Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Will to Believe

My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".

 

Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not...." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?

Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote  (and to which I now add bolding):

. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking.  [. . .]  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  

 

Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc.  But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important.  What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.) 

 

You have read Sextus Empiricus and know  something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise.  In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed.  But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus.  One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.)  With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it.  We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.

 

As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it.  (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)

 

Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.

 

I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew.  I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be.  One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.  

 

It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part.  You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days;  if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to  cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc.  You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse.  That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.

 

Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult. 

 

I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this  world is the creation of  an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.'  Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich?  And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil.  You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument'  is one way.

 

This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.

 

Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation. 

 

I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens,  I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas.  In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle.  Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness.  We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision -- a cutting off of ratiocination -- is will-driven

You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?

 

You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now.  "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.

 

So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is  “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit.  Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.  

 

It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,

. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."

Comments

[Anthony Flood]

Another rich and erudite meditation, Bill, but if I might approach the issue another way: yes, what you decide does depend on your will, but you do not decide in an ethical void, but in the working out of God's eternal decree (Ephesians 1:11). Is your will free (Erasmus) or in bondage from which only God in Christ can liberate you (Luther)? If the latter, then for all your considerable analytical skill, you cannot fruitfully work through the conceptual issues you raise so breathtakingly. He who sins is a slave to sin (John 8:34) and must regard my biblical citations as so many uncomprehending dodges. He will always feel justified in asking God, post mortem, ‘Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?’ (Bertrand Russell) but not be justified (Romans 1:18-20). You have evidence enough (which justifies always presupposing what that evidence implies). Either you've been given to the Son by the Father, or you have not (John 6:37, 39); if you have, then you hear His voice in His Word (John 10:27); if you have not, you don't. That's the epistemological situation of created image-bearers, which conclusion you have systematically resisted coming to over dozens of essays.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

I greatly appreciated this restatement of your philosophical position on the question of belief in relation to reason and the will. With time, it has become one that I share, and I find that it has permitted me to have not a lesser but a greater faith. In the many years that I spent searching-- in books, in ritual, in places said to be holy--for certainty, I was always ultimately disappointed, finding myself falling between two poles, one an excessive rationalism and the other an excessive skepticism, each of which overvalued the power of reason to penetrate the great mysteries of our existence. So, thanks for sharing your thoughts once again. This from Pascal seems pertinent:

“One must know how to doubt where necessary, how to be sure where necessary, and how to submit where necessary. Whoever does not do so does not understand the power of reason. There are those who fail against these three principles, either by assuring everything as demonstrative, failing to know themselves in demonstration, or by doubting everything, failing to know where to submit, or by submitting in everything, failing to know where to judge” (Pascal, Pensées, Frag. 204, Sellier, p. 151 [my translation]).

Vito

[BV]

Vito,

What do you make of Tony's comment above?

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

“What do you make of Tony's comment above?”

I am no philosopher, but I do not make much of it. For one thing, it appears to rely on circular reasoning, i.e., that not only (1) the biblical account of a human Fall but (2) a particular theological understanding of the penalties ensuing from it (the unfree will), is the explanation for our cognitive limitations. Tony is perfectly free to believe (1) and (2), but why should I, you, or anyone else? The truth of both propositions is assumed but not logically or rationally demonstrated; it is a belief, and like all beliefs, it falls short of proof. Further, it appears to deny the existence of an impartial philosophical ground on which human beings, whatever their belief systems, can pursue and advance the search for truth, insisting instead that rationality depends on the acceptance of the Christian worldview. I think that the history of philosophy, to cite just one discipline, reveals the opposite, as in the cases of Augustine, who learned so much from the pagan philosopher Plato and the Neoplatonists or Aquinas from Islamic and Jewish scholars. Both recognized that access to certain truths, whether metaphysical or moral, was open to all men, even by those who denied the ultimate truth, which they affirmed, of Christian revelation.

Vito

[BV]

Very good, Vito. You and I are in basic agreement. Tony is not engaging what I say but merely opposing it, which he is of course free to do. That is his free decision. He has decided that a certain brand of Christianity is The Answer.

You are right to point out the circularity of his reasoning. This is the main problem with the presuppositional apologetics (deriving from Cornelius van Til, et al.) to which Tony subscribes. The presuppositionalists want a rationally coercive 'knock-down' proof of the existence of God (the God of the Christian Bible as they conceive God to be, with all the Calvinist add-ons) and they think they can get this proof by simply presupposing the existence of God as they conceive God to be. But of course, one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it.

>>Further, it appears to deny the existence of an impartial philosophical ground on which human beings, whatever their belief systems, can pursue and advance the search for truth, insisting instead that rationality depends on the acceptance of the Christian worldview.<<

That is exactly what they deny. There is no neutral point of view or neutral stance from which one could impartially assess the reasons pro et contra on the God question. For them, the truth of all propositions and the validity of all reasoning presupposes, and thus logically requires, the existence of God (as they conceive him to be). If so, the atheist's reasoning cannot be sound unless God exists, which implies that atheism is false. A point I have repeatedly made, however, is that one cannot validly infer (2) from (1) below:

1) It cannot be true that truth does not exist.

2) It cannot be true that God does not exist.