “T,” the little word “God” may or may not name a concrete entity or living being; it may be a stand-in for the end of the search, or perhaps a hypothesis yet to be proven. Nevertheless the pursuit of Truth is finally the pursuit of God, on one hand, inasmuch as the question of God inevitably arises at some point in the journey toward knowledge; and, on the other, because as a matter of historical fact the search for Truth is inseparable from the knowledge of God — even when His existence is denied or unknown. In the West this is a historical given through the Enlightenment and Romantics; just think, for example, of Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Newton, and Leibniz, men born only fifty years apart, and each in his own way captivated, sometimes obsessively, by divinity. The rule still obtains into the twentieth century, too, even for the most secular or naturalistic thinkers. Simply put, God is unavoidable. Every serious intellectual comes to Him eventually.
No student, therefore, should earn a liberal arts degree without facing God either. But how?
One way is to learn about candidates for deity. It may be surprising how few there are. To be sure, there are countless ancient claimants to the throne, but these have been either defanged or mocked into fiction. A study of gods thus is a study of religions, because gods have living worshipers or they don’t exist. But there is a difference between studying gods and studying “world religions.” The irresistible temptation of the latter is to sample the global buffet as a kind of dilettante anthropologist: a classroom tour of exotic specimens representing outmoded superstitions. How quaint, we remark, as we set the icon back on the desk.
That’s not what I have in mind. Any legitimate candidate for deity wants your soul. A class devoted to the gods should take this seriously. Just as a good philosopher will teach students that questions about meaning and purpose are not abstract or irrelevant but urgent and existential, so a theologian will teach students about the gods as a matter of life and death. Is God? and Which is God? are questions on which everything hangs. To say this is not to prejudice the answers — perhaps they are No and None — but it is to rule out treating the subject flippantly, as akin to astrology or alchemy. It is also to assert that theology, which is the study or knowledge of God, belongs in any university worthy of the name.
For folks who are still skeptical: last night I went to a talk that was partly about quantum physics and the multiverse hypothesis. One ongoing debate among physicists is whether the multiverse idea constitutes “metaphysical overreach,” that is, whether physics is equipped to posit such an interpretation from the uncertainty made evident in quantum mechanics. If you’re chasing down the nature of reality, at some point you bump up against inescapably metaphysical questions. To treat those questions as optional, rather than the heart of the matter, is to abandon higher education.