You all know the Rubin vase: it's that black-and-white image that the mind interprets as either two faces looking at each other, or a vase. If you don't know both are there, you will probably immediately see one or the other exclusively. If you stare at it long enough though, or if someone tells you there's an alternate interpretation, you will see the image flip, and suddenly you're looking at a completely different picture. There are a lot of different images that work this way, and it's a fun perception game to play: staring at them, trying to flip your perception between one and the other as quickly as you can. The thing is, you never see both at once. While you're looking at a picture of a vase, it is a picture of a vase. When you're looking at a picture of two faces, the vase disappears. Each interpretation of the image is consistent, and persistent: it usually takes some mental wrenching to switch views.
I feel like I've been staring at a Rubin vase for the last year: particularly, the last three or four months. The image is life, the universe, and everything, and the two interpretations are of course the scientific, specifically materialistic view, and the religious, specifically Christian. One view says that material reality is the only reality, and all those insights and impulses which we call "spiritual" arise out of material events and causes. The universe first, then life, then intelligence, then meaning. The other view says that there is a spiritual reality behind the material, that meaning came before matter, and in some unfathomable way gave birth to matter. ("Before" is of course an inappropriate term: time and space are properties of the universe, and if the spiritual view is true, "before," "after," and "outside" are meaningless with regard to the spiritual reality. But we do what we can with the brains we have.)
Now, to a lot of people it appears self-evident that one of these views is true and one is false. I am tempted to call these people lucky. For me, they are like the two interpretations of the Rubin vase: when I'm looking at one, it seems as if it must be true: it is plausible, internally consistent, and sufficient to explain pretty much everything that I feel and observe. But when for some reason the image flips, as when I read a book or talk to a person holding the opposite view, then the opposite view is equally persuasive. Each view has its weaknesses, and I don't lose awareness of these when I switch between views, but when I'm looking at one the objections to it seem trivial, faulty, or ignoble. Worse yet, each view can give a full account of why the alternative is persuasive, even though it's wrong.
As an example, I've just been reading Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. (Which, by the way, I recommend that all my scholarly Christian friends read. If you ever intend to get into a debate with a thoughtful, well-educated atheist, you had better be exposed to the best arguments they have to offer, and this book contains many of them. He especially says some things on the "religion and science are mutually exclusive" line of thought that are important to consider.) The process of reading it, for me, was a torment of multistable perception. I came to it, let me confess, hoping that it would be so unconvincing that I would be able to embark on the road back to Christianity without further qualms or doubts. My hope was half-fulfilled. When I was reading it with a belief in God at the back of my mind, it was unconvincing (though still very much worth the read.) When I was reading it without that belief, it was convincing. Faces. Vase. Faces. Vase. Back and forth until my poor brain is dizzy and sick.
The essential difference between the Rubin dilemma, and the material/spiritual dilemma, is that they can't both be true. Dawkins is very clear about that, for which I'm glad. Either there is a spiritual reality which is independent of the material, or there isn't. You can have something that looks very like religion and belief in God, even something resembling Christianity, while still claiming that the material universe is the first and ultimate reality, but there are a few things you can't have. You can't have resurrection. You can't have eternal life. You can't have true miracles. It is a fundamentally different kind of thing from the faith my friends have, and that I used to claim. But it only serves to exacerbate my problem. My perception shifts, shifts, shifts between these two views, and one of them must be false. But how can I tell which one? How can I decide between two plausible, eternally consistent, and equally complete ways of looking at the world?
No, really, I'm asking you.
In such a quandary, Pascal's Wager looks better than it ever has before. "If you don't know which one to believe, you'd better believe in God, because if it's true you get eternal life and if it's false it won't matter anyway." I still think this is a despicable and impossible solution, however. Does anyone really think that God would accept worship springing from such a motivation? I can't imagine so; ergo, no one who really believed in God could profess belief on these terms. Another, similar, way of solving it would be: "If you don't know which one to believe, why not choose the one that makes you happiest?" (Or most content, or that you think will cause you to lead the best life.) I've already confessed that I'm longing to go back to Christianity. I said before, and I still hold, that if Christianity is true, the story of the world is a comedy (in the Shakespearean sense.) If not, it's a tragedy. And I'm partial to happy endings. Moreover, as long as I cannot call myself a Christian, I will feel divided from the people I love best. It is so, so tempting to simply walk back into church, to smile, to say "I believe, because I can no longer bear not to believe." But again, do I really think that God wants my belief or worship on those terms? No, not for a minute. So I am caught in something very like the liar's paradox: if I don't really believe in God, then I can profess belief, for any of the above reasons. If I do believe in God, then I can't, because I don't have grounds for belief that are worthy of the God I believe in. But does that mean my refusal to profess belief demonstrates my belief?
That's where I am right now. Further bulletins as events warrant, and please for the love of God, or of material grandeur and beauty, if you have any light to shed on my dilemma, cast it my way.
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...And what there is to conquer / By strength and submission, has already been discovered / Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate-- but there is no competition-- / There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. -T. S. Eliot
2 comments:
The question would seem now to be one of faith.
You have pursued a knowledge of the two perspectives sufficiently enough to understand them (though of course both could be studied for many lifetimes), and you realize that only one is true and that the other is necessarily false. Neither can be proven or known in a "scientific" way, and so neither can be chosen, willfully and deliberately taken up, because there is no appropriate Reason to select one or the other. There are no more mental exercises to continue the process. You are at a dead end.
And so how do you believe either in materialism or in Christianity? Hon, I don't think a person can decide to believe one thing or another; once all the rationality has been gone through (seeing as how something that stands the test of rationality fits our belief in the rational), one either believes or one doesn't. One sees the vase and the faces, but knows through faith that the faces are real and the vase an illusion, or vice versa.
I don’t know how one would come to believe in materialism, but I can speak to the other side.
As one who believes in the God of Christ, I can tell you that a part of that Christian perspective composing one half of your Rubin vase is the teaching that faith is a gift (Ephesians 2:8). If Christianity is true, then, you will believe when you receive the gift of belief. The core of this perspective is that what is required of those who adopt it is a humility to recognize that the very ability to believe is not even within their power. That is the only basis of faith that is worthy of the Christian God: choosing to acknowledge the incapacity to rightly believe, and asking for belief as a gift.
Ginny, my dear, I love you so, so much. I am not intellectually indifferent to what you have been going through this past year. I viscerally want you to have this precious and beautiful gift of faith in the True God, because it is good. And I want your good, and your joy. Whatever that means to you, there it stands and always will.
The problem I see is not a tough decision as to which of these two "realities" is true, but the fact that the discussion includes two separate realities at all.
Materialism and the progress of science may do wonders to alienate people from their spirituality, it's true, but far more alienating, I feel, is the ancient and very tenacious belief that this world we inhabit, that we are born into and that contains the sum total of everything that we are able to experience, every beauty and every joy, is somehow "less pure" than a hypothesized "spiritual existence", over which everything material is draped like so much useless skin and carbon.
Science has shown us that the brain is indisputably the root and base of the mind, of consciousness as we know it. Science is alienating because at the same time it allows us a mastery over our environment that is almost absolute, it shows us exactly how small we are : surely, the truest form and nature of God cannot possibly be expressed within the very limited medium of electricity and a few pounds of squishy tissue. And realizing one's own insignificance before God is a hard feeling to convince people to have with the cheap thrills of electronic entertainment and conspicuous consumption not just present, but presented by our culture as something to aspire to at great cost.
Unfortunately, from a global perspective, our country in particular seems badly afflicted with the delusion that some people here know better what God wants than other people do, and the muddled and dishonest debates the former offer hurt us all. People who claim such intimate knowledge of God's will are intellectual descendants of the pre-Enlightenment clergy who gilded cathedrals and dressed themselves in silk while their brothers trod around knee-deep in a squalor neither of us can really imagine.
Deep down, every individual on this planet knows exactly what God wants for humanity. It's when we start delegating our spiritual obligations that things go awry. The fact that you're pushing the hard questions means that you're doing your homework, and good on you for it.
"Atom" comes from the Greek 'atomos', meaning 'uncuttable'. Until we cut them and got quarks. Crack a quark open and the system used to empirically gather scientific evidence begins to break down. The more of the machinations of our universe we know and can know, the more doubts we have and can have. Nevertheless : from one source all things depend.
Go back and look at your picture more closely : don't the faces and the vase define each other? Doesn't one end at exactly the point where the other begins? Neither exists without the other. We can only clearly perceive one at a time, even as we know both are always there.
We should bring this up over coffee sometime when I'm not preoccupied with cursing inarticulately at chess games!
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